Being Free, Feeling Free. Race, Gender and Republican Domination.
Members of racial and sexual minorities often live in the fear of arbitrary interference from others – rogue police officers or sexual harassers. Are they unfree, by dint of believing they are unfree? I draw on the republican theory of freedom – according to which we are unfree if we are subjected to a risk of arbitrary interference – to offer a qualified positive answer. I clarify the role of probabilistic judgements about risk in republican political theory. I argue that under specific circumstances, diagnoses of republican freedom can be indexed to a certain belief about probability – what it is warranted for someone to believe, in light of their distinctive epistemic perspective.
Cécile Laborde is Professor of Political Theory at Oxford University and holds the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory. She holds a DPhil from Oxford and has taught at Exeter, King’s College London and University College London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, as well as of the Académie Royale de Belgique, and has held visiting positions in Paris and Princeton. She is the author of Pluralist Thought and the State (2000), Critical Republicanism (2008) and Liberalism’s Religion (2017), which was published by Harvard University Press and won the 2018 Spitz Prize. Her work on republicanism, non-domination, secularism, and religion has appeared in Journal of Political Philosophy, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, among others. She is the co-editor of the Cambridge Elements in Political Philosophy.
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (D.Phil., Oxford) is a professor in political theory at, and director of, the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published widely on equality, discrimination, and standing to blame and praise. Recently, he has developed an interest in x-phi studies of discrimination. His most recent book is The Beam and the Mote (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
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