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An innovative argument that vindicates our normative commitment to basic equality, synthesising philosophy, history, and psychologyWhat makes human beings one another's equals? That we are ";basic equals"; has become a bedrock assumption in Western moral and political philosophy. And yet establishing why we ought to believe this claim has proved fiendishly difficult, floundering in the face of the many inequalities that characterise the human condition. In this provocative work, Paul Sagar offers a novel approach to explaining and justifying basic equality. Rather than attempting to find an independent foundation for basic equality, he argues, we should instead come to see our commitment to this idea as the result of the practice of treating others as equals. Moreover, he continues, it is not enough to grapple with the problem through philosophy alone—by just thinking very hard, in our armchairs; we must draw insights from history and psychology as well.Sagar writes that, as things stand, there appear to be no good arguments for believing in the truth of basic equality. Indeed, for much of Western intellectual history and social practice, basic inequality has been the default position. How is it then, Sagar asks, that in Western societies, in a period of less than a century, basic equality emerged as the dominant view? Sagar approaches this not as a mere philosophical puzzle, but as a dramatic historical development. In so doing, he shows us what is at stake when human beings treat one another as equals just because they are human beings

"Although thinkers of the past might have started from presumptions of fundamental difference and inequality between (say) the genders, or people of different races, this is no longer the case. At least in mainstream political philosophy, we are all now presumed to be, in some fundamental sense, basic equals. Of course, what follows from this putative fact of basic equality remains enormously controversial: liberals, libertarians, conservatives, Marxists, republicans, and so on, continue to disagree vigorously with each other, despite all presupposing some kind of basic equality. They may argue about who gets what, how much, and why, but the starting point - that all people are in some sense deserving of prima facie equal consideration - has become an axiom of our moral and political thinking. But why? Why are we basic equals? The trouble is that as soon as one asks for an explanation of this foundational premise, it begins to look shaky. After all, on any conceivable metric human beings are notably unequal, and often to striking degrees. Philosophers in this area tend to talk of equal worth, but often without trying to specify what exactly that means. Philosophically, basic equality is neither acceptable nor rejectable. It is not rejectable because we appear to be, as a matter of fact, profoundly committed to the truth of the claim that we are all one another's basic equals. But to the extent that there appear to be no philosophical arguments for believing in the truth of basic equality, it is not acceptable either. The aim of this book is to try and show why basic equality is acceptable. To do so, however, it will also contend that we need to approach the question rather differently to how it has mostly been handled so far. What's required is an exercise in what Bernard Williams called 'impure philosophy': it must include insights from other areas of human intellectual endeavour, whether psychology and history or even what we learn from how we go about practicing basic equality in our collective lives"--

AbstractOver the past two decades, Philip Pettit has consistently argued for an understanding of "republican" liberty in terms of nondomination. Yet in his major published studies, he has almost nothing to say about markets, nor about the economy more generally. I contend that this is a seriously problematic omission, insofar as markets represent a major problem for republican views of freedom. In short: if freedom requires the absence of the mere possibility of arbitrary interference (as Pettit maintains), then the widespread existence of markets indicates that on a republican view the vast majority of people in the world today exist in the dominated position of slaves. As a result, Pettit cannot adopt the "complacency" towards market transactions that he officially avows. But in turn, we ought to be highly skpetical that the republican account of freedom is a viable one.

The aim of this article is to explore some of what Hobbes says in Leviathan about what the Leviathan is. I propose that Hobbes is not finally clear on this score. Nonetheless, such indeterminacy might be revealing, insofar as it points us in different directions regarding how the state can be conceptualized, and what it is thought able to do. The paper is thus deliberately open ended: it does not aim to definitively settle interpretative issues, but rather to use Hobbes as a way of thinking about the differing potentials of state theory.