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12Book ReviewRobert H. Myers, Self‐Governance and Cooperation.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 179. $45.00Ethics 112 (2): 396-398. 2002.
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40A Tree Can Make a DifferenceJournal of Philosophy 114 (1): 33-42. 2017.We show that it is not possible to extend the ranking of one-stage lotteries based on their weak-expectation to a reflexive and transitive relation on the collection of one- and two-stage lotteries that satisfies two basic axioms, the minimal value axiom and the reduction axiom. We propose an extension that satisfies only the first axiom. This ranking takes payoffs, their probabilities, and the tree structure into account.
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24Review of Peter Vallentyne: Contractarianism and Rational choice: Essays on David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (review)Ethics 103 (2): 385-387. 1993.
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506The nomic role account of carving reality at the jointsSynthese 115 (2): 171-198. 1998.Natural properties are those that carve reality at the joints. The notion of carving reality at the joints, however, is somewhat obscure, and is often understood in terms of making for similarity, conferring causal powers, or figuring in the laws of nature. I develop and assess an account of the third sort according to which carving reality at the joints is understood as having the right level of determinacy relative to nomic roles. The account has the attraction of involving very weak metaphysi…Read more
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1Gopal Sreenivasan, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 18 (1): 62-64. 1998.
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367“Answers to five questions on normative ethics”In Jesper Ryberg & Thomas S. Peterson (eds.), Normative Ethics: Five Questions, Automatic Press/vip. 2007.I came late to philosophy and even later to normative ethics. When I started my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto in 1970, I was interested in mathematics and languages. I soon discovered, however, that my mathematical talents were rather meager compared to the truly talented. I therefore decided to study actuarial science (the applied mathematics of risk assessment for insurance and pension plans) rather than abstract math. After two years, however, I dropped out of university,…Read more
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13“The connection between prudential goodness and moral permissibility”, journal of social philosophy 24 (1993): 105-28Journal of Social Philosophy 24 (2): 105-28. 1993.The basic idea of the theorem is not very new: it is a slight generalization of a theorem proved by John Harsanyi in the 1950s.[i] The power of the book comes from his interpretation of the theorem, and from his strikingly clear and insightful discussion of the various conditions.
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276Explicating lawhoodPhilosophy of Science 55 (4): 598-613. 1988.D. M. Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Dretske have recently proposed a new realist account of laws of nature, according to which laws of nature are objective relations between universals. After criticizing this account, I develop an alternative realist account, according to which (1) the nomic structure of a world is a relation between initial world-histories and world-histories, and (2) a law of nature is a fact that holds solely in virtue of nomic structure (and not, for example, in virtue…Read more
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886Moral dilemmas and comparative conceptions of moralitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 117-124. 1992.Earl Conee is a well known contemporary defender of the impossibility of moral dilemmas. In his 1982 paper "Against Moral Dilemmas" he argued that moral dilemmas are impossible because the existence of such a dilemma would entail that some obligatory action is forbidden, which is absurd. More recently, in "Why Moral Dilemmas are Impossible" he has defended the impossibility of moral dilemmas by claiming that the moral status of an action depends in part on the moral status of its alternatives…Read more
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29Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, LW Sumner. Oxford University Press, 1996, 239+ xii pagesEconomics and Philosophy 13 (2): 330-. 1997.
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David Braybrooke, Bryson Brown, and Peter Schotch (with two chapters by Laura Byrne), Logic on the Track of Social Change Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 16 (5): 315-317. 1996.
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27Left-Libertarianism: A PrimerIn Peter Vallentyne & Hillel Steiner (eds.), Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, Palgrave Publishers. 2000.Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike most versions of egalitarianism, leftlibertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places specific limits on what others may do to one’s person without one’s permission. Unlike the more familiar right-libertarianism (which also endorses full self-ownership), it holds that natural resources—resources which are not the results of anyone's choice…Read more
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28Review: Self-Ownership and Equality: Brute Luck, Gifts, Universal Dominance, and Leximin (review)Ethics 107 (2). 1997.
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307Who are the least advantaged?In Nils Holtug & Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (eds.), Egalitarianism: new essays on the nature and value of equality, Clarendon Press. pp. 174--95. 2007.The difference principle, introduced by Rawls (1971, 1993), is generally interpreted as leximin, but this is not how he intended it. Rawls explicitly states that the difference principle requires that aggregate benefits (e.g., average or total) to those in the least advantaged group be given lexical priority over benefits to others, where the least advantaged group includes more than the strictly worst off individuals. We study the implications of adopting different approaches to the definition …Read more
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607Justice in general: An introductionIn Equality and justice, Routledge. 2003.This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses the following three (only loosely related) issues: (1) What is the concept of justice? (2) Is justice primarily a demand on individuals or on societies? (3) What are the relative merits of conceptions of justice based on equality, based on priority for those who have less, and based on ensuring that everyone …Read more
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23Book Review:The Limits of Hobbesian Contractarianism. Jody Kraus (review)Ethics 106 (1): 193-. 1995.
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24Review (review)Theoria 73 (2): 179-186. 2007.Théories Économiques de la Justice, Marc FleurbaeyModern Theories of Justice, Serge-Christophe KolmTheories of Distributive Justice, John Roemer
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72The teleological/deontological distinctionJournal of Value Inquiry 21 (1): 21-32. 1987.The teleological/deontological distinction was introduced in 1930 by C.D. Broad] and since then it has come to be accepted as the fundamental classificatory distinction for moral philosophy. I shall argue that the presupposition that there is a single fundamental classificatory distinction is false. There are too many features of moral theories that matter for that to be so. I shall argue furthermore that as it is usually drawn the teleological/deontological distinction is not even a fundamental…Read more
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37Infinity in ethics (2nd ed.)Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.Puzzles can arise in value theory and deontic (permissibility) theory when infinity is involved. These puzzles can arise for ethics, for prudence, or for any normative perspective. For the sake of simplicity, we focus on the ethical versions of these problems. We start by addressing problems that can arise in determining what is permissible, either in a given choice situation when there are an infinite number of options or in infinite sequence of choice situations, each with only finitely many o…Read more
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695Taxation, Redistribution and Property RightsIn Andrei Marmor (ed.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, Routledge. 2012.
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161Brute luck, option luck, and equality of initial opportunitiesEthics 112 (3): 529-557. 2002.In the old days, material egalitarians tended to favor equality of outcome advantage, on some suitable conception of advantage. Under the influence of Dworkin’s seminal articles on equality, contemporary material egalitarians have tended to favor equality of brute luck advantage---on the grounds that this permits people to be held appropriately accountable for the benefits and burdens of their choices. I shall argue, however, that a plausible conception of egalitarian justice requires neither th…Read more
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340Enforcement Rights Against Non‐Culpable Non‐Just IntrusionRatio 24 (4): 422-442. 2011.I articulate and defend a principle governing enforcement rights in response to a non‐culpable non‐just rights‐intrusion (e.g., wrongful bodily attack by someone who falsely, but with full epistemic justification, believes that he is acting permissibly). The account requires that the use of force reduce the harm from such intrusions and is sensitive to the extent to which the intruder is agent‐responsible for imposing intrusion‐harm.
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1164Left-LibertarianismIn David M. Estlund (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 152. 2012.
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |