Pettit, Non-domination and Agency: A Taylorian Assessment by Adam McLaughlin A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Political Science School of Political Studies Faculty of Social Science University of Ottawa © Adam McLaughlin, Ottawa, Canada 2016 Abstract Philip Pettit claims his neorepublican theory of freedom as non-domination is preferable to the liberal ideal of non-interference, and he is right. But the reasons why he is right run deeper than is apparent if we attend solely to his arguments defending non-domination in negative terms. In fact, embedded in the three benefits that Pettit claims non-domination can offer (which non- interference cannot) lie significant resonances with a positive idea of freedom concerned with a person’s sense of agency. We find such an idea in Charles Taylor, where freedom as self- realization is intricately linked with his “significance view” of human agency. By adopting this Taylorian lens and assessing Pettit’s non-domination, I show that non-domination does have much to offer those of us who think of freedom primarily in positive terms and, more generally, to all those of us who believe that freedom and agency are inextricably linked and must be treated as such.   ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my committee, Sophie Bourgault, Paul Saurette and Rob Sparling for their support and encouragement in my efforts to complete this project. In particular, a huge thank you to Sophie Bourgault for all her guidance, patience, and ‘off the wall’ dedication throughout the entire process; influences that will last a lifetime from a true mentor, thank you. I would also like to thank my family and friends, especially Devin Lefebvre, Andy Catalano, Andrea Prajerová, Keith Haysom, Jahanzaib Mirza, and my colleagues of Team A+ for being there when an ear was needed and for your faith in me; made a world of difference, tiptop! A very special thank you to my partner Willow Denis for her unwavering support in my journey to completing this thesis. I would also like to acknowledge the Political Studies community, my professors, and the staff of the departmental secretariat, your friendliness and caring for students helped in so many ways.   iii Table of Contents Introduction 1- Context and problematization 1 2- Approaching Pettit by reconceptualizing positive liberty: From Isaiah Berlin to Charles Taylor 4 3- Research questions and thesis statement 9 4- Situating the thesis in the broader context of political theory and analytical philosophy 11 5- The Approach 13 6- Moving forward: Layout of the thesis 13 Chapter 1—Human Agency and Freedom as Self-Realization: A case for the quality of agency argument in Charles Taylor’s positive liberty 15 1.1: Charles Taylor’s positive liberty as an ‘exercise concept’: Freedom as self-realization 16 1.1-I: Freedom as Self-Realization: Defusing Berlin’s ‘Inner Citadel’ Concerns 18 1.1-II: Political Participation and its relationship to personal freedom 19 1.1-III: Positive liberty, political participation and the horizon of significance 23 1.2: Human Agency: Consciousness and significance 26 1.2-I: Humans as self-interpreting beings 29 1.2-II: Interpreting our feelings and articulating our emotions through language 31 1.3: Agency and evaluations: Understanding our motivations 34 1.4: Strong and weak evaluations 36 1.5: Brodie as a weak and strong evaluator: On route to the ‘quality of agency’ argument 42 1.6: Conclusion: The ‘quality of agency’ argument 47   iv Chapter 2 - Philip Pettit’s Republican Freedom as Non-Domination 50 2.1: Arbitrary and Non-Arbitrary Forms of Power 52 2.1-I: The Republic and its citizens: A non-arbitrary relationship 55 2.1-II: The master/slave dichotomy 60 2.2: Domination as a way to understand Non-Domination 61 2.2-I: Interference and Intentionality 63 2.2-II: On an Arbitrary Basis 67 2.2-III: In Certain Choices 71 2.2-IV: Where we are and where we go from here 74 2.3: Non-domination is preferred over non-interference: The Quality of Agency Argument 77 2.3-I: The fear of unpredictable interference and personal anxiety 78 2.3-II: Avoiding strategic life planning and the anti-ingratiating argument 83 2.4-III: Improving a person’s status and intersubjective relations 90 2.4: Conclusion 94 Conclusion 96 1: Retaining the analytical distinction between positive and negative liberty 96 2: Agency and freedom: Saving Pettit’s non-domination 100 Bibliography 104   v Introduction ________________________________________ 1. Context and problematization With the principle of freedom as non-domination as one of its core values, the republican tradition has been given new life over the last twenty years and has provided us with an alternative account of individual liberty that is worthy of consideration. Thanks in part to scholars like Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, a revival of the “Italian-Atlantic tradition of republicanism” (often dubbed as neo-Roman republicanism) has taken place within Western political philosophy.1 Both Pettit and Skinner have worked to provide a detailed analysis of the principle of non-domination, offering insightful discussions of why this principle is so highly valued within the republican tradition. Moreover, their work has generated many lively discussions across different disciplines, and as Cécile Laborde rightly observes: “The republican revival has been spectacular and multi-faceted. It has affected real-world political life as well as academic discussions, across the various fields of history, law, philosophy, criminology and political science”.2 Few would contest the affirmation that the republican principle that has received the greatest amount of attention in this intellectual revival is the idea of freedom as non- domination. And it is precisely here that this thesis inserts itself: namely, in the debates surrounding this negative conception of liberty, understood as non-domination. With a focus on ensuring that a person does not have to live under the goodwill of another, the republican ideal of non-domination attaches a great deal of importance to ensuring that individuals are not subjected to arbitrary power and can not be interfered with on an arbitrary basis. Arbitrary acts of interference are ones that are done at the whim of another’s will without any consideration for the effects that the interference might have on the person affected. When this occurs, we can think of a person as being unfree because he or she is dependent on the goodwill of another to not exercise his or her arbitrary power to interfere as he or she so chooses. Republican accounts of liberty seek to reflect on ways to avoid this kind of unfreedom, by cutting off the possibility for this kind of dependency to develop at its roots.                                                                                                                 1 Philip Pettit, “Two Republican Traditions,” in Republican Democracy, ed. Andreas Neiderberger and Philipp Schink (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2013), 169. 2 Cécile Laborde, “Republicanism,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears (Oxford, U.K: Oxford University Press Ltd, 2013), 513.   1 Promising a richer way to envision individual freedom, Philip Pettit offers his account of republican liberty as an alternative to the principle of non-interference that is central to most traditional liberal accounts of liberty. The major issue Pettit has with non-interference is that it leaves open the possibility for someone to retain arbitrary power over another because it only requires that one’s “expectation” of being interfered with be minimized.3 What is more, even if a person is not directly interfered with, the principle of non-interference cannot ensure that another can interfere simply because he or she has the desire to so. By leaving people vulnerable to the will of another, non-interference cannot prevent a person’s freedom from being dependent on the altruism of others. In contrast, the republican ideal of non-domination aims to cut off this kind of dependency and vulnerability at its roots by seeking different institutional and legal means to increase the certainty that no person can retain the sort of arbitrary power that can allow him or her to interfere at will. As a result, Philip Pettit claims that his account of freedom as non- domination is more adequate and richer than the ideal of non-interference, and thus a viable alternative to this approach to liberty (and here, Pettit specifically has in mind Isaiah Berlin’s version of non-interference, most famously articulated in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”).4 This thesis hopes to demonstrate that Pettit is indeed correct to claim that non-domination is a preferable account of liberty than non-interference. However, my aim is not simply to show readers why Pettit’s account of freedom as non-domination is richer than freedom as non- interference. What I also hope to show—and what is much more counter-intuitive—is that his theory of freedom can in part be understood as a positive account of liberty, a view that Pettit himself rejects. As Pettit explains, because the republican theory of freedom “focuses on people’s individual power of choice”, it shares a common thread with “negative liberty as non- interference”, and thus should be considered a negative approach to liberty.5 If there are some vague similarities to a positive conception of liberty, these might be the result of non- domination’s acknowledgment that liberty requires “something more than the absence of                                                                                                                 3 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997; reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010): 84-85. Pettit specifies that non-domination guarantees “not exemption from intentional interference”, but only the sort that is carried out arbitrarily (Republicanism, 84). In this manner he does concede that non-interference may be better suited for providing a larger ‘quantity’ of unobstructed choices, but it cannot promise that those choices will remain free from arbitrary rule or change. 4 Ibid., 21. 5 Ibid., 11 (emphasis added).   2 interference; it requires security against interference, in particular against interference on an arbitrary basis.”6 As much as Pettit is correct that positive liberty does require more than the absence of interference, it is not just the ‘security’ against these acts that matters. Rather, it is why the ‘security’ of not being interfered with is important: namely, because this ‘security’ can help secure a particular end state for the person involved. Pettit also underscores the fact that the “primary focus” of the republican ideal of liberty is to avoid “the evils associated with interference” (and in particular the kind carried out arbitrarily). It is here that we can see a distinction between his theory and positive liberty accounts and their emphasis on democratic self-rule7 and its association to the ideal of self- mastery.8 In fact, Pettit argues that if positive liberty is to be understood in the “populist fashion of democratic participation”, he has little desire to be associated with such accounts of freedom.9 Indeed, he objects to an ideal of freedom that carries with it the very real possibility of forcing individuals to conform to a single will. In his view, “the prospect of each being subject to the will of all is scarcely attractive”.10 Adding to this, Pettit also explains that he objects to having his theory of freedom equated with (positive) doctrines of liberty that place the achievement of being self-mastered as their end goal. As explained in his Republicanism: “This conception [of liberty] is negative to the extent that it requires the absence of domination by others, not necessarily the presence of self- mastery”.11 While Pettit does acknowledge that freedom understood as self-mastery is “attractive” and worthy of consideration, he insists that his main concern is to demonstrate that self-mastery can be both “facilitated” and “actively promoted” by non-domination.12 Nevertheless, he does argue, in a somewhat blunt way: “It would not be a useful exercise to compare the attraction of these two freedoms.”13 In other words, Pettit is telling us that it is not a useful endeavor to compare his negative model of freedom with a positive rendition that prioritizes a desired end state.                                                                                                                 6 Pettit, Republicanism, 51. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 Ibid., 51. 9 Ibid., 81. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 51. 12 Ibid., 82. 13 Ibid., 81-82.   3 Now, it is precisely on this point that I disagree with Pettit, and in this thesis, I intend to demonstrate that it can indeed be a very useful exercise to compare non-domination (a negative model) with a positive rendition of liberty. In fact, I will go further and maintain that what makes Pettit’s republican model of freedom as non-domination preferable to the liberal account of freedom as non-interference, is precisely the fact that it gives fairly serious consideration, even if at times implicitly, to a desired end state, or a person’s sense of agency and self-realization. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that Pettit’s theory of freedom is not that far removed from a positive conception of freedom? I do not believe it would be. In order to demonstrate why that is, we will need to consider at length the following questions: does Pettit’s negative model of freedom as non-domination have enough in common with a positive understanding of liberty to justify a comparison between them? Do we have sufficient resonances to think the comparison plausible? Does Pettit value some of the same principles that are important to positive liberty theorists? And, more importantly: does Pettit wish to achieve a certain end state that is similar to what is sought by positive liberty theorists such as Charles Taylor? Through a detailed consideration of these questions, I hope to show that Pettit’s model of non-domination is much closer to a positive account of liberty than what he is willing to concede. I believe that this can be substantiated provided we set aside the traditional recourse to Berlin’s classic formulation of positive liberty (taken up by Pettit), and instead, turn to Charles Taylor’s formulation of positive liberty as an ‘exercise state’. Taylor’s formulation of positive liberty is one that tightly connects a person’s freedom with her sense of self-realization, where self-realization is understood as being able to follow through on the desires that she has determined to be significant to her as a person. Nevertheless, we will first take a brief moment to introduce Taylor’s work by way of a short excursus into Berlin’s famous essay. 2: Approaching Pettit by reconceptualizing positive liberty: From Isaiah Berlin to Charles Taylor In its classic Berlinian formulation, positive liberty is described as a doctrine that stresses the importance of the question “[b]y whom am I ruled?”, and is concerned with the locus of   4 control (the origin or source of who decides what I am free to do).14 As a result, positive liberty considers the principle of political participation as a great end goal, while also being attuned to the importance of self-mastery. In Berlin’s opinion, placing political participation as an end goal would legitimize state intrusion into the private lives of individuals on behalf of society at large.15 The latter ideal of self-mastery could, on the other hand, force the individual to abandon his or her own inclinations and match his or her desires to a universal ideal of a right and rational life.16 These two goals, political participation and self-mastery, are thus intertwined insofar as a universal notion of a rational life becomes institutionalized (thanks in part to popular sovereignty). Now, even if Berlin claims that positive liberty is chiefly about a desire to make responsible choices en route to the realization of a life plan,17 he still posits that positive liberty carries with it the possibility of severely hampering a person’s free will. One of his wariest concern is that positive liberty brings with it a very particular idea of what kind of person an individual should be in order to live a ‘free’ in life. According to Skinner, it is not so much “the idea of being your own master,” but the idea of “mastering your self” that truly bothers Berlin.18 What Skinner is referring to here, is the way Berlin worries that embedded in the notion of liberty in a positive sense, is an idealized version of what this ‘self’ ought to be and what will be demanded of the individual in order to live up to this standard. A concern that is at play all throughout Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, but most forcefully expressed in section IV, ‘Self Realization’, wherein he frames positive liberty as the “positive doctrine of liberation by reason”.19 The doctrine of ‘liberation by reason’ is one in which a person must work to stem her desires and match her will to that of society. Berlin thinks that positive liberty sets forth a particular notion of self-realization as the one true and proper way to live, and in turn forces people into adopting this particular way of life so that what they do conform to the will of all at                                                                                                                 14 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 77-78. 15 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 208. 16 Ibid., 189-91. 17 Ibid., 178-9. 18 Skinner, “A Third Conception of Liberty,” 239. Through this reformulation, Skinner wishes to demonstrate that Berlin is really talking about the dangers behind a doctrine of liberty that is concerned with self-realization and “above all with self-perfection” (Ibid.). 19 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 189.   5