The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen

Abstract

Abstract. Philip Pettit (2001) has suggested that there are parallels between his republican account of freedom and Amartya Sen's (1970) account of freedom as decisive preference. In this paper, I discuss these parallels from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. I sketch a formalization of republican freedom, and argue that republican freedom is formally very similar to freedom as defined in Sen's "minimal liberalism" condition. In consequence, the republican account of freedom is vulnerable to a version of Sen's liberal paradox, an inconsistency between universal domain, freedom, and the weak Pareto principle. I argue that some standard escape-routes from the liberal paradox -those via domain restriction -are not easily available to the republican. I suggest that republicans need to take seriously the challenge of the impossibility of a Paretian republican. IntroductionPhilip Pettit (1997) argues that, within the long tradition of republican thought -from the Roman Republic to the United States of America -a particular notion of freedom can be seen as a unifying theme: the notion of freedom as the opposite of subordination or slavery. Such freedom, on Pettit's account, requires more than the absence of "interference", that is, the absence of certain actual constraints on an individual's actions or choices. It requires the absence of "domination", that is, the absence of the possibility of arbitrary interference. Arbitrary interference is the sort of interference that a master can exercise over a slave capriciously, and which the slave is constantly vulnerable to, 1 Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Luc Bovens, Geoffrey Brennan, Keith Dowding, Philip Pettit, and Wlodek Rabinowicz for very helpful comments and discussion. 2 even if the master happens to be going through a spell of goodwill towards the slave. Domination, Pettit reminds us, is a common grievance:"The grievance … is that of having to live at the mercy of another, having to live in a manner that leaves you vulnerable to some ill that the other is in a position arbitrarily to impose … It is the grievance expressed by the wife who finds herself in a position where her husband can beat her at will, and without the possibility of redress; by the employee who dare not raise a complaint against an employer, and who is vulnerable to any of a range of abuses, some petty, some serious, that the employer may choose to perpetrate; by the debtor who has to depend on the grace of the moneylender, or the bank official, for avoiding utter destitution and ruin;and by the welfare dependant who finds that they are vulnerable to the caprice of a counter clerk for whether or not their children will receive meal vouchers." (Pettit 1997, 4-5) On Pettit's republican account, freedom is the absence of domination. As Pettit argues, this can be defined, in more precise terms, as the absence of interference not just in the actual world, but also in all relevant possible worlds. A slave may not suffer interference in the actual world, because his master presently has som...

Republican freedom and the rule of law

“…While I agree with Pettit that the implications of republican freedom go well beyond those of liberal freedom, I argue that, in consequence, the assignment of republican freedom to two or more agents in society may be so demanding as to conflict with other important desiderata. In particular, extending work in an earlier paper, 5 I argue that what Amartya Sen has called a 'liberal paradox' reemerges in a strengthened form as a 'republican paradox': republican freedom clashes with Pareto efficiency. 6 Further, I suggest that the 'republican paradox' illustrates a trade-off between two important dimensions of freedom: scope and robustness.…”

Measuring Specific Freedom

“…is immune from any interference. This idea says that a person can only be ascribed a freedom if they are not only free in the actual world where there is no effective resistance (where no set of agents can prevent i from ϕ-ing), but also no such resistance in all nearby possible worlds (List 2004). In the model introduced here, the set of possible worlds is the set of act-tokens which is denoted by the set of possible coalitions.…”

“…See, for example,Conger (1988),Gal-Or and Raphael (1998),Spreitzer (1995), Pfeffer (1992.23 This is also true forSen's (1970) conception of minimal liberty. SeeList (2004).…”

Systemic domination, social institutions and the coalition problem

“…The objection, then, must be that there is no principled way of doing this that delivers plausible results with regard to which collections of individuals actually hold power as a potential team (cf. List, 2004: 77). One response to this challenge is to argue that we specify the relevant domain by reference to substantive moral values.…”

“…Why should we think that the robustness requirement ought to be interpreted according to such a standard? Conceptually, there is nothing that demands this (List andValentini, 2016: 1048;Pettit, 2008). Thus, if we could specify the domain of possible worlds that is to count as directly relevant for assessments of social freedom in a way that excludes the most improbable 'team formations', the coalition problem would be dissolved.…”