Volume 5, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Philip Pettit’s The Robust Demands of the Good, Guest Editors: N. P. Adams and Susanne Burri

Philip Pettit has argued that the goods of attachment, virtue, and respect are robust goods in the sense that they require both the actual provision of certain benefits and the modally robust provision of these benefits. He also claims that we value the robustness of these goods because it diminishes our vulnerability to others. I question whether robustness really reduces vulnerability and argue that even if it does , vulnerability reduction is not the reason we value robustness. In place of Pettit’s account, I defend a promotional account of the value of robustness. I argue that we value robustness because it increases the probability we will enjoy a certain kind of benefit.

In The Robust Demands of the Good Pettit claims that the three goods he takes to be central to the good, namely attachment, virtue and respect, share a common structure: they are robustly demanding in that they require the provision of an associated benefit not just under actual but across various possible circumstances. The aim of this paper is to show that the unified account of the good misconstrues the nature of respect. First, I argue that Pettit’s account of respect as robust non-interference cannot account for the particularly robust kind of robustness that respect requires and fails to clarify the relation between respect and freedom. Second, drawing on Pettit’s earlier work, I propose to reconceive of respect as the robust provision of discursive address. This account solves the ambiguities of Pettit’s account of respect. However, it suggests that the particularly robust demands of respect are demands of the right, not the good.

The article critically discusses Pettit’s account of love as an intimate attachment. I will not question his notion that love implies care; my aim is to show how, under certain social structural conditions, the demands of love bring about and/or reproduce oppression. First, I recap and discuss Pettit’s conception of love. Second, I show how the traditional gender order generates asymmetries in the provision of care, thus setting the ground for situations in which the demands of care become oppressive. Third, I critically discuss the ways in which a person can resist the oppression implied in the demands of care. In a fourth step, I consider Pettit’s critique of problematic forms of love. Finally, I conclude by drawing upon the categories of freedom and domination as key concepts for developing a more critical account of love.

Philip Pettit has argued that more robust harms are worse than less robust ones, other things equal, and thinks that appealing to this presumption can help us rationalise the appeal of a number of widely-held moral principles. In this paper, I challenge this view. I argue against the presumption and suggest that, even if it were correct, it could not give much support to the moral principles that Pettit discusses. I also claim, however, that Pettit has the resources at his disposal to explain the attraction of the principles in another way, and lay out how such an explanation would proceed. As moral heuristics, at least, these principles can be grounded on the need to maintain social norms necessary to guarantee individuals’ security.

Philip Pettit has identified some interesting apparent commonalities among core human values like love, friendship, virtue, and respect. These are all, Pettit argues, ‘robustly demanding’: they require us to provide certain benefits across ranges of alternative scenarios. Pettit also suggests a general ‘rationale’ for valuing such goods, which draws on his work on freedom. In this paper, I zoom in on love in particular. I critically assess whether Pettit’s schematic account of love’s value adequately captures what we typically value in valuing love. And I scrutinize the analogy Pettit suggests between the rationale for valuing freedom and his rationale for valuing love. My conclusion is that whereas Pettit’s account of love and its value does not strictly speaking contain false propositions, it ends up being a somewhat skewed account of love’s value. Finally, I bring up some widely discussed aspects of love’s value not captured by Pettit’s account.

What does the growing tide of displaced persons today teach us about the ongoing paradoxes of human rights regimes, which rely on the particular sovereignty of nation-states for their constitution and application but are framed and normatively justified as universal? Working with Arendt’s defense of ‘the right to have rights’ in response to the problem of statelessness which is the practical lynchpin of these historical and theoretical tensions, I specify that and why any person on earth, regardless of their legal status as a national or resident or non-resident alien, can legitimately expect two things from the political community in which they reside: hospitality and membership.

Jason Brennan and John Tomasi have argued that if we focus on income alone, the Difference Principle supports welfare-state capitalism over property-owning democracy, because capitalism maximizes long run income growth for the worst off. If so, the defense of property-owning democracy rests on the priority of equal opportunity for political influence and social advancement over raising the income of the worst off, or on integrating workplace control into the Difference Principle’s index of advantage. The thesis of this paper is that even based on income alone, the Difference Principle is not as hostile to property-owning democracy as it may seem, because the Difference Principle should not be interpreted to require maximizing long run income growth. The main idea is that it is unfair to make the present worst off accept inequality that doesn’t benefit them, for the sake of benefitting the future worst off, if the future worst off will be better off than they are anyway.