Philip Pettit

A major new account of the state and its importance by a leading political philosopherThe future of our species depends on the state. Can states resist corporate capture, religious zealotry, and nationalist mania? Can they find a way to work together so that the earth heals and its peoples prosper? Or is the state just not up to the task? In this book, the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit examines the nature of the state and its capacity to serve goals like peace and justice within and beyond its borders. In doing so, he breaks new ground by making the state the focus of political theory—with implications for economic, legal, and social theory—and presents a persuasive, historically informed image of an institution that lies at the center of our lives.Offering an account that is more realist than utopian, Pettit starts from the function the polity is meant to serve, looks at how it can best discharge that function, and explores its ability to engage beneficially in the life of its citizens. This enables him to identify an ideal of statehood that is a precondition of justice. Only if states approximate this functional ideal will they be able to deal with the perennial problems of extreme poverty and bitter discord as well as the challenges that loom over the coming centuries, including climate change, population growth, and nuclear arms.

A major new account of the state and its importance by a leading political philosopherThe future of our species depends on the state. Can states resist corporate capture, religious zealotry, and nationalist mania? Can they find a way to work together so that the earth heals and its peoples prosper? Or is the state just not up to the task? In this book, the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit examines the nature of the state and its capacity to serve goals like peace and justice within and beyond its borders. In doing so, he breaks new ground by making the state the focus of political theory—with implications for economic, legal, and social theory—and presents a persuasive, historically informed image of an institution that lies at the center of our lives.Offering an account that is more realist than utopian, Pettit starts from the function the polity is meant to serve, looks at how it can best discharge that function, and explores its ability to engage beneficially in the life of its citizens. This enables him to identify an ideal of statehood that is a precondition of justice. Only if states approximate this functional ideal will they be able to deal with the perennial problems of extreme poverty and bitter discord as well as the challenges that loom over the coming centuries, including climate change, population growth, and nuclear arms.

Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches.

Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches.

Philip Pettit offers a new insight into moral psychology. He shows that attachments such as love, and certain virtues such as honesty, require not only their characteristic positive behaviours in the actual world (i.e. as things are), but preservation of those characteristic behaviours across a range of counterfactual scenarios in which things are different from how they actually are. The counterfactual 'robustness', in this sense, of these behaviours is thus part of our very conception of these attachments and these virtues. Pettit shows that attachment, virtues, and respect all conform to a similar conceptual geography. He explores the implications of this idea for key moral issues, such as the doctrine of double effect and the distinction between doing and allowing. He articulates and argues against an assumption, which he calls 'moral behaviourism,' which permeates contemporary ethics.

Some goods that we generate for others, as when we give them attention or help or encouragement, require us to provide that benefit under the actual circumstances where we interact. Other goods that we generate require not just that we actually provide that sort of benefit but that we are also poised to provide it, even should actual circumstances change in various ways. These goods demand robust and not merely actual beneficence. Thus to give you friendship I must be robustly, not just accidentally, attentive to your needs; to give you a virtue like honesty I must be robustly disposed to tell you the truth; and to give you respect I must be robustly committed to showing restraint in my dealings with you. In this original contribution to normative ethics, Philip Pettit charts the range of robustly demanding goods, building on his earlier work on the robust demands of freedom. He explores the rationale behind our concern for being able to rely on others to treat us well, not just for being lucky enough to enjoy good treatment. And then he traces the implications for ethics of giving a central place to robustly demanding goods. The lessons he draws teach us that there is a tighter connection between being good and doing good than is generally recognized; that it is harder to count as doing good than it is to count as doing evil; and that there is a serious issue, ignored in many ethical theories, about the basis on which we should deliberate in day-to-day decisions about what it is right to do. The book amounts to a radical rethinking of ethics in which many standard positions shift or fall. The association between being good and doing good casts doubt on the orthodox dichotomy between evaluating agents and evaluating actions. The calibration between doing good and doing evil explains the Knobe effect, so called, as well as explaining the superficial appeal of doctrines like that of double effect. And the investigation of how to be guided in deliberating about the right reduces the gap between the recommendations of approaches like Kantianism, contractualism, and virtue theory and their common, consequentialist foe.

In this rigorous distillation of his political philosophy, Philip Pettit, author of the landmark work Republicanism, champions a simple standard for our most complex political judgments, offering a challenging ideal that nevertheless holds out a real prospect for social and democratic progress. Whereas many thinkers define freedom as the absence of interference—we are left alone to do as we please—Pettit demands that in their basic life choices free persons should not even be subject to a power of interference on the part of others. This notion of freedom as non-domination offers a yardstick for gauging social and democratic progress and provides a simple, unifying standard for analyzing our most entangled political quandaries. Pettit reaffirms the ideal, already present in the Roman Republic, of a free citizenry who enjoy equal status with one another, being individually protected by a law that they together control. After sketching a fresh history of freedom, he turns to the implications of the ideal for social, democratic, and international justice. Should the state erect systems for delivering mandatory healthcare coverage to its citizens? Should voting be a citizen’s only means of influencing political leaders? Are the demands of the United Nations to be heeded when they betray the sovereignty of the state? Pettit shows how these and other questions should be resolved within a civic republican perspective. Concise and elegant in its rhetoric and ultimately radical in its reimagining of our social arrangements, Just Freedom is neither a theoretical treatise nor a practical manifesto, but rather an ardent attempt to elaborate the demands of freedom and justice in our time.

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individual agents that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should go about explaining the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable in the manner of individuals. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, in a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. Christian List and Philip Pettit take the line that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper social science and a proper approach to law, morality, and politics have to take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy.

According to republican theory, we are free persons to the extent that we are protected and secured in the same fundamental choices, on the same public basis, as one another. But there is no public protection or security without a coercive state. Does this mean that any freedom we enjoy is a superficial good that presupposes a deeper, political form of subjection? Philip Pettit addresses this crucial question in On the People's Terms. He argues that state coercion will not involve individual subjection or domination insofar as we enjoy an equally shared form of control over those in power. This claim may seem utopian but it is supported by a realistic model of the institutions that might establish such democratic control. Beginning with a fresh articulation of republican ideas, Pettit develops a highly original account of the rationale of democracy, breathing new life into democratic theory.

This book examines an unlikely development in modern political philosophy: the adoption by a major national government of the ideas of a living political theorist. When Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero became Spain's opposition leader in 2000, he pledged that if his socialist party won power he would govern Spain in accordance with the principles laid out in Philip Pettit's 1997 book Republicanism, which presented, as an alternative to liberalism and communitarianism, a theory of freedom and government based on the idea of nondomination. When Zapatero was elected President in 2004, he invited Pettit to Spain to give a major speech about his ideas. Zapatero also invited Pettit to monitor Spanish politics and deliver a kind of report card before the next election. Pettit did so, returning to Spain in 2007 to make a presentation in which he gave Zapatero's government a qualified thumbs-up for promoting republican ideals. In this book, Pettit and Jose Luis Marti provide the historical background to these unusual events, explain the principles of civic republicanism in accessible terms, present Pettit's report and his response to some of its critics, and include an extensive interview with Zapatero himself. In addition, the authors discuss what is required of a political philosophy if it is to play the sort of public role that civic republicanism has been playing in Spain. An important account of a rare and remarkable encounter between contemporary political philosophy and real-world politics, this is also a significant work of political philosophy in its own right.

Originally published in 1980, this book examines the major issues in the philosophy of social science, paying specific attention to cross-cultural understanding, humanism versus scientism, individualism versus collectivism, and the shaping of theory by evaluative commitment. Arguing for a cross-cultural conception of human beings, the authors defend humanism and individualism, and reject the notion that social inquiry is necessarily vitiated by an adherence to values.

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individual agents that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper approach to the social sciences, law, morality, and politics must take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy.

Originally published in 1980, this book examines the major issues in the philosophy of social science, paying specific attention to cross-cultural understanding, humanism versus scientism, individualism versus collectivism, and the shaping of theory by evaluative commitment. Arguing for a cross-cultural conception of human beings, the authors defend humanism and individualism, and reject the notion that social inquiry is necessarily vitiated by an adherence to values.

Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows in Made with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy. Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It enables human beings to reason, commit themselves as persons, and incorporate in groups. But it also allows them to agonize about the future and about their standing relative to one another; it takes them out of the Eden of animal silence and into a life of inescapable conflict--the state of nature. Still, if language leads into this wasteland, according to Hobbes, it can also lead out. It can enable people to establish a commonwealth where the words of law and morality have a common, enforceable sense, and where people can invoke the sanctions of an absolute sovereign to give their words to one another in credible commitment and contract. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Made with Words is both an original reinterpretation and a clear and lively introduction to Hobbes's thought.

However much people want esteem, it is an untradable commodity-- there is no way that you can buy the good opinion of another or sell to others your good opinion of them. And yet esteem is allocated in society according to systematic determinants: people's performance, publicity, and presentation relative to others will help to fix how much esteem they enjoy and how much disesteem they avoid. In turn, rational individuals are bound to compete with one another, however tacitly, in the attempt to increase their chances of winning esteem and avoiding disesteem. And this competition shapes the environments in which they each pursue esteem, setting relevant comparators and benchmarks, and determining the cost that a person must bear for obtaining a given level of esteem. Hidden in the multifarious interactions and exchanges of social life, then, there is a quiet force at work -- a force as silent and powerful as gravity -- which molds the basic form of people's relationships and associations. This force was more or less routinely invoked in the writings of classical theorists like Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Montesquieu, Mandeville and Hume and Madison. Although Adam Smith himself gave it great credence, however, the rise of economics proper coincided with a sudden decline in the attention devoted to the economy of esteem. What had been a topic of compelling interest for earlier authors fell into relative neglect throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is designed to reverse the trend. It begins by outlining the psychology of esteem and the way the working of that psychology can give rise to an economy. It then shows how a variety of social patterns that are otherwise anomalous come to make a lot of sense within an economics of esteem. And it looks, finally, at the ways in which the economy of esteem may be reshaped to improve overall social outcomes. While making connections with older patterns of social theorising, it offers a novel orientation for contemporary thought about how society works and how it may be made to work. It puts the economy of esteem firmly on the agenda of economics and social science and of moral and political theory.

The text contends that people care about others' opinions of them and that the actions they take to raise the esteem they enjoy produce social patterns. They also point out that the actions taken to raise esteem affect individual economic behaviour.

Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith have been at the forefront of philosophy in Australia for much of the last two decades, and their collaborative work has had widespread influence throughout the world. Mind, Morality, and Explanation collects the best of that work in a single volume, showcasing their seminal contributions to philosophical psychology, the theory of psychological and social explanation, moral theory, and moral psychology.

Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith have been at the forefront of philosophy in Australia for much of the last two decades, and their collaborative work has had widespread influence throughout the world. Mind, Morality, and Explanation collects the best of that work in a single volume, showcasing their seminal contributions to philosophical psychology, the theory of psychological and social explanation, moral theory, and moral psychology.

Philip Pettit has drawn together here a series of interconnected essays on three subjects to which he has made notable contributions. The first part of the book deals with the rule-following character of thought. The second discusses the many factors to which choice is rationally responsive - and by reference to which choice can be explained - consistently with being under the control of thought. The third examines the implications of this multiple sensitivity for the normative regulation of social affairs. Thus the volume covers a large swathe of territory, ranging from metaphysics to philosophical psychology to the theory of rational regulation. The connections that Pettit makes between these areas are original and illuminating. Each part of the book develops a key theme. The first is that thought succeeds in following rules - and overcomes Wittgenstein's rule-following problem - so far as it is response-dependent; it is a sort of enterprise that is accessible only to creatures like us for whom certain responses are primitive and shared. The second is that while human choice may be sensitive to discursive reasons, as we would expect in a thinking subject, it can at the same time be subject to the control - the virtual control, in the model developed here - of rational self-interest. And the third is that the rational interest of agents in achieving esteem in the eyes of others, and in avoiding disesteem, exercises a virtual form of control that can explain the emergence of norms and various other aspects of social life.

Philip Pettit has drawn together here a series of interconnected essays on three subjects to which he has made notable contributions. The first part of the book discusses the rule-following character of thought. The second considers how choice can be responsive to different sorts of factors, while still being under the control of thought and the reasons that thought marshals. The third examines the implications of this view of choice and rationality for the normative regulation of social behaviour.