Watch us here.

I have been delighted to see such strong support across political and disciplinary divides for this proposal. Let us hope the AHRC takes notice and removes this language from its funding documentation.

Arendt, Rawls and Habermas are special cases and I’ve listed their top two cited works.  Google lists Arendt’s and Habermas’ works multiple times so I suspect they are undercounts. Obviously works with appeal outside of political theory and philosophy get a good deal more traction.

The list is simply based on people who came to mind as I was doing this.  I stopped when I realized how much time I was spending, so  this is hardly complete.  If you have additions and wish to contact me (or post) I’d be grateful. (rehfeld [@] wustl.edu)

Special cases (see note above):

John Rawls (see note above):

• A Theory of Justice, 33,386 total citations, 856/yr   
• Political Liberalism, 7974, 443/yr

Hannah Arendt (see note above)   

• The Human Condition (1958): 7595, 143/yr   
• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951):  4584, 74/yr

Jurgen Habermas (see note above)   

• Structural Transformation (1991/1962):  3743, 187/yr   
• The Theory of Communicative Action (1984):  4933, 133/yr

The list in order of citations per year (total citations, citations per year)

1. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990): 5841 total citations, 278/yr
2. Martha C Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2001): 2440, 244/yr.
3. HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (1961): 7733, 155/yr
4. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982): 4330, 150/yr
5. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract: (1988): 3261, 142/yr
6. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (1996): 2052, 137/yr
7. Susan Okin, Justice Gender and the Family: 1868, 85/yr
8. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983): 2327, 83/yr
9. Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (1999): 959, 80/yr
10. Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the State (1981): 2260, 75/yr
11. Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (1992): 1542, 75/yr
12. Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation: 3255, 74/yr
13. Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (1994): 1168, 69/yr
14. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (1995): 1062, 66/yr
15. Mark Warren, Democracy and Association (2001): 507, 51/yr
16. Robert Dahl’s Preface to Democratic Theory (1956): 2538, 47/yr
17. James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, (1993): 795, 44/yr
18. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (1993): 783, 44/yr
19. Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (1993): 1067, 38/yr
20. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953): 1695, 25/yr
21. Jacob Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear, (2000): 193, 18/yr
22. Brian Barry, Political Argument (1965 and 1990 reissue combined): 797, 17/yr
23. Nancy Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, (2000): 190, 17/yr
24. Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (1991): 323, 16/yr

Chapter VI begins by reminding us of an important conclusion from the previous chapter, namely, that the Members of the Public (MoP) will be confronted with a large set of rules of social morality, and that with respect to these rules, the MoP (as a group) is indifferent (they prefer any member of the set to no rule at all, but do not converge on any particular member of that set).

The goal of this chapter is to advance to two partial solutions to this ‘problem of indeterminacy.’  They both concern individual rights, specifically, those rights commonly known (from Benjamin Constant’s famous essay) as the ‘liberty of the moderns.’  These solutions are only ‘partial’ because they serve only to narrow somewhat the set of eligible rules of social morality, but do not pick out any particular rules.

Section 17 presents the first of these two partial solutions.  In this section, drawing on the work of Benn, Gewirth, and Rawls, Gaus employs an ‘argument from abstraction’ to show that all reasonable Members of the Public would be committed to endorsing, at least in an abstract form, certain fundamental individual rights (the ‘liberty of the moderns’), as such rights are essential for effective agency.

Gaus begins the section by reminding us of the ‘Kantian-Rawlsian two-step procedure’ for arriving at justified principles under circumstances of reasonable pluralism (diversity of ends and values among the reasonable MoP). Roughly, this procedure involves ‘bracketing’ our disagreements, adopting a shared perspective, and reasoning on the basis of this shared perspective (the perspective of pure practical reason for Kant, the perspective of the original position for Rawls).

Gaus advances his own ‘argument from abstraction’ in this section in order to show that the MoP would support certain individual rights for all persons.  However, specific interpretations of individual rights, that is, specific rules, acceptable to all MoP in accordance with the ‘deliberative model,’ will need to be formulated at a later stage.  Nonetheless, showing that all reasonable MoP endorse such rights can serve to narrow the set of eligible rules of social morality (rules that deny such rights to some persons or deny them altogether are ruled out).

Gaus claims that the success of any argument from abstraction (whether Rawls’s original position argument, or the argument that Gaus advances in this section) depends on three claims:(a) the successful identification of a shared perspective (the original position for Rawls; the perspective of abstract agency for Gaus); (b) the importance or weightiness of the evaluative standards identified by the shared perspective (why the conclusions of the shared perspective should be taken seriously by the MoP for the purposes of evaluating rules of social morality); and (c) the ability of the conclusions generated via the shared perspective to survive the return of the Members of the Public to their ‘full set of evaluative standards’ (i.e., the ability of the conclusions of ‘pro tanto justification’ to survive ‘full justification’).

Gaus asserts that it was a concern with (c), the compatibility of the conclusions of the shared perspective (the conception of ‘justice as fairness’ endorsed by the parties in the original position) with reasonable persons’ various ‘comprehensive doctrines,’ that prompted Rawls’s move to political liberalism.  Rawls’s commitment to the original position device as the appropriate perspective for ascertaining principles of political justice remains constant from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism (p. 336).  As we’ll see, Gaus thinks that while the first principle of justice as fairness (the basic liberties principle), or some version of it, survives (c), the difference principle cannot.

The “second abstraction characteristic of Rawls’s original position,” Gaus explains, is that it focuses on the justification of abstract principles rather than rules.  Gaus restates his claim (from 14.3) that “principles are too vague and too subjective to interpretive controversy to provide an effective framework for cooperation” (p. 337).  Nonetheless, identifying principles shared by the MoP can be useful, since such stably shared principles would at least eliminate many proposed rules for social morality.

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Cambridge University Press summarizes The Order of Public Reason (OPR) as follows: “Gerald Gaus shows how we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyses social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.”

We welcome all contributors to the Public Reason blog as discussants. For those of you who have not joined up, let this reading group be a reason for you to do so. We’re also happy to have as many readers as we can. I want to state here that you will find that OPR is quite expensive. You can compare prices for the book here. However, if you cannot afford to buy the book, do not let this discourage you from participating. Sample copies are available. Just email me at kevinvallier-at-gmail-dot-com and I will be more than happy to provide you with a sample until you can purchase the book for yourself.

I will post the first entry next Monday. We will be reading the preface, and the first two sections of Chapter 1. The first two sections are a total of 36 pages. The text is quite engaging and provocative. I am sure you will enjoy it.

You can find the schedule and links to the posts on each section here.

I am now beginning work on “How to Peer Review” which will address substantive, practical advice on how to best conduct reviews of journal articles and book proposals. This seems to be the new area where good information is lacking.

A question then for readers: what advice should be offered? All comments will be gratefully acknowledged in the final piece.

Please post all comments here so that they may all be in one place, as this announcent will be posted widely (as I think the issue is highly important and I am keen to canvass opinions from as many as possible).

In this innovative and important work, Gerald Gaus advances a revised, and more realistic, account of public reason liberalism, showing how, in the midst of fundamental disagreement about values and moral beliefs, we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyzes social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.

Given the orientation of the blog, I suspect the book will be of interest. Would anyone be interested in running a reading group here?

Here’s what I have in mind. Liberal political thought, to this point, has largely ignored a set of concerns that were central to many Labor movements, which might be called concerns over “workplace democracy” or what is sometimes called “democratic corporatism.”  With some notable exceptions (Pateman, Gould, Mansbridge), frequently offered by those operating in a Marxist framework, political philosophers have instead focused on issues of distribution or issues of legitimacy in terms of public reasons or political dialogue.  Relatively little attention has been paid to whether a society with profound inequalities in wealth, where corporations are dominant players in the political landscape, can be meaningfully democratic. There are a number of reasons for this omission, I think, including the assumptions that (1) if distribution problems are taken care of the rest will take care of itself or (2) the ideal society will have stringent campaign finance laws, public election financing, or some other way of insulating the political sphere from the economic sphere.  Given the economic and, following the Supreme Court Ruling, political-legal realities in the US for the indefinite future, I no longer believe that such assumptions will do.

Instead, I believe that if corporations are going to be dominant players in the political landscape for the indefnite future, more work needs to be done to consider whether such organizations need to be more democratic.  Are CEOs or Boards of Directors the “free speakers” for corporations, at liberty to use corporate money to influence election outcomes and policy debates?  Do campaign contributions require the approval of the majority of shareholders?  Do they require the approval of employees? There are of course reasons to favor discretionary decision making by executives - taking a vote for all decisions may leave firms unable to respond efficiently to market demands. Nonetheless, there are also substantial reasons to provide protections for workers or stockholders from what may be arbitrary or self-servingly indefensible decisions made by a board of directors. Also, the need for such rapid, discretionary decision-making with regard to political contributions is far from clear.  Treating corporations, in theory or in practice, as individuals with a right to free speech completely ignores these issues.

Later in his career Rawls himself more clearly distinguishes a property-owning democracy from the idea of a welfare state. A recent symposium in the Journal of Social Philosophy considers the implications of this distinction, in a way that is frequently relevant to the issue at hand. Given Citizens v. FEC, however, I believe that more work on the moral and political implications of corporate involvement in contemporary politics, and the ways in which workplace democracy can further democratic equality without unduly sacrificing market competitiveness, is necessary.  It is no longer plausible (if it ever was) in the American context, to believe that campaign finance law will insulate the political sphere from the economic sphere, such that inequalities in one need not entail inequalities in the other.

Any thoughts?

Drawing on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice many have suggested that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is akin to the full/partial compliance distinction. In creating his ideal theory, Rawls assumes that people will comply (almost) perfectly with the requirements of justice. He then uses his original position argument to conclude that his first principle of justice should have priority over his second. Next, Rawls weakens his ideal theory assumptions, adding the constraint that people may not abide by the requirements of justice. He concludes that we should only embrace his general conception of justice in non-ideal theory.

Unfortunately, the canonical examples of ideal and non-ideal theories cannot be fully characterized as full and partial compliance theories respectively. As Simmons and others note, even Rawls says ideal theory requires more than perfect compliance. In creating his ideal theory he assumes, for instance, that the circumstances do not prevent justice from being secured. Furthermore, others have more recently provided ideal and non-ideal theories that are not full and partial compliance theories (respectively). The main thing that distinguishes Allen Buchanan’s and Michael Blake’s non-ideal theories from their ideal theories, for instance, is that their non-ideal theories assume that there will be states and consider what we should do given that we are confined to a statist system. Similarly, the main thing that distinguishes Ronald Dworkin’s non-ideal theory from his ideal theory is that he assumes that people only have different talents and disabilities in his ideal theory. Blake’s, Buchanan’s, and Dworkin’s ideal theories do not require perfect compliance. Assuming that there is something to the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and these authors are not just using the terms in completely different ways, the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction cannot just be the full/partial compliance distinction.

Reflecting on the many ways people seem to use the terms, one might despair at the thought of trying to unify such disparate ideal and non-ideal theories. In the draft of his book manuscript Michael Blake suggests, for instance, that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is not that useful because it can mean many different things. He implores others to be careful to explain just what assumptions they are making in advancing any theory. Perhaps this is part of what drives Simmons and others to argue for one or another of these ways of thinking about the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction.

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The proposal strikes me as a very bad idea in a number of ways. I don’t see how the law liberates women from whatever social pressure there exists to wear a veil. Will wearing a balaclava in public be illegal too? If not, then won’t the law just force a change of attire? Nussbaum has some discussion of this general issue in her Liberty of Conscience, pp. 346-53, invoking the ability of Chicagoans (and the Dutch, and presumably the French) to conduct normal social interactions with their faces covered in winter.

What if feminists who believe that make-up is just a manifestation of the objectification of women in patriarchy, and hence symbolic of repression and degradation, are right? Is there a way to support the veil ban, but not think that this claim about make-up would justify a make-up ban?* How about t-shirts with sexist imagery and messages? Quite apart from dress codes, we can recognise prostitution as degrading, and hence contrary to the values of an egalitarian republic, without thinking it should be illegal, primarily because making it illegal may very well just make the lives of those women, so degraded, even worse.

So, a question: can anything be said in support of this proposal (from ideally a feminist perspective), that does not run into these and other problems?

*[I should add I think having to wear a burqa is worse than feeling compelled to wear make-up.]

For instance, one of the practices Providian is said to have developed involved substituting what they called “stealth pricing” for explicit annual fees. Instead of charging all its customers a flat fee of, say, $50 per year, Providian offered cards with zero annual fee but with steep penalties for late payments, going over your credit limit, etc. To many customers, Providian’s cards thus appeared to be free. But Providian knew that many of its customers - especially the low-income, high credit-risk customers it was targeting - would wind up paying much more in penalties than they would have with a flat annual fee, even if most customers (wrongly) believed the opposite to be true.

So, at least at first glance, it looks like Providian was exploiting several kinds of vulnerability on the part of these customers.  First, the customers were vulnerable insofar as they were likely to do the things that would incur penalties. And secondly, they were vulnerable insofar as they tended to underestimate the extent to which they would do this, and hence underestimate the true cost of the cards Providian was offering. Providian took advantage of these vulnerabilities to enhance its own profit (which, at its peak according to the documentary, were around $1 billion per year).

Is this a case of wrongful exploitation? It might be, but the story raises a few questions in my mind.

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Just in case you are confused, here is the run down. The commentary I gave focused on a collection of essays on libertarianism and anarchism edited by Tibor Machan and Roderick Long. In it, I advanced a new argument for the conclusion that libertarians should endorse some kind of welfare liberalism.

Here were the comments I made: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-hassoun08.htm

Several people responded. Here are Narveson’s comments: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-narveson08.htm

Here are Long’s: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-long08.htm

Here are Thomas’s: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-thomas08.htm

Perhaps I should also say that I post my reply to these here only because I did not succeed in getting them on the Molinari web site and there was some discussion of the relevant argument in the commentary I posted here a while ago. This was the commentary: http://publicreason.net/2008/05/23/why-libertarians-should-be-welfare-liberals/

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Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (in its original formulation) says that in an election between A and B (where A  is the right choice and B is the bad choice), for an electorate in which each voter has an independent probability p>.5 of voting for A (the right choice), then as the size of electorate increases, the probability that the electorate will elect A (the right choice) approaches 1. Even for a low value of p, such as p=.51, the probability that the electorate will choose A approaches 1 rather quickly. For instance, with 10,001 voters, the electorate already has about a 99% chance of picking A.

Some epistemic democrats defend democracy using Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. They claim that democracies are adequately modeled by the Jury Theorem, and that the average voter is more likely than not to make a good choice. There’s debate about whether democracies are well-modeled by the theorem (e.g., whether voters make statistically independent choices, and if they don’t, what impact that has). (E.g., see the chapter “The Irrelevance of the Jury Theorem” in Estlund’s [i]Democratic Authority[/i].) I’m with Jerry Gaus and Estlund–I don’t think actual democracies are adequately modeled by the theorem, so I don’t think that we can use the theorem to conclude that they tend to make good choices. (Nor can we use it to conclude that they tend to make bad choices. Note that if p>.5, then as the size of the electorate increases, the theorem says that voters are certain to choose the bad choice. And I think the evidence, if anything, points to p<.5. So, from my perspective, it’s a good thing Condorcet’s Jury Theorem doesn’t apply.)

;However, suppose you do believe that democracies are well-modeled by the theorem. If so, then it’s worth asking how many voters you really need. After all, the probability that the electorate will make the right choice shoots up near 1 pretty quickly, even when p is only slightly higher than .5. Every additional voter adds some small probability that the electorate will make the right choice. However, we get diminishing returns. The question is how rapidly the returns diminish. After all, in a high stakes election, the net value of A over B might be, let’s say, on the order of $10 trillion.

 Imagine that, just like the other voters, my p is .51. Still, suppose that my vote increases the likelihood that we’d make the right choice by 1% or even .001% Because the value of making the right choice is so high, then my additional vote counts for a lot–it has a lot of expected utility. [The expected utility of my vote in this case is the difference in value between A and B times the marginal increase in the probability that the electorate will make the right choice.] So, for example, the 1001st voter is adding only about .02% accuracy to the electorate, but that means her vote is worth $2 billion! [Note: I have the exact number at work, but I’m typing this at home. So it might a little off.] Think of the electorate as being like a machine making a choice that’s worth $10 trillion or $0. If you increase the likelihood that this machine will make the right choice by .02%, you’re increasing the expected utility of the machine’s choice by $2 billion.

So, at what N is the Nth voter only contributing a few dollars worth of accuracy? Let’s suppose that every voter has an opportunity cost of $100. That is, during the time she votes, she could have done something else worth $100 either to her personally or to promote the common good. At what N does adding additional voters become wasteful?

Now that it seems like I’ve gotten Mathematica to cooperate, it looks like for this example, where each voter has a p of .51, the net value of making the right choice is $10 trillion, and where we’re calling votes wasteful when they have an expected utility under $100, votes become wasteful at about N=100,001. (This isn’t exactly right–it’s just about the order of magnitude where the value of a vote is in the 10s. In fact, I’m calculating the value of 100,001st voter at about $26.) Note that if p is higher than .51, the net value of the right choice is lower, or if opportunity costs are higher, then N will be lower. So, N=100,000 might be a high estimate.

So, if you defend democracy using the standard formulation of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, it seems that you should think having 120 million Americans vote is kind of a waste of time. It would be far better just to have a small number of people vote and have everyone else go about their day. 119,899,999 of these people are just adding unnecessary accuracy to an already impressively accurate machine. They should go do something else instead. We just don’t need mass democracy. It doesn’t do us that much additional good. The first 100 thousand voters contribute more than the next 100 billion. Etc.

Of course, you might say, “Well, if only 100,000 people voted, they might not vote for the common good but for their self-interest at the expense of the common good.” Maybe so. But if you’re saying stuff like that, I take it you don’t think democracies are well-modeled by Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.

All this hangs on my having done the mathematics correctly. So, I’ll double-check the results when I get back to work on Monday.

The accuracy of a jury of N members when each juror has  a 51% chance of being accurate is given by the formula below:

Pa (probability the jury is accurate) = SUM [upper bound = N, lower bound = (N=1)/2] (N!/(N-i!)i!) * (.51^i) * (.49^(N-i))

Since that’s likely to be unclear, here’s a link to a nice print out of the formula:http://books.google.com/books?id=CdIOKZWc3oMC&lpg=PP1&dq=public%20choice%20iii&pg=PA129

It’s easy to calculate Pa using Mathematica for values where N < 6500.  After that, Mathematica and other programs can’t handle it. So, what I’d ideally like to do is find some program that can calculate Pa for higher values of N, such as N=50,000, N=500,000, N= 1,000,000, etc.

Alternatively, if there is some way to find the first derivative of this function, that might be helpful as well. Does anyone know how to do this?

What I’d really like to know is what the optimal number of jurors/voters is when the conditions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem obtain.  Even tiny increases in accuracy can have significant value if the value of being accurate is high enough.  So, for example, the marginal value of the 5007th voters is about 0.002%.  But if picking the better candidate is worth, let’s say, $1 trillion dollars, then the expected value of that vote is quite high.  But what’s the marginal impact of the 50,000th vote?  The 100,000th?  The millionth?I’m wondering if you think that democracies are adequately modeled by the Condorcet Jury Theorem (you shouldn’t, by the way), what’s the optimum number of voters?  Let’s say that the net value of being accurate is $1 trillion, and that adding additional voters is suboptimal once the marginal value of a vote goes below $1.  In that case, the optimal number of jurors (N) is given by the formula:1,000,000,000,000 * [Pa(N+1) - Pa(N)] = 1

Alas, despite trying many things over the past week or so, I have no idea how to solve this without a supercomputer.

Another alternative would be to find some upper bound and prove the the actual number is below this (already low) upper bound.  But I’ve been unsuccessful at that.

Yet another alternative is to calculate the real marginal value of votes at a bunch of Ns that Mathematica can handle, then run some regressions to find a function that models the marginal value well, and use that as substitute.  I’ve done that with a few different functions, but the problem is that these functions are of questionable accuracy for high values of N.Any ideas?