Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behavioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility to do otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between...

This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment ag­gregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected propositions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this intro­duction is to show how ideas from the...

Political theory, sometimes also called “normative political theory”, is a subfield of the disciplines of philosophy and political science that addresses conceptual, normative, and evaluative questions concerning politics and society, broadly construed. Examples are: When is a society just?...

We introduce a “reason-based” way of rationalizing an agent's choice behaviour, which explains choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context the agent cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he or she cares about these properties (the...

In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democratic decision making cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires reasoned and well-informed discussion by those involved in and/or subject to the decisions in question, under conditions of equality and respect. In short,...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, preferences are usually assumed to be fixed and exogenously given. We introduce a framework for conceptualizing preference formation...

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition of Arrow's (1951/1963) and Sen's (1970/1979) social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of an individual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a single scalar-valued welfare function. I develop a multidimensional...