Christian List
Biographic Data
| ID | 1105046 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian List |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | List |
| SIGNATURE | LIST C |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1627-800X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 576 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Do group agents have free will
It is common to ascribe agency to some organized collectives, such as corporations, courts, and states, and to treat them as loci of responsibility, over and above their individual members. But since responsibility is often assumed to require free will, should we also think that group agents have free will? Surprisingly, the literature contains very few in-depth discussions of this question. The most extensive defence of corporate free will that …
Can AI systems have free will
While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett’s work. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic…
The Impossibility of Non-manipulable Probability Aggregation
A probability aggregation rule assigns to each profile of probability functions across a group of individuals (representing their individual probability assignments to some propositions) a collective probability function (representing the group's probability assignment). The rule is "non-manipulable" if no group member can manipulate the collective probability for any proposition in the direction of his or her own probability by misrepresenting h…
Probabilistically coherent credences despite opacity
Real human agents, even when they are rational by everyday standards, sometimes assign different credences to objectively equivalent statements, such as ‘Orwell is a writer’ and ‘E.A. Blair is a writer’, or credences less than 1 to necessarily true statements, such as not-yet-proven theorems of arithmetic. Anna Mahtani calls this the phenomenon of ‘opacity’. Opaque credences seem probabilistically incoherent, which goes against a key modelling as…
Dynamically rational judgment aggregation
Judgment-aggregation theory has always focused on the attainment of rational collective judgments. But so far, rationality has been understood in static terms: as coherence of judgments at a given time, defined as consistency, completeness, and/or deductive closure. This paper asks whether collective judgments can be dynamically rational, so that they change rationally in response to new information. Formally, a judgment aggregation rule is dynam…
Foundations of Institutional Reality
Much of our social environment is “socially constructed.” Our lives are structured by institutions, rules, and norms. We participate in and interact with organizations and corporate entities, from firms and banks to schools, universities, and churches. Our economic activities rely on private property, money, contracts, and other financial and institutional constructs. And society couldn’t function without decision-making procedures and a legal sy…
A quadrilemma for theories of consciousness
In this paper, I argue that no theory of consciousness can simultaneously respect four initially plausible metaphysical claims—namely ‘first-person realism’, ‘non-solipsism’, ‘non-fragmentation’, and ‘one world’—but that any three of the four claims are mutually consistent. So, theories of consciousness face a ‘quadrilemma’. Since it will be hard to achieve a consensus on which of the four claims to retain and which to give up, we arrive at a lan…
The many‐worlds theory of consciousness
This paper sketches a new and somewhat heterodox metaphysical theory of consciousness: the “many‐worlds theory”. It drops the assumption that all conscious subjects’ experiences are features of one and the same world and instead associates different subjects with different “first‐personally centred worlds”. We can think of these as distinct “first‐personal realizers” of a shared “third‐personal world”, where the latter is supervenient, in a sense…
Agential possibilities
We ordinarily think that we human beings have agency: we have control over our choices and make a difference to our environments. Yet it is not obvious how agency can fit into a physical world that is governed by exceptionless laws of nature. In particular, it is unclear how agency is possible if those laws are deterministic and the universe functions like a mechanical clockwork. In this short paper, I first explain the apparent conflict between …
Group Agency and Artificial Intelligence
The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear …
Dynamically Rational Judgment Aggregation
Dynamic and stochastic systems as a framework for metaphysics and the philosophy of science
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical mechanical system, (ii) a hydrogen atom or any other quantum–mechanical system, and (iii) the earth’s atmosphere or any other statistical mechanical system. We introduce a general and unified framework for desc…
Why Free Will Is Real
Philosophers have argued about the nature and existence of free will since at least Plato. Today, many scientists and some scientifically minded philosophers are skeptical that it exists, especially when it is understood to require the ability to choose between alternative possibilities. If the laws of physics govern everything that happens in the world, they argue, then how can our choices be free? Believers in free will must be misled by habit,…
Democratic Deliberation and Social Choice: A Review
In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democracy cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires deliberation. In formal social choice theory, by contrast, the study of democracy has focused primarily on the aggregation of individual opinions into collective decisions, typically through voting. While the literature on deliberation has an optimistic flavour, the literature on social choice is more mixed. It is centred ar…
From Degrees of Belief to Binary Beliefs: Lessons from Judgment-Aggregation Theory
Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part one: General agendas
How can several individuals’ probability assignments to some events be aggregated into a collective probability assignment? Classic results on this problem assume that the set of relevant events—the agenda—is a $$\sigma $$ -algebra and is thus closed under disjunction (union) and conjunction (intersection). We drop this demanding assumption and explore probabilistic opinion pooling on general agendas. One might be interested in the probability of…
Probabilistic Opinion Pooling
Suppose several individuals (e.g., experts on a panel) each assign probabilities to some events. How can these individual probability assignments be aggregated into a single collective probability assignment? This chapter is a review of several proposed solutions to this problem, focusing on three salient proposals: linear pooling (the weighted or unweighted linear averaging of probabilities), geometric pooling (the weighted or unweighted geometr…
Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part two: The premise-based approach
How can several individuals’ probability functions on a given $$\sigma $$ -algebra of events be aggregated into a collective probability function? Classic approaches to this problem usually require ‘event-wise independence’: the collective probability for each event should depend only on the individuals’ probabilities for that event. In practice, however, some events may be ‘basic’ and others ‘derivative’, so that it makes sense first to aggregat…
What Matters and How It Matters: A Choice-Theoretic Representation of Moral Theories
This essay presents a new “reason-based” approach to the formal representation of moral theories, drawing on recent decision-theoretic work. It shows that any moral theory within a very large class can be represented in terms of two parameters: (i) a specification of which properties of the objects of moral choice matter in any given context, and (ii) a specification of how these properties matter. Reason-based representations provide a very gene…
The Methodology of Political Theory
This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles a…
Freedom as Independence
Much recent philosophical work on social freedom focuses on whether freedom should be understood as noninterference, in the liberal tradition associated with Isaiah Berlin, or as nondomination, in the republican tradition revived by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We defend a conception of freedom that lies between these two alternatives: freedom as independence. Like republican freedom, it demands the robust absence of relevant constraints on…
Reason-Based Choice and Context-Dependence: An Explanatory Framework
We introduce a ‘reason-based’ framework for explaining and predicting individual choices. The key idea is that a decision-maker focuses on some but not all properties of the options and chooses an option whose ‘motivationally salient’ properties he/she most prefers. Reason-based explanations can capture two kinds of context-dependent choice: (i) the motivationally salient properties may vary across choice contexts, and (ii) they may include ‘cont…
Belief revision generalized: A joint characterization of Bayes' and Jeffrey's rules
Emergent Chance
This article offers a new argument for the claim that there can be nondegenerate objective chance in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, the article shows how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, the present argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level…
Two Intuitions About Free Will: Alternative Possibilities and Intentional Endorsement
Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the intentional endorsement of one’s actions (“indeterministic picking is not enough”). According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, a free action must be intentionally endorsed, and indeterminism ma…
Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation
The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that one demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the other. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reasses…
Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem
Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 9, Issue 3 p. 277-306 Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem† Christian List, Christian List Nuffield College, Oxford,Search for more papers by this authorRobert E. Goodin, Robert E. Goodin Social & Political Theory and Philosophy, Australian National UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Christian List, Christian List Nuffield College, Oxford,Search for more papers by this aut…
Disaggregating Deliberation’s Effects: An Experiment within a Deliberative Poll
Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half th…
Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation
Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying …
Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls
Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. Deliberation can protect against majority cycles—not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to …
Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-Based Approach
Why cooperate? The incentive to
Emergent Chance
This article offers a new argument for the claim that there can be nondegenerate objective chance in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, the article shows how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, the present argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level…
Aggregating Sets of Judgments: Two Impossibility Results Compared1
A Model of Path-Dependence in Decisions over Multiple Propositions
I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violation…
Republican freedom and the rule of law
At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination, as opposed to freedom as noninterference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a particular rule-of-law requirement, whereas liberal freedom does not. Liberals may also endorse such a requirement, but not as part of their conception of freed…
In Defence of Voting Power Analysis: Responses to Albert
A model of non-informational preference change
According to standard rational choice theory, as commonly used in political science and economics, an agent’s fundamental preferences are exogenously fixed, and any preference change over decision options is due to Bayesian information learning. Although elegant and parsimonious, such a model fails to account for preference change driven by experiences or psychological changes distinct from information learning. We develop a model of non-informat…
Judgment Aggregation By Quota Rules: Majority Voting Generalized
The widely discussed `discursive dilemma' shows that majority voting in a group of individuals on logically connected propositions may produce irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of individuals accepting it exceeds a given threshold, where different thresholds may be used for different propositions. After characterizing quota rules, we p…
A Conditional Defense of Plurality Rule: Generalizing May's Theorem in a Restricted Informational Environment
May's theorem famously shows that, in social decisions between two options, simple majority rule uniquely satisfies four appealing conditions. Although this result is often cited in support of majority rule, it has never been extended beyond decisions based on pairwise comparisons of options. We generalize May's theorem to many‐option decisions where voters each cast one vote. Surprisingly, plurality rule uniquely satisfies May's conditions. This…
A Model of Jury Decisions where all Jurors have the same Evidence
A possibility theorem on aggregation over multiple interconnected propositions
The Logical Space of Democracy
Can we design a perfect democratic decision procedure?Condorcet famously observed that majority rule, our paradigmatic democratic procedure, has some desirable properties, but sometimes produces inconsistent outcomes.Revisiting Condorcet's insights in light of recent work on the aggregation of judgments, I show that there is a conflict between three initially plausible requirements of democracy: "robustness to pluralism," "basic majoritarianism,"…
Group Communication and the Transformation of Judgments: An Impossibility Result
While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication.I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs.I id…
On the Many as One: A Reply to Kornhauser and Sager
The Many as One', Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory.i How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind?How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity?ii We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense.But should we expect integration among the many in the legislature, fo…
Special Majorities Rationalized
Complaints are common about the arbitrary and conservative bias of special-majority rules. Such complaints, however, apply to asymmetrical versions of those rules alone. Symmetrical special-majority rules remedy that defect, albeit at the cost of often rendering no determinate verdict. Here what is formally at stake, both procedurally and epistemically, is explored in the choice between those two forms of special-majority rule and simple-majority…
On the Significance of the Absolute Margin
Consider the hypothesis H that a defendant is guilty (a patient has condition C), and the evidence E that a majority of h out of n independent jurors (diagnostic tests) have voted for H, and a minority of k ≕ n − h against H. How likely is the majority verdict to be correct? By Condorcet's formula, the probability that H is true given E depends only on each juror's competence and on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority h − k,…
What Matters and How It Matters: A Choice-Theoretic Representation of Moral Theories
This essay presents a new “reason-based” approach to the formal representation of moral theories, drawing on recent decision-theoretic work. It shows that any moral theory within a very large class can be represented in terms of two parameters: (i) a specification of which properties of the objects of moral choice matter in any given context, and (ii) a specification of how these properties matter. Reason-based representations provide a very gene…
Aggregating Causal Judgments
Decision making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals’ causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explor…
Scientific Fraud: Social Deviance or the Failure of Virtue
This article asks what it is about the nature of science that might explain the phenomenon of scientific fraud? What philosophical theory of scientific change might account for the existence of fraud and thus point the way toward a possible remedy? Three essential components comprise a scientific fraud. First, there must be at least one individual who is deceived. Second, there must be something which does the deceiving-a paper, a graph, a fossil…
Two Intuitions About Free Will: Alternative Possibilities and Intentional Endorsement
Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the intentional endorsement of one’s actions (“indeterministic picking is not enough”). According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, a free action must be intentionally endorsed, and indeterminism ma…
Scientific Fraud: Social Deviance or the Failure of Virtue
This article asks what it is about the nature of science that might explain the phenomenon of scientific fraud? What philosophical theory of scientific change might account for the existence of fraud and thus point the way toward a possible remedy? Three essential components comprise a scientific fraud. First, there must be at least one individual who is deceived. Second, there must be something which does the deceiving-a paper, a graph, a fossil…
Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem
Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 9, Issue 3 p. 277-306 Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem† Christian List, Christian List Nuffield College, Oxford,Search for more papers by this authorRobert E. Goodin, Robert E. Goodin Social & Political Theory and Philosophy, Australian National UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Christian List, Christian List Nuffield College, Oxford,Search for more papers by this aut…
Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result
Suppose that the members of a certain group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions. And imagine that the group itself now has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a …
In Defence of Voting Power Analysis: Responses to Albert
A possibility theorem on aggregation over multiple interconnected propositions
In Defence of Voting Power Analysis: Responses to Albert
Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation
The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that one demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the other. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reasses…
The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen
Philip Pettit (2001) has suggested that there are parallels between his republican account of freedom and Amartya Sen's (1970) account of freedom as decisive preference. In this paper, I discuss these parallels from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. I sketch a formalization of republican freedom and argue that republican freedom is formally very similar to freedom as defined in Sen's “minimal liberalism” condition. In consequence, the republ…
Deliberative Polling« als Methode zum Erlernen des demokratischen Sprechens
ZfP Zeitschrift für Politik , Seite 87 - 105
Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Response to Aldred
Jonathan Aldred shares our desire to promote a reconciliation between social choice theory and deliberative democracy in the interests of a more comprehensive and compelling account of democracy. His comments on some details of our analysis – specifically, our use of Arrow's conditions of universal domain and independence of irrelevant alternatives – give us an opportunity to clarify our position. His discussion of the independence condition in p…
Multidimensional Welfare Aggregation
A Model of Jury Decisions where all Jurors have the same Evidence
Aggregating Sets of Judgments: Two Impossibility Results Compared1
On the Significance of the Absolute Margin
Consider the hypothesis H that a defendant is guilty (a patient has condition C), and the evidence E that a majority of h out of n independent jurors (diagnostic tests) have voted for H, and a minority of k ≕ n − h against H. How likely is the majority verdict to be correct? By Condorcet's formula, the probability that H is true given E depends only on each juror's competence and on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority h − k,…
A Model of Path-Dependence in Decisions over Multiple Propositions
I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violation…
On the Many as One: A Reply to Kornhauser and Sager
The Many as One', Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory.i How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind?How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity?ii We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense.But should we expect integration among the many in the legislature, fo…
Republican freedom and the rule of law
At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination, as opposed to freedom as noninterference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a particular rule-of-law requirement, whereas liberal freedom does not. Liberals may also endorse such a requirement, but not as part of their conception of freed…
A Conditional Defense of Plurality Rule: Generalizing May's Theorem in a Restricted Informational Environment
May's theorem famously shows that, in social decisions between two options, simple majority rule uniquely satisfies four appealing conditions. Although this result is often cited in support of majority rule, it has never been extended beyond decisions based on pairwise comparisons of options. We generalize May's theorem to many‐option decisions where voters each cast one vote. Surprisingly, plurality rule uniquely satisfies May's conditions. This…
Special Majorities Rationalized
Complaints are common about the arbitrary and conservative bias of special-majority rules. Such complaints, however, apply to asymmetrical versions of those rules alone. Symmetrical special-majority rules remedy that defect, albeit at the cost of often rendering no determinate verdict. Here what is formally at stake, both procedurally and epistemically, is explored in the choice between those two forms of special-majority rule and simple-majority…
Strategy-Proof Judgment Aggregation
Which rules for aggregating judgments on logically connected propositions are manipulable and which not? In this paper, we introduce a preference-free concept of non-manipulability and contrast it with a preference-theoretic concept of strategy-proofness. We characterize all non-manipulable and all strategy-proof judgment aggregation rules and prove an impossibility theorem similar to the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem. We also discuss weaker for…
Judgment Aggregation By Quota Rules: Majority Voting Generalized
The widely discussed `discursive dilemma' shows that majority voting in a group of individuals on logically connected propositions may produce irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of individuals accepting it exceeds a given threshold, where different thresholds may be used for different propositions. After characterizing quota rules, we p…
CHAPTER 19 Judgment Aggregation
The chapter surveys the recent and fast‐growing literature on the aggregation of logically interrelated propositions, following List and Pettit's formalization of the “doctrinal paradox”. The classical preference aggregation problem is a special case in which propositions take the form of binary preference judgments (“alternative x is better than alternative y”). The first part of the chapter focuses on aggregation methods that satisfy an Arrowia…
Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle
It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-maki…
Where do Preferences Come From
Group Communication and the Transformation of Judgments: An Impossibility Result
While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication.I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs.I id…
Computer Science (39 works) · Epistemology (37 works) · Philosophy (35 works) · Political science (33 works) · Law (30 works) · Mathematics (26 works) · Economics (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Mathematical economics (21 works) · Game Theory and Voting Systems (18 works)