In the Spring of 1995,1 was asked to testify as an expert witness in a case in Canada that raised a number of different philosophical and jurisprudential issues. The case concerned whether prisoners sentenced to two years or more in a Canadian penitentiary had the right to vote. For many years, Canada has denied those incarcerated in its prisons voting rights (following the British practice of doing so), but after the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, which grants each citizen of Canada the right to vote, that practice was challenged; in a series of court cases, prisoners maintained that denying them the right to vote during their incarceration amounted to denying them one of their basic constitutional rights as Canadian citizens.

One of the most important issues raised by this case was the nature of Canada’s political identity. The fact that the political identity of a state can be partly at stake in a law is, I believe, important and insufficiently recognized. A law can be not only a tool for the organization of the community (e.g., by promoting order, or coordination, or public wellbeing), but also a significant expressive force in that community, symbolizing the community’s sense of its values and (what I will call) its “political personality”. Indeed, for countries which are not culturally homogeneous and in which the unity of the community is primarily purchased through the principles of its polity, the expressive nature of certain laws can be essential in the creation, maintenance or revision of a unifying identity for that society; this is an identity that not only helps to hold the pluralist society together but also helps people to have a sense of themselves as members of that political community. I hope to argue that the controversy surrounding the issue of whether or not prisoners’ voting rights should be suspended reflects controversy about what kind of state Canada is and shows the ways in which law can be expressive.

Expected-utility (EU) theory has been a popular and influential theory in philosophy, law, and the social sciences. While its original developers, von Neumann and Morgenstern, presented it as a purely predictive theory useful to the practitioners of economic science, many subsequent theorists, particularly those outside of economics, have come to endorse EU theory as providing us with a representation of reason. But precisely in what sense does EU theory portray reason? And does it do so successfully?

There are two strikingly different answers to these questions in the literature. On the one hand, there is the view of people such as David Gauthier that EU theory is an implementation of the idea that reason's only role is instrumental. On the other hand, there is the view suggested by Leonard Savage (1954/1972; and see Anderson, 1993) that the theory is a “formal” and noninstrumental characterization of our reasoning process.

There has been a persistent tendency to identify what is called “the freerider problem” in the production of collective (or public) goods with the prisoner's dilemma. However, in this article I want to challenge that identification by presenting an analysis of what are in fact a variety of collective action problems in the production of collective goods. My strategy is not to consult any intuitions about what the free-rider problem is; rather I will be looking at the problematic game-theoretic structures of various situations associated with the production of different types of collective goods, thereby showing what sorts of difficulties a community concerned with their voluntary production would face. I call all of these dilemmas free-rider problems because in all of them certain individuals find it rational to take advantage of others' willingness to contribute to the good in a way that threatens its production. Some readers may feel that the term ‘free-rider problem’ is so identified with the prisoner's dilemma that my extension of the term in this way “jars”; if so, I invite them to coin another word for the larger phenomenon. My aim is not to engage in linguistic analysis but to attempt at least a partial analysis of the complicated structure of collective good production.