•  25
    Review of Dale F. Murray, Nozick, Autonomy and Compensation (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (12). 2007.
    In this nicely written book, Dale Murray critically discusses the moral rights posited by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His focus is on these rights and not on Nozick's arguments about the justness of the state. He argues that Nozick's rights to compensation give rise to rights to government-financed health care and that Nozick should recognize a natural right to enough goods to ensure a reasonable chance of living a decent and meaningful life (if feasible for all). Murray also di…Read more
  •  17
    Critical Notice
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (4): 609-626. 1998.
  •  10
    Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 734-737. 2000.
    This is a collection of ten of Fred Feldman’s previously published articles along with an introduction. The essays concern three main topics: the nature and structure of consequentialism, the nature of pleasure, and the moral relevance of desert. The introduction provides a very useful overview of how the pieces fit together and of their general significance. In addition, each article is preceded by a very crisp synopsis.
  •  28
    Child liberationism and legitimate interference
    with Morrice Lipson
    Journal of Social Philosophy 23 (3): 5-15. 1992.
    Child liberationism holds that children are entitled to more freedom from interference than we currently acknowledge socially or legally. It holds, for example, that "the law [should] grant and guarantee to the young the freedom that it now grants to adults to make certain kinds of choices, do certain kinds of things, and accept certain kinds of responsibilities. This means in turn that the law [should] take action against anyone who interferes with young people's rights to do such things".1 Cal…Read more
  •  26
    Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms
    Philosophical Review 105 (4): 550. 1996.
    This book brings together and develops Patricia Greenspan’s thoughts on moral dilemmas and the role of emotions in moral judgment. Her main focus is on metaethics and moral psychology, and she discusses moral dilemmas primarily as a concrete way of introducing these issues.
  • Book Reviews (review)
    Mind 104 (415): 658-661. 1995.
  •  163
    Of Mice and Men: Equality and Animals
    The Journal of Ethics 9 (3-4): 403-433. 2005.
    Can material Egalitarianism (requiring, for example, the significant promotion of fortune) include animals in the domain of the equality requirement? The problem can be illustrated as follows: If equality of wellbeing is what matters, and normal mice are included in this egalitarian requirement, then normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because their wellbeing …Read more
  •  1260
    Brute luck and responsibility
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 7 (1): 57-80. 2008.
    The concept of agent-responsibility for an outcome (that is, of the outcome reflecting the autonomous choice of the agent) is central to both ethics and political philosophy. The concept, however, remains radically under-explored. In particular, the issue of partial responsibility for an outcome needs further development. I propose an account of partial responsibility based on partial causal contribution. Agents who choose autonomously in full knowledge of the consequences are agent-responsible,…Read more
  •  434
    The problem of unauthorized welfare
    Noûs 25 (3): 295-321. 1991.
    This problem has already been discussed by a number of authors.[i] Typically, however, authors take one of two extreme positions: they hold that all welfare should be taken at face value, or they hold that "suspect" welfare should be completely ignored. My contribution here is the following: First, I introduce the notion of unauthorized (suspect) welfare, of which welfare from meddlesome preferences, offensive tastes, expensive tastes, etc. are special cases. Second, I formulate four conditions …Read more
  •  11
    Equal opportunity and the family
    with Morry Lipson
    Public Affairs Quarterly 3 (4): 27-45. 1989.
  •  1066
    Distributive Justice
    In Robert Goodin, Philip Pettit & Thomas Pogge (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell. 2007.
    The word “justice” is used in several different ways. First, justice is sometimes understood as moral permissibility applied to distributions of benefits and burdens (e.g., income distributions) or social structures (e.g., legal systems). In this sense, justice is distinguished by the kind of entity to which it is applied, rather than a specific kind of moral concern.
  •  38
    Motivational Ties and Doing What One Most Wats
    Journal of Philosophical Research 16 443-445. 1991.
    In his paper "Motivational Ties"[i] Al Mele addresses the question of how intentional behavior is possible in "Buridan’s ass" choice situations. This is the question of how an agent could make a choice between two or more (equally) maximally attractive options (such as choosing one, rather than another, of two effectively identical copies of a desired book). For if, as is commonly supposed, choices and intentions are based on the attractiveness of options (roughly, how strongly one is motivated …Read more
  •  5
    Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 4 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    This is the fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory.
  • Éthique et mort(s) - Libertarisme, propriété de soi et homicide consensuel
    Revue Philosophique De Louvain 101 (1): 5-25. 2003.
  •  192
    This book contains a collection of important recent writing on left-liberalism, a political philosophy that recognizes both strong liberty rights and strong ...
  •  93
    Where there are infinitely many possible [equiprobable] basic states of the world, a standard probability function must assign zero probability to each state—since any finite probability would sum to over one. This generates problems for any decision theory that appeals to expected utility or related notions. For it leads to the view that a situation in which one wins a million dollars if any of a thousand of the equally probable states is realized has an expected value of zero (since each such …Read more
  •  432
    Why Left‐Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried
    with Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2): 201-215. 2005.
    In a recent review essay of a two volume anthology on left-libertarianism (edited by two of us), Barbara Fried has insightfully laid out most of the core issues that confront left-libertarianism. We are each left-libertarians, and we would like to take this opportunity to address some of the general issues that she raises. We shall focus, as Fried does much of the time, on the question of whether left-libertarianism is a well-defined and distinct alternative to existing forms of liberal egalita…Read more
  •  674
    Libertarianism
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions. It is normally advocated as a theory of justice in the sense of the duties that we owe each other. So understood, it is silent about any impersonal duties (i.e., duties owed to no one) that we may have.
  •  463
    Responsibility and False Beliefs
    In Carl Knight & Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), Justice and Responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2011.
    An individual is agent-responsible for an outcome just in case it flows from her autonomous agency in the right kind of way. The topic of agent-responsibility is important because most people believe that agents should be held morally accountable (e.g., liable to punishment or having an obligation to compensate victims) for outcomes for which they are agent-responsible and because many other people (e.g., brute luck egalitarians) hold that agents should not be held accountable for outcomes for w…Read more
  •  870
    Consequentialism
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice 3rd edition, Blackwell. 2007.
    Ethics in Practice, 3rd edition, edited by Hugh La Follette (Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming 2007).
  •  135
    Utilitarianism and infinite utility
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (2). 1993.
    Traditional act utilitarianism judges an action permissible just in case it produces as much aggregate utility as any alternative. It is often supposed that utilitarianism faces a serious problem if the future is infinitely long. For in that case, actions may produce an infinite amount of utility. And if that is so for most actions, then utilitarianism, it appears, loses most of its power to discriminate among actions. For, if most actions produce an infinite amount of utility, then few actions …Read more
  •  61
    Infinite utility: Anonymity and person-centredness
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (3). 1995.
    In 1991 Mark Nelson argued that if time is infinitely long towards the future, then under certain easily met conditions traditional utilitarianism is unable to discriminate among actions. For under these conditions, each action produces the same infinite amount of utility, and thus it seems that utilitarianism must judge all actions permissible, judge all actions impermissible, or remain completely silent. In response to this criticism of utilitarianism, I argued that utilitarianism had the r…Read more
  •  82
    Decision theory without finite standard expected value
    with Luc Lauwers
    Economics and Philosophy 32 (3): 383-407. 2016.
    :We address the question, in decision theory, of how the value of risky options should be assessed when they have no finite standard expected value, that is, where the sum of the probability-weighted payoffs is infinite or not well defined. We endorse, combine and extend the proposal of Easwaran to evaluate options on the basis of their weak expected value, and the proposal of Colyvan to rank options on the basis of their relative expected value.
  •  13
    Persons and Values (review)
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (3): 595-607. 1988.