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69Subsidized abortion: Moral rights and moral compromisePhilosophy and Public Affairs 10 (4): 361-372. 1981.
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15On event-identityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1). 1974.This Article does not have an abstract
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102Kantian fairnessPhilosophical Issues 15 (1). 2005.It is widely thought to be unfair to hold people responsible, or to blame or punish them, for wrongful acts or omissions that are beyond their control. Because this principle is often taken to support incompatibilism, and because it has led many to deny the possibility of moral luck, we might expect its normative underpinnings to have been carefully scrutinized. However, surprisingly, they have not. In the current paper, I will try to fill this gap by first reconstructing, and then criticizing, …Read more
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42Ethics: Essential Readings in Moral Theory (edited book)Routledge. 2012.Ethics: Essential Readings in Moral Theory is an outstanding anthology of the most important topics, theories and debates in ethics, compiled by one of the leading experts in the field. It includes sixty-six extracts covering the central domains of ethics: why be moral? the meaning of moral language morality and objectivity consequentialism deontology virtue and character value and well-being moral psychology applications: including abortion, famine relief and consent. Included are both classica…Read more
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195Real-world luck egalitarianismSocial Philosophy and Policy 27 (1): 218-232. 2010.Luck egalitarians maintain that inequalities are always unjust when they are due to luck, but are not always unjust when they are due to choices for which the parties are responsible. In this paper, I argue that the two halves of this formula do not fit neatly together, and that we arrive at one version of luck egalitarianism if we begin with the notion of luck and interpret responsible choice in terms of its absence, but a very different version if we begin with the notion of responsible choice…Read more
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32Predicting PerformanceSocial Philosophy and Policy 5 (1): 188. 1987.Equal opportunity requires that persons be selected for desirable positions on the basis of their qualifications. To assess an applicant's qualifications, we must both predict how well he would perform if chosen, and compare his projected performance with that of his rivals. Since we lack direct access to future performance, all such predictions must be based on some past– or present-tense information about the applicants, together with some relevant supporting information. But is any and every …Read more
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41My Profession and Its DutiesThe Monist 79 (4): 471-487. 1996.Much that is written about professional ethics concerns the requirements imposed by specific roles. We are often told what professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers should do—or, alternatively, what a good doctor, lawyer, or teacher will do. In this paper, I shall try to clarify these claims as they pertain to one particular role—that of a faculty member at a college or university—by asking what special requirements the role imposes, and why faculty members are obligated to live up to…Read more
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100Compensation and Transworld Personal IdentityThe Monist 62 (3): 378-391. 1979.A natural way of viewing compensation is to see it as the restoration of a good or level of well-being which someone would have enjoyed if he had not been adversely affected by the act of another. This view underlies Nozick’s assertion that “something fully compensates … person X for Y’s action A if X is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A”; and it has been held by many others as well. Because the notion that compensation is…Read more
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60Liberal Neutrality and the Value of AutonomySocial Philosophy and Policy 12 (1): 136-159. 1995.Many liberals believe that government should not base its decisions on any particular conception of the good life. Many believe, further, that this principle of neutrality is best defended through appeal to some normative principle about autonomy. In this essay, I shall discuss the prospects of mounting one such defense. I say only “one such defense” because neutralists can invoke the demands of autonomy in two quite different ways. They can argue, first, that because autonomy itself has such gr…Read more
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27Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal TheoryRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003.Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible
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1Equality for InegalitariansCambridge University Press. 2014.This book offers a new and compelling account of distributive justice and its relation to choice. Unlike luck egalitarians, who treat unchosen differences in people's circumstances as sources of unjust inequality to be overcome, Sher views such differences as pervasive and unavoidable features of the human situation. Appealing to an original account of what makes us moral equals, he argues that our interest in successfully negotiating life's ever-shifting contingencies is more basic than our int…Read more
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110Who’s in Charge Here?: Reply to Neil LevyPhilosophia 36 (2): 223-226. 2008.In his response to my essay “Out of Control,” Neil Levy contests my claims that (1) we are often responsible for acts that we do not consciously choose to perform, and that (2) despite the absence of conscious choice, there remains a relevant sense in which these actions are within our control. In this reply to Levy, I concede that claim (2) is linguistically awkward but defend the thought that it expresses, and I clarify my defense of claim (1) by distinguishing my position from attributionism
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Philosophy of Action |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |