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461The problem of unauthorized welfareNoûs 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
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48How to combine pareto optimality with liberty considerationsTheory and Decision 27 (3): 217-240. 1989.
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38Motivational Ties and Doing What One Most WatsJournal 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
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9Oxford 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.
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Éthique et mort(s) - Libertarisme, propriété de soi et homicide consensuelRevue Philosophique De Louvain 101 (1): 5-25. 2003.
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1082Distributive JusticeIn Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit & Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 1996.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.
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252Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (edited book)Palgrave Publishers. 2000.This book contains a collection of important recent writing on left-liberalism, a political philosophy that recognizes both strong liberty rights and strong ...
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30Paul Weirich, Equilibrium and Rationality: Game Theory Revised by Decision RulesEthics 109 (3): 684-686. 1999.
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59Standard Decision Theory Corrected: Assessing Options When Probability is Infinitely and Uniformly SpreadSynthese 122 (3): 261-290. 2000.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
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39Democratic distributive justice, Ross Zucker. Cambridge university press, 2001, X + 336 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 19 (1): 156-160. 2003.
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48David Copp, Morality, Normativity, and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1995, pp. 262Utilitas 11 (1): 130. 1999.
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494Responsibility and False BeliefsIn Carl Knight & Zofia Stemploska (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
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905ConsequentialismIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice 3rd edition, Blackwell. 2007.Ethics in Practice, 3rd edition, edited by Hugh La Follette (Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming 2007).
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165Why Left‐Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to FriedPhilosophy 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
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688LibertarianismStanford 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.
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91Decision theory without finite standard expected valueEconomics 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.
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148Utilitarianism and infinite utilityAustralasian 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
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63Infinite utility: Anonymity and person-centrednessAustralasian 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
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55Against Maximizing Act-Consequentialism (December 2, 2010) in Moral Theories edited by Jamie Dreier (Blackwell Publishers, 2006), pp. 21-37 (review)In Dreier Jamie (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theories, Blackwell. 2006.Maximizing act consequentialism holds that actions are morally permissible if and only if they maximize the value of consequences—if and only if, that is, no alternative action in the given choice situation has more valuable consequences.1 It is subject to two main objections. One is that it fails to recognize that morality imposes certain constraints on how we may promote value. Maximizing act consequentialism fails to recognize, I shall argue, that the ends do not always justify the means. Act…Read more
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20Teaching Nonphilosophy Faculty to Teach Critical Thinking about Ethical IssuesTeaching Philosophy 22 (3): 249-257. 1999.As demand from fields such as nursing and accounting elevate the need for critical thinking courses, philosophers are in a unique position to share their skills in teaching such courses with nonphilosophy faculty. This paper discusses the need for critical thinking courses outside of philosophy and why philosophers should be interested in training nonphilosophy faculty. After basic course design information is offered for nonphilosopher readers, guidelines are offered on how philosophy teachers …Read more
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67Gauthier on Rationality and MoralityEidso 5 (1): 79-95. 1986.David Gauthier's book represents the culmination of his work over the last twenty years on the theory of rational choice and on contractarian moral theory. It is the most important book on contractarianisni since Rawls‘ A Theory of Justice' and is mandatory reading for anyone specializing in contemporary moral theory. Gauthier does two distinct, although closely related, things in his book: (l) he defends a theory of rational choice, and (2) he defends a contractarian theory of morality. The two…Read more
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709Left-Libertarianism and LibertyIn Thomas Christiano & John Christman (eds.), Debates in Political Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 17--137. 2009.
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1Libertarianism, self-ownership and consensual homicideRevue Philosophique De Louvain 101 (1): 5-25. 2003.
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100Taking Justice Too SeriouslyUtilitas 7 (2): 207. 1995.One of the standard objections to traditional act utilitarianism is that it is insensitive to issues of justice and desert. Traditional act utilitarianism holds, for example, that it is morally obligatory to torture or kill an innocent person, when doing so increases the happiness of others more than it decreases the happiness of the innocent person. Utilitarianism is, of course, sensitive to what people believe about justice, but it is not sensitive to justice itself
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74Teleology, consequentialism, and the pastJournal of Value Inquiry 22 (2): 89-101. 1988.Act teleological theories are theories that judge an action permissible just in case its outcome is maximally good.[1] It is usually assumed that act teleological theories cannot be @i, i.e., make the permissibility of actions depend on what the past was like (e.g., on what promises were made, what wrong doings were done, and more generally on what actions were performed).[2] I shall argue that this is not so. Although @u act teleological theories, such as classical act utilitarianism, are not p…Read more
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107Equality, efficiency, and the priority of the worse-offEconomics and Philosophy 16 (1): 1-19. 2000.Egalitarian theories of justice hold that equality should be promoted. Typically, perfect equality will not be achievable, and it will be necessary to determine which of various unequal distributions is the most equal. All plausible conceptions of equality hold that, where perfect equality does not obtain, (1) any benefit (no matter how small) to a worst-off person that leaves him/her still a worst-off person has priority (with respect to equality promotion) over any benefit (no matter how large…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |