•  360
    On the decriminalization of drugs
    Criminal Justice Ethics 22 (1): 30-33. 2003.
  •  173
    Moral relativism defended?
    Mind 89 (356): 589-594. 1980.
  •  177
    In Praise of Blame
    OUP Usa. 2006.
    Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnatio…Read more
  •  279
    Three grades of social involvement
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (2): 133-157. 1989.
  •  207
    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
  •  33
    Review: Educating Citizens (review)
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1). 1989.
  •  74
    Our preferences, ourselves
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1): 34-50. 1983.
  •  69
    Liberal Purposes by William A. Galston (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 90 (1): 49-52. 1993.
  •  191
    Groups and justice
    Ethics 87 (2): 174-181. 1977.
  •  58
    Charles Taylor on purpose and causation
    Theory and Decision 6 (1): 27-38. 1975.
    abstractCharles Taylor analyzes purposive action as involving both teleological explicability and intentionality on the part of the agent. This paper examines (a) the adequacy of this analysis of purposiveness, and (b) an incompatibility that Taylor finds between purpose, thus analyzed, and causal explicability. My conclusions are that (1) there is at least one aspect of our concept of purpose that Taylor's analysis does not capture, and (2) even if his account were correct, it would not rule ou…Read more
  •  117
    Subsidized abortion: Moral rights and moral compromise
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (4): 361-372. 1981.
  •  788
    But I Could Be Wrong
    Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 64. 2001.
    My aim in this essay is to explore the implications of the fact that even our most deeply held moral beliefs have been profoundly affected by our upbringing and experience—that if any of us had had a sufficiently different upbringing and set of experiences, he almost certainly would now have a very different set of moral beliefs and very different habits of moral judgment. This fact, together with the associated proliferation of incompatible moral doctrines, is sometimes invoked in support of li…Read more
  •  86
    Reasons and intensionality
    Journal of Philosophy 66 (6): 164-168. 1969.
  •  94
    Antecedentialism
    Ethics 94 (1): 6-17. 1983.
  •  86
    Morality Within the Limits of Reason
    Philosophical Review 100 (4): 682. 1991.
  •  526
    Justifying reverse discrimination in employment
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (2): 159-170. 1975.
  •  122
    Ethics, Character, and Action
    Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1): 1. 1998.
    According to one long-standing tradition, the organizing question of ethics is “What are we morally obligated to do?” However, many philosophers, inspired by an even older tradition, now urge a return to the question “What kind of person is it best to be?” According to these philosophers, the proper locus of evaluation is character rather than action, and the basic evaluative concept is virtue rather than duty. Following what has become common usage, I shall refer to the first approach as “duty …Read more
  •  79
    The two-vocabularies argument again
    Mind 86 (341): 101-103. 1977.
  •  102
    Causal explanation and the vocabulary of action
    Mind 82 (325): 22-30. 1973.
    It seems plausible to suppose that (a) the vocabulary of action is distinct from and irreducible to that of mere movement, And (b) the causal laws of the natural sciences are couched solely in terms of the latter vocabulary. From these two suppositions, The falsehood of determinism has sometimes been said to follow. I argue that whether this does follow depends on our conception of causal explanation; on the interpretation of this concept that seems to me the most interesting, The falsehood of d…Read more
  •  292
    Real-world luck egalitarianism
    Social 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
  •  365
    Ancient wrongs and modern rights
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1): 3-17. 1981.
  •  116
    Punishment as Societal Defense
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 548-549. 1999.
    Phillip Montague’s point of departure is a simple but illuminating way of conceptualizing the fact that creates the need for punishment—namely, that each society contains some people who will wrongfully kill or injure others unless held in check by a system of penalties. This fact, Montague argues, in effect confronts each society with a forced choice: either allow potential criminals to inflict harm on others, or else prevent them from doing so by maintaining a system of punishment that will ha…Read more
  •  68
    Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory
    with Bruce Ackerman, Richard J. Arneson, Ronald W. Dworkin, Gerald F. Gaus, Kent Greenawalt, Vinit Haksar, Thomas Hurka, George Klosko, Charles Larmore, Stephen Macedo, Thomas Nagel, John Rawls, and Joseph Raz
    Rowman & 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.
  •  178
    Moral education and indoctrination
    with William J. Bennett
    Journal of Philosophy 79 (11): 665-677. 1982.
  •  128
    Hare, abortion, and the golden rule
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (2): 185-190. 1977.
  •  66
    Why the past matters
    Philosophical Studies 43 (2). 1983.
  •  148
    Desert
    Princeton University Press. 1987.
    "--Jeffrie Murphy, The Philosophical Review (forthcoming)