Exploring Republican Freedom: Freedom and Domination by Keith Breen & Cillian Mcbride

Author:Keith Breen & Cillian Mcbride [Breen, Keith & Mcbride, Cillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815373551
Google: LQ-6swEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39219068
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-15T09:08:37+00:00

They will generate a fund of public reasons such that everyone in the society will be expected to countenance them, short of producing novel grounds for raising challenges. Part of learning one’s way about such a polity will consist in learning what considerations and what criteria pass without saying – pass in every context, not just in this or that particular milieu – as principles of local political argument. (Pettit 2004, p. 164)

One might think that in order to allow for this kind of practical norm generation, Pettit will still have to fall back on some kind of basic principle, such as the principle of ‘respect for persons’ (Larmore) or of ‘fairness’ (Christman) suggested by his critics. Pettit, however, insists that even a norm as basic as ‘equal respect’ will emerge as a result of the practice of contestation and public deliberation, rather than being presupposed by it (Pettit 2012, p. 262).

Summarizing this brief discussion of Pettit’s idea of realizing freedom from public domination through the practice of contestation, I submit that we may conclude that while this practice does centrally involve reference to norms (and therefore is not value-free), these norms are neither determined a priori or pre-politically, nor are they fixed in any way. Instead, they are generated, disputed, and revised by the essentially political practice of contestation, which means that, as a result, they are going to vary considerably between different societies and points in time (Pettit 2012, p. 263). Accordingly, Pettit offers a number of observations on what such norms are likely going to be, but does not say anything about what they should be. He thus presents freedom from public domination as a value-neutral concept. Another way of putting this is to characterize it as a practice-based concept. We may call a concept practice-based in this sense to the extent that, while including evaluative elements, it relies on the content of those elements being provided by (political) practice. In that respect, practice-based concepts also differ from other value-neutral, but not value-free, concepts (like MacCallum’s definition of freedom), insofar as the necessary evaluative content here is provided not by individual evaluative viewpoints, but by the evaluative viewpoint emerging from a collective practice.9 Understanding freedom from public domination in this way helpfully underlines its value-neutral (and thus non-normative) nature on the conceptual level, as well as the importance of taking seriously the essential interlinkage between theory and practice at play in Pettit’s neo-republicanism. Yet, while the characterization of freedom as non-domination I have provided here might indeed allow Pettit to (at least partly) uphold the claim that it is a non-normative concept, it has a number of distinct further implications for the picture of neo-republican politics emerging from it. Although I cannot possibly discuss them in any detail here, I will conclude by providing a brief sketch of these implications, the extent to which they result from the practice-based character of Pettit’s concept and how Pettit might be able to deal with them.

Implications of a practice-based concept

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