Ideas That Matter

In this book, leading philosophers take up three ideas that are prominent in the work of Joshua Cohen. The first idea relates to reinvigorating democracy—improving collective decision-making by free and equal citizens. The second idea found in this volume relates to confronting injustice. What reason do those who have been systematically excluded from democracy’s promise have to obey the law or work together with others who have turned a blind eye on their situation? The third idea might be understood loosely in terms of political principles in an interdependent world. Where traditionally, theories of justice took the nation or the state to set the scope of principles of distributive justice, the rise of new institutions has put pressure on that bounded conception. This collection includes work by Martha Nussbaum, Charles Sabel, Stuart White, Archon Fung, and Chris Lebron, among others.

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "


Author(s):  
Claire Taylor

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Follert ◽  
Lukas Richau ◽  
Eike Emrich ◽  
Christian Pierdzioch

AbstractVarious scandals have shaken public confidence in football's global governing body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). It is evident that decision-making within such a collective provides incentives for corruption. We apply the Buchanan-Tullock model that is known from Public Choice theory to study collective decision-making within FIFA. On the basis of this theoretical model, we develop specific proposals that can contribute to combating corruption. Three core aspects are discussed: the selection of the World Cup host, transparency in the allocation of budgets, and clear guidelines for FIFA officials and bodies with regard to their rights and accountability. Our insights can contribute to a better understanding of collective decision making in heterogenous groups.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN FAUDE ◽  
JULIA FUSS

AbstractInstitutional overlap emerges not only as an unintended by-product of purposive state action but also as its deliberate result. In two ways, this article expands existing research on the causes and consequences of institutional overlap. First, we establish that three different types of dissatisfaction may lead states to deliberately create institutional overlap: dissatisfaction with substantive norms and rules, dissatisfaction with decision-making rules and dissatisfaction with the institutional fit of an existing governance arrangement for a given cooperation problem. Each type of dissatisfaction triggers a distinct motivation for the creation of institutional overlap: to induce policy change, to increase influence on collective decision-making or to enhance governance effectiveness. Second, we demonstrate that whereas the motivation to induce policy change leads to interface conflicts, the motivations to increase influence on collective decision-making and to enhance governance effectiveness give rise to inter-institutional coordination. Three empirical case studies on global energy governance, the governance of global development banking and global environmental governance probe these analytical claims.


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