Applying Axiomatic-Deductive Methods

Axiomatic-Deductive (AD) methods of examining issues in moral and political philosophy tend to be ignored in the mainstream political philosophy literature. By axiomatic-deductive methods I refer largely to social choice and game theory, alongside modal analysis. The AD literature has been applied to conceptual issues such as how freedom can be conceptualised and measured, to aspect of rights (such as Sen’s theorem). to the related issue of capabilities, to the nature of welfare (notably issues surrounding utility), to political power, and to issues concerning public interest and the general will. Generally speaking, this specialised literature is not referred in mainstream discussions – though there are exceptions of course (Amartya, Sen, Brian Barry, Robert Nozick to name a few major writers) and simple game theory has been discussed more broadly – notably applied to Hobbes and Rousseau for example. Nevertheless, the AD approach is not broadly integrated into the mainstream discussions. There are several reasons for this. First, the results are often technical and difficult to grasp. Non-technicians ignore them. Second, the results are not always immediately transferable to other debates, what the axiomatic-deductive method demonstrates is not always clear. To be sure, there is a new, younger breed of academics who are applying results, integrating them into modal analyses for example, however, there is still often a mismatch between the formal literature and the more mainstream. This paper delves more deeply into why this is so, and provides some examples of how formalization can be applied more directly to central questions in a manner that does not require sophisticated technical expertise.