Daniel Little
March on Selma, 1965 Human beings have attitudes, behaviors, habits, stereotypes, and values. And somehow these mental attributes are developed or acquired in the course of normal human social life. But how, when, and with what results does this process work? And how persistent are a set of attitudes and values once established in the …
Continue reading "How are an individual’s political values formed?"
The United States is a multicultural democracy. This is simply an empirical fact; the country is a democracy (imperfect by many important measures); and it is multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-national. So what is involved in helping bring about a transition to an "inclusive" multicultural democracy -- a social and political order embodying fundamental equality across …
Continue reading "Group identities and inclusive multicultural democracy"
Rawls believes that a just society must be a pluralistic society, and that means that it must be neutral across (reasonable) comprehensive conceptions of the good. Citizens must be enabled to pursue their own comprehensive conceptions without interference from the state. Does this imply that a comprehensive conception based on the idea of ethnic or …
Continue reading "Confronting race through Rawls’s political philosophy"
John Rawls and Philip Pettit agree about the idea that a liberal democracy depends on the idea that all citizens have equal liberties, rights, worth, and dignity. Therefore they also agree that social and legal arrangements that are incompatible with equal rights, equal liberties, and equal dignity are illegitimate. They disagree in some details about …
Continue reading "Can liberal political philosophy support anti-racism?"
We might say that a political philosophy is a formulation of the normative ideals that the philosopher holds to be primary in implementing the moral and social facts of "assemblages of free individuals in society, with conflicts of interest and belief". How should such a society be organized? What values should it aspire to realize …
Continue reading "A political philosophy for an inclusive multicultural democracy"
Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is …
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In his influential article "A definition of physicalism" (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an ontology of the world. I believe that we can define a possibly true, substantive doctrine which holds, roughly, that the empirical world 'contains just what a true complete physics would say it …
In 1964 Jim Marshall, a defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, committed a mistake by recovering a fumble by the San Francisco 49ers and running it into the end zone – at the wrong end of the field. In the early 1990s the US Congress made a mistake by ordering continued development of the Osprey …
The years following the collapse of the socialist-Stalinist regimes of eastern Europe were not comfortable for the people of the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and many other countries. The economic arrangements of a centrally planned economy abruptly collapsed, and new market institutions were slow to emerge and often appeared indifferent to the needs of the …
Continue reading "Memory and culture after 1989 in Central Europe"
Do organizations have properties that are in some recognizable way independent from the behaviors and intentions of the individuals who inhabit them? In A New Social Ontology of Government I emphasized the ways in which organizations fail because of actor-level features: principal-agent problems, inconsistent priorities and goals across different working groups, strategic manipulation of information by some …
Understanding Society 