Christian List

One of the central problems within the free will debate liesin the apparent incompatibility of an agent’s ability to dootherwise and determinism. Recently, compatibilist liber-tarianism was proposed as an actualist position intendedto finally reconcile both. In this article, we argue that inorder to maintain consistency, this position must be under-stood as a variant of classical compatibilism rather than aversion of libertarianism. Though this seems to be anundesired consequence for proponents of compatibilist lib-ertarianism, we think that it is not that bad. We show thatrecent objections to this position can be avoided byembracing its compatibilist nature and argue that a modi-fied version of compatibilist libertarianism might very wellbe as close to an actualist account of free will in a deter-ministic world as one can hope for.

It is argued that political realists have framed internationalized relations by way of an implicit appeal to what is called the 'agent-exclusion principle.' The agent-exclusion principle holds that in cases where agency is nested, agency at one level precludes or displaces agency at another level. This paper interrogates the truth of the agent-exclusion principle by reformulating it as an agent-exclusion problem: when agency is nested, is it the case that agency at one level necessarily excludes agency at another? Or is multi-level agential co-presence possible? By problematizing the agent-exclusion principle in this way, I can leverage the considerable effort that has been put into understanding and resolving the agent-exclusion problem in other domains to better understand its expression in the context of globalized relations. In particular, a critical evaluation of the agent-exclusion principle motivates, against the political realist, the rejection of state-centric realism but also points to the impossibility of a cosmopolitan world state. I conclude with a reflection on the significance of these findings for scholarship globally in higher education. Keywords Agent-exclusion principle • Globalization • Higher education reforms • Ideology • The state 1 A subdiscipline of philosophy concerned with the nature and properties of the social world (Epstein, 2021).

This book is an enquiry into the meaning and nature of collective responsibility. It analyses the moral culpability of collective entities implicated in some of the most pressing contemporary ethical issues, including institutional injustice, corporate scams, organized crimes, gang wars, genocide, xenophobia, and other group-based violence. It asks: Who is responsible when a collective is (held) responsible? Is collective responsibility merely a façon de parler, a rhetorical way of talking about individual moral responsibility, or is it more than that? Using some of the latest resources from the philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and social ontology, the author develops a nuanced non-individualist position with the help of a con cept of collective agency. He interprets collective responsibility as the responsibility of a collective without either reducing it to the responsibility of the individual members or making it a case where their moral positions become blurred. An important intervention in moral philosophy, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of moral philosophy, philosophy of action and mind, philosophy of social sciences, and political philosophy. It will also be a theoretical resource for legal theorists, just war theorists, game theorists, business ethicists, and policy makers.

We need an account of corporate agency that is temporally robust. One that will help future people to cope with challenges posed by corporate groups in a range of credible futures. In particular, we need to bequeath moral resources that enable future people to avoid futures dominated by corporate groups that have no regard for human beings. This paper asks how future philosophers living in broken or digital futures might reimagine contemporary debates about corporate agency. It argues that the only temporally robust account is moralised extreme collectivism, where full moral personhood is accorded (only) to those corporate groups that are reliably disposed to respond appropriately to moral reasons.

Amartya Sen has argued the impossibility of the Paretian liberal. While his abstract argument is compelling, the concrete significance of the conclusion is in some doubt. This is because it is not clear how important liberalism in his sense is; in particular it is not clear that the sort of liberalism required for the impossibility result is a compelling variety. We show that even if the argument cannot be used to establish the inconsistency of Paretianism and common-or-garden liberalism, it can be adapted to prove a parallel impossibility. This is the impossibility of combining the Pareto criterion with a loyalty constraint involving certain claim-rights rather than liberty-rights. The impossibility of the Paretian loyalist is of interest in itself but it is also interesting for the light it throws on the source of Sen-style impossibilities.

The present doctoral dissertation aims to offer an indirect defence of the individualist position in the debate concerning collective moral responsibility. As such it swims against the general tide as it were. However, the individualism defended in the dissertation is of a rather weak kind, allowing a range of collective entities. Basically, the main claim of the thesis is that only human agents qualify as moral agents, and thus moral responsibility, either individual or collective, is to be ascribed to individual agents either individually or collectively. iii presupposes agency. I argue that, due to their constitution, collective agents are such agents that it necessarily would be unfair to hold them morally responsible in their own right. I proceed mainly in respect to Pettit's account of collective agents. However, although the focus is primarily on Pettit's account, I suggest that the idea of this paper is generalizable, as the premises or assumptions on which the critical points are based are widely shared by the proponents of the collectivist camp.

Great Britain planned the Falklands campaign of 1982 very carefully and went to war intentionally. It aimed to retake the Falklands, and it was successful. British forces were outnumbered and not as well equipped as they could have been. The logistical problems were immense, given how far the Falklands are from Britain. For these reasons, it is questionable whether Britain was well advised to attempt to retake the islands. And for these reasons, Argentina may have believed that Britain would not risk a war. This belief may have been partly responsible for the failure of Argentina to prepare adequately to hold the islands. Britain benefited from this failure and, ironically, may owe its success partly to the fact that Argentina thought it would be foolish to fight for the islands. I do not claim that Britain was irrational to go to war; I only raise the issue. It is clear how a debate about the issue would proceed. Early in the war, Britain sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano with the loss of over three hundred sailors. The sinking has been controversial mainly because the ship was sailing away from the Falklands when it was attacked, and was outside the British military exclusion zone. The ship is said to have changed course a few hours before being attacked, so it is possible that the attack was due to faulty information. Nonetheless, Britain did sink the ship, and did apparently intend to do so. The question remains whether the attack was justified under the circumstances. I do not say that the attack was not justified; I only raise the issue. We can see how a debate about the issue would proceed.

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment-as is arguably the case with Christian List and Philip Pettit's theory of group agency-face the so-called "problem of the first belief" that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups.

Christian List and Philip Pettit have recently argued for a performative theory of personhood in which all agents who manage to perform in the space of obligations are taken as persons. Based on this account they claim that group agents are also persons. This theory has been challenged on the grounds of its historical accuracy, lack of political relevance, and contestability of the concept of personhood. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the debate by approaching it through the Hegelian idea of recognition. The claim is that recognition theory provides a multi-dimensional view of personhood that gives a clearer account of what is at stake with collective personhood.

Link for the full open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1515/jso-2016-0019

This paper argues that republicans have not sufficiently differentiated their conception of liberty from that of classical liberalism.  By focusing strictly on Berlinian notions of liberty as non-interference, they have built up their republican alternative around a liberal straw man.  Not only do republicans neglect to examine the work of the ‘new’ liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulated by the likes of J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse—which is a topic of exploration in its own right—they have also ignored influential twentieth century classical liberals like Friedrich von Hayek.  An examination of Hayek’s contribution to twentieth century liberalism complicates the republican critique of liberalism.  Although characterizing himself as a classical liberal, Hayek does not articulate a conception of ‘negative liberty’ along the lines argued by Berlin and associated with liberalism by republican theorists.  As a corollary, Hayek places paramount importance on the ‘rule of law’ to the point where he dismisses the tenets of laissez-faire as ‘rationalist dogma’.  The significance is that, for Hayek, the question regarding liberty cannot be simply regarded as a matter of interference versus non-interference, but rather the kind of interference necessary to maintain a free market order.  At the concrete level of policy, this enables Hayek to accept the possibility of a minimum income in his free market order, a policy that has recently been proposed by republicans like Pettit as a distinctively republican contribution to debates regarding political economy.  As a consequence, the republican critique of liberalism is unable to sufficiently address Hayek’s contribution to the concept of liberty.

Amartya Sen has argued the impossibility of the Paretian liberal. While his abstract argument is compelling, the concrete significance of the conclusion is in some doubt. This is because it is not clear how important liberalism in his sense is; in particular it is not clear that the sort of liberalism required for the impossibility result is a compelling variety. We show that even if the argument cannot be used to establish the inconsistency of Paretianism and common-or-garden liberalism, it can be adapted to prove a parallel impossibility. This is the impossibility of combining the Pareto criterion with a loyalty constraint involving certain claim-rights rather than liberty-rights. The impossibility of the Paretian loyalist is of interest in itself but it is also interesting for the light it throws on the source of Sen-style impossibilities.

This paper considers the contribution positive political theory has made to the resolution of “Hobbes’ Problem”—the problem of describing the nature of artificial persons, such as states. This problem plays a central role in both empirical and normative work in political science. Several areas of positive political theory, most notably social choice theory, have shed light on Hobbes’ Problem, and the results have been generally negative. That is to say, they have suggested that the conditions necessary to generate an artificial collective agent out of the individual agents comprising it may be impossible to satisfy,
at least if this is done in a nontrivial way. While efforts to establish the possibility of a collective agent continue—notably in recent work by Christian List and Philip Pettit—the primary accomplishment of positive political theory has been to raise the question of whether Hobbes’ Problem can be solved at all.

Collectives are more or less structured groups of human beings. Responsibility-collectivism is the view that the moral responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the combined moral responsibility of individual group members. This paper focuses on one of the key conditions of responsibility: the requirement of control. It is plausible that this requirement also applies to collective agents and so collective responsibility presupposes group-control. Responsibility-collectivists have often tried to unpack the idea of group-control as non-causal control. I argue that non-causal control is not an admissible basis for attributing responsibility. Only causal group-control is. This is because non-causal group control does not provide the right kind of information regarding the ancestry of a certain outcome. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the difficulties which arise for responsibility-collectivism if one understands group-control as causal group-control. One of these difficulties is whether causal group-control is consistent with ontological individualism. The second concerns the relationship of group-control and individual control. I argue that the first difficulty is manageable, but only at the price of having to accept a solution to the second difficulty which runs counter to the original aim of the responsibility-collectivist of characterizing irreducible collective responsibility as compatible with individual responsibility. Worse still, responsibility-collectivists may have to choose sides in other areas of social ontology as well. This further raises the price of this position.

Primarily due to the works of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, the classical doctrine of republicanism has been resurrected in modern political theory. However despite the great and growing attention paid to it by numerous commentators, republican freedom remains an underdeveloped school of thought. It consequently is yet to answer many of the questions and challenges that have been presented by critics. One of the most effective and interesting critiques of republican freedom is offered by Christian List. List argues that republicans have to overcome an obstacle he describes as the ‘republican paradox’. List suggests that an individual’s freedom is a delicate balance between its scope, or its size, and its robustness, or its permanence. He suggests that if republicans are to attach primary importance to the robustness of freedom rather than its scope, then maximising the former might leave very little room for the latter. This paper aims to respond to List’s challenge by overcoming the very trade-off that List envisions. It will argue that depicting freedom as a trade-off between scope and robustness is a misrepresentation. This argument is founded upon another important feature of republican thought, this being deliberation. Whilst freedom’s robustness is determined by the rule-of-law, its scope is negotiated through a process of deliberation in which individuals demark the spheres of life that public authorities cannot interfere with. This study suggests that as long as effective individual agency is preserved in public discourse, a consequence will be a reasonable scope of freedom, and this would hold true in a world of robust non-domination. This essay will also argue that the best way to protect this agency is to supplement republican deliberation with John Rawls’ theory of Political Liberalism. This thesis therefore contends that freedom that has been made robust through the rule-of-law can retain adequate scope through public discourse that is supplemented by political liberalism, which safeguards the fairness of public decisions within deliberative democracies.