Is Moralizing Political Morality Bad? Invasion and Vitiation in Republicanism

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  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Normative Political Theory

Abstract

The importance of freedom, domination, and oppression in our daily lives has sustained a rich philosophical discussion of what it means to be free. A major answer is the republican position championed by Pettit where we are free if we are not under the arbitrary and unaccountable will of a master. This state of unfreedom consisting in having a master is domination. Republicans want us to be concerned not just with actual interference with our choices (as liberals are classically concerned with), but with the power or capacity to interfere, a power that is present even in a benevolent master. While it is much worse to be the slave of a sadistic master than the slave of a benevolent master; both are slaves, both are unfree. At the same time, having the power to interfere in someone’s choice seems to be a much wider category than having a master. After all, a person walking next to me has the power to trip me over; yet I would never call that person my master, or I her slave. This has led Pettit and other republicans to use qualifiers like “arbitrary interference” or more recently “uncontrolled interference” (see for example, Pettit 2012, p. 58) to distinguish between all powers to interfere and those that are proper of a master over a slave. While transitioning between those two terms, Pettit used the term “invasion” to refer to the kind of hindrance proper of a master. I believe that we should return to the term “invasion” and look at the work where this concept is more carefully articulated to better understand what kinds of hindrances lead to domination.

An important reason for focusing on invasion and its relation to other kinds of hindrances is that republicans can better respond to critiques that republican freedom is a moralized concept. This is not a single critique but a family of critiques that emphasize the connection between republican freedom and normative theory. A common version of this family of critiques is that the move from the powers to interfere to the arbitrary or uncontrolled power to interfere is a move that requires a wholesale theory of justice. The theory of justice determines which interferences are legitimate and which ones are arbitrary. Some find this problematic because of the redundancy of the concept. After all, if republican freedom is the final byproduct of a theory, then it would be hard to claim that the theory is a liberal one, where liberty or freedom is a central pillar of a liberal theory. Others find this dependence on a theory of justice problematic on pluralist or public reason grounds. If it is the case that republican freedom depends on a particular theory of justice, then republican freedom cannot be used effectively to persuade others about the wrongness of an activity.

To avoid the problems that originate from moralizing freedom, List and Valentin (2016) and others have proposed that we go back to more fundamental concepts. They propose that we should focus on the power to interfere and think of freedom as not being under this power to interfere. Thay call this state “independence”. I believe that turning to the more fundamental concepts can help us clarify what it means to be dominated. In Pettit’s analysis of hindrances, he splits all hindrances into two groups: invasion and vitiation. He then goes to show that invasion is the kind of hindrance that constitutes domination. A careful look at his analysis reveals that – apart from the Hobbesian distinction between external hindrances (invasions) and internal hindrances (vitiations) which Pettit discards – Pettit presents six different pairs of concepts. Each pair is a different way of comprehensively splitting hindrances into two groups. One of these six is what I consider to be true invasion (hindrances that subject one to another’s will), while the other five are more basic concepts upon which invasion is built.

The first section of this paper is an analysis of these six concepts. It is then followed by showing the way what I take to be true invasion builds on the other concepts. This clarifies what type of hindrance invasion is. Invasion is uncontrolled interference that is also robust and voluntary obstruction, actual vitiation from an agent you have relied on, or robust vitiation if the agent is the only provider of the good. The second section of the paper uses this analysis of invasion to respond to the critiques that invasion is a moralized concept. I grant that invasion is moralized in a way that other hindrances are not, since invasion is inherently connected to oppression, where other kinds of hindrances are not. But this moralization is not problematic. After all, moralizing political morality is not necessarily bad.

Author

• Armando Perez-Gea, Stanford University