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Delineates the principal ideas that make up my theory of freedom as negative liberty. Raises a number of challenges to positive-liberty theories and to the civic-republican conception of freedom, with sustained criticisms of the work of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. It likewise objects to moralized conceptions of particular freedoms and unfreedoms. It pays particular attention to the ways in which such freedoms and unfreedoms exist over time.

In order to show that freedom is (at least theoretically) measurable, one must show that the different kinds of constraint on freedom (physical impossibility, threats, difficulty) can be aggregated so as to provide overall freedom judgements. This can be done by reducing all of these kinds of constraint to the constraint of physical impossibility. This solution does not involve a “restrictivist” conception of constraints on freedom. Once it is recognized that overall freedom is a function of the physical compossibility of actions, it should also be recognized that agents for whom particular actions are difficult or costly, or who are subjected to coercion, generally suffer reductions in their degrees of overall freedom. Further analysis of the notion of constraints shows that this liberal conception of freedom is not, as is often supposed, ultimately distinguishable either from traditionally socialist conceptions or from the republican conception recently proposed by Philip Pettit.

The freedom of a group of individuals is best understood as the sum of the degrees of freedom of its individual members. G. A. Cohen has opposed this view, arguing that a group (e.g. the proletariat) can suffer from “collective unfreedom”, where collective unfreedom signifies the incompossibility of given actions of different individuals, and can coexist with the individual freedom of each to perform her respective action. A closer analysis of the notion of collective unfreedom suggests that what is true in claims about collective unfreedom can be stated in terms of individual unfreedom. Cohen is nevertheless right in suggesting that degrees of group freedom can vary depending, among other things, on the structure of property rights. This contradicts Hillel Steiner’s claim that group freedom is constant-sum, a claim which arises out of a failure to distinguish between the number of actions a possible world can contain and the number of freedoms it can contain.

This chapter examines how the republican theory of non-domination can be used for a normative analysis of WTW relationships. It is argued that Lovett’s conception of non-domination captures some of the defining elements of these relationships. However, his conception of rules is (too) strongly rooted in the ideas of reasonability and impartiality, as a result of which vulnerable people in particular are at risk of being excluded from its (potentially protective) scope. Therefore, a republican normative analysis of WTW practices should also take account of Pettit’s more inclusive, democratic account of the republican theory of non-domination that is more attentive to the need for democratic oversight over discretionary spaces of welfare officers and work supervisors.

This chapter responds to a variety of objections, including the following: that the account is not really consequentialist; that it gives too much priority to states as the guarantors of human rights; that it makes human rights too contingent; that it is implausible that there is any formula for equity; that the claim of first-person authority is implausible; that it leaves out important values, such as the badness of domination; and that it requires a division in practical reason that is “repugnant to common sense”. The chapter also explains why he depends on his readers to help detect his fudge factors and theoretical inertia.

This chapter defends a key thesis: Some aesthetic properties are possessed essentially by some works of art. This thesis (individual- or I-essentialism) is distinguished from other essentialist claims in aesthetics (e.g., class- or C-essentialism). The supposed supervenience of aesthetic properties on sets of non-aesthetic properties is challenged or shown to be trivial when the breadth of the requisite base properties (including intentional properties) is revealed. Prominent among the essential aesthetic properties are expressive or representational properties. The relational aspect of aesthetic properties is defended with reference to the work of Frank Sibley, Philip Pettit and Roger Scruton. Only works, not their constitutive material, can have essential aesthetic properties such that, in worlds where an appropriate (or normative) aesthetic response to a work is not possible, that work cannot exist.

This chapter looks to the republican tradition of political thought for guidance in unravelling the problems that surround the analysis and practice of criminal law. It argues that republicanism can help us to understand what ‘the public’ is, how an action may wrong it, and why some of those wrongs should be designated crimes. It shows how a republican theory of criminal law draws on elements of the three neo-republican approaches: Pettit's (and Braithwaite's) emphasis on dominion, Huigens' emphasis on virtue, and Marshall's and Duff's emphasis on crimes as ‘shared wrongs’. These help explain the public stake in preserving some sense of community or solidarity where the law is concerned.

This chapter considers two other rival accounts of normative statements. First, it considers the account of ‘Cornell moral realism’ which is based on applying the causal theory of reference to normative terms. Secondly, it considers the accounts of David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith, which are based on the attempt to give a ‘conceptual analysis’ of normative statements. It is argued that both of these approaches fail, largely because they cannot accommodate the sort of ‘internalism’ that was argued for in Chapter 1.

This chapter explores the relation between the different dimensions of rationality. Previous chapters have argued that decision theory cannot be developed in a way that will satisfy the requirements of all three dimensions of rationality. This chapter assesses the prospects for taking decision theory to be a theory of rationality in just one of the three dimensions. It evaluates Pettit's claim that decision theory provides a normative canon of rationality, but not a deliberative calculus of rationality, as well as Kahneman and Tversky's proposal to use prospect theory as a explanatory-predictive complement to decision theory. The upshot of the chapter is that the three dimensions of rationality cannot be separated out.

‘Worldmaking’ is the antirealist doctrine that we make the known world with our concepts. It is Constructivism without a commitment to relativism. This chapter considers the relation between Worldmaking and the global response-dependency theory of concepts urged by Pettit. According to this theory all concepts are of dispositions to produce a certain sort of response in normal humans in normal conditions. Pettit denies that this theory leads to Worldmaking. The chapter argues that he is wrong. The theory leads to the view that all properties are response-dependent and this leads to Worldmaking. For that reason alone Pettit's theory of concepts should be rejected.

Criminal justice scholars such as Bottoms and Pratt argue that citizen participation has played a decisive role in the expansionary penal state. Their “penal populism” thesis is exemplified by the classic case of three-strikes legislation in California, which was propelled forward by distrust of officials, erosion of barriers between electoral politics and criminal justice policy, equation of effective punishment with severity, and emotive political rhetoric. As a remedy, Lacey, Pettit, Zimring, and others recommend greater professionalization and more insulation between criminal justice policymaking and the public. This chapter challenges this approach on practical and normative grounds, arguing that sealing off the criminal justice process from the public blocks education, assumption of responsibility, and trust-building experiences. Penal populism, it argues, is not a matter of too much citizen participation, but of a mass mobilization lacking constructive elements of other citizen movements. The restorative justice movement is instructive, as advocates reject the idea of the public as naturally punitive. Programs involve citizens as needed resources for humanizing mainstream criminal justice procedures, as, for example, lay volunteers in circle sentencing and family group conferencing dialogues.

This chapter establishes that Green's republicanism overcomes the limitations of contemporary philosophical attempts to reinvigorate the republican tradition. Green avoids the contemporary dichotomy between ‘protective’ (Pettit) and ‘civic humanist’ (Sandel, Honohan) republicanism. The chapter begins by highlighting Green's self-identification as a republican, with the second section sketching the contemporary republican landscape. Section three establishes that Green's conceptions of ‘independence’ and ‘true freedom’ are superior to those used by contemporary philosophers. Green's conceptualisations of true freedom and intersubjective recognition are also explored. Section four analyses Greenian ‘civic virtue’ and its interrelationships with freedom. Section five explores the democratic contestability of the ‘common good’ in Green's republicanism, something that causes significant difficulties for contemporary republicans. Section six critically assesses Green's decentralised political structure, before section seven explores his radical theory of patriotism and civil disobedience. The conclusion argues that Green's republicanism is more coherent, integrated, and compelling than the leading contemporary versions.

This chapter gives an account of what cognitivism in ethics is and argues that the a priori global nature of the supervenience of the ethical on the descriptive requires cognitivists in ethics to identify ethical properties with descriptive ones. It argues that we can locate ethical properties with descriptive ones in terms of the role ethical properties play in folk morality, a view of ethics I call, with Philip Pettit, ‘moral functionalism’.

This chapter presents a series of challenge cases for the orthodox definition of hope—cases that show this definition cannot distinguish strong hopes for highly unlikely outcomes from either weaker hopes or even despair directed at those outcomes. To truly capture what it is to “hope against hope,” we need to supplement the orthodox definition. The chapter then considers and rejects three recent proposals about how to supplement the definition. Although these three proposals—from Philip Pettit, Luc Bovens, and Ariel Meirav—are not ultimately successful, this chapter argues that there are important lessons we should take from each. In light of these lessons, the chapter proposes the incorporation analysis of hope, whereby hoping for an outcome is a distinctive way of treating one's own attitudes toward the outcome.

This chapter explains and defends the general method to be used throughout the book. It is inspired by the later Wittgenstein, and draws heavily on developments of the Wittgensteinian view offered by Philip Pettit and by Huw Price. One part of the strategy is to pay adequate attention to the fact that language is a social practice; it is something we use to get things done. Another part of the strategy is to avoid appeal to theoretically substantial notions of truth or reference in providing demystifying philosophical accounts.

This chapter considers how late-eighteenth-century chemical replicas after chemically unstable academic paintings were rediscovered in the early 1860s. Seeking to acquire a prototype of James Watt’s steam engine from the Soho manufactory established by Matthew Boulton in the mid-1760s, curator Francis Pettit Smith unearthed a set of replicas, which he called “sun pictures.” Smith identified the images as early photographs. On that basis, he claimed that photography must have been invented at Soho in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Although Smith’s story found support among several leading photographers in the 1860s, it was strongly opposed by Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, grandson of the Soho industrialist. This chapter demonstrates how M.P.W. Boulton destroyed Smith’s story. It also highlights the ways in which Boulton simultaneously integrated Smith’s chemo-mechanical findings into his own aircraft designs. The chapter concludes by arguing for the extensive connections between the leading inventors of photography and combustion-engine research.

Among recent critiques of the desert model is one by a sociologist and a philosopher, John Braithwaite and Phillip Pettit. They consider the whole idea of sentences apportioned to the gravity of offences to be mistaken, and offer an alternative, consequentialist theory of justice that supposedly would decide sentencing policy better. Braithwaite and Pettit wish to retain the forward-looking and aggregative features of the utilitarian calculus. They are troubled, however, by the calculus's seeming disregard of the person. Their solution, essentially, is to retain the calculus but change its measure from utility to something that would give greater emphasis to persons' capacity for choice. They term this something else ‘dominion’. The argument for proportionate sanctions was made on reprobative grounds: punishments convey censure or blame, and hence should be ordered according to the degree of blameworthiness of the conduct.

This chapter examines the modern republican tradition and how thinkers from Niccolò Machiavelli to the authors of The Federalist conceived of the relationship and inevitable tensions between law and politics. It first provides an overview of the modern republican tradition, the various theoretical strands within it and contemporary modern neo-republicanism. It then proceeds with a discussion of how modern republicans thematise the relationship between law and politics, along with the ideas of contemporary neo-republican thinkers about the modern republican tradition. It also considers the research program initiated by the studies of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, namely, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997) and Liberty before Liberalism (1998), respectively. The chapter concludes by proposing a republican political theory that addresses the reality of pluralism and highlights points of conflict.