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471Responsibility and False BeliefsIn 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
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140Utilitarianism 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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86Decision 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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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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682Left-Libertarianism and LibertyIn Thomas Christiano & John Christman (eds.), Debates in Political Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 17--137. 2009.
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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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105Equality, 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
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1Libertarianism, self-ownership and consensual homicideRevue Philosophique De Louvain 101 (1): 5-25. 2003.
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143Taking 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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69Teleology, 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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17Left-Libertarianism and Private DiscriminationSan Diego Law Review 43 981-994. 2006.Left-libertarianism, like the more familiar right-libertarianism, holds that agents initially fully own themselves. Unlike right-libertarianism, however, it views natural resources as belonging to everyone in some egalitarian manner. Left-libertarianism is thus a form of liberal egalitarianism. In this article, I shall lay out the reasons why (1) left-libertarianism holds that (a) private discrimination is not intrinsically unjust and (b) it is intrinsically unjust for the state to prohibit priv…Read more
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358“Response-dependence, rigidification, and objectivity”, erkenntnis 44 (1995): 101-112Erkenntnis 44 (1). 1996.A fully developed sophisticated response-dependent account would fill in specifications for B (the beings) and C (the conditions), would probably replace the reference to disapproval with a reference to a more complex response, and might involve a more complex scheme.[ii] For simplicity, however, I shall focus my argument on the above simple scheme of moral wrongness, since added complexities will be irrelevant to my argument.
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6Review (review)Economics and Philosophy 14 (1): 135-143. 1998.Théories Économiques de la Justice, Marc FleurbaeyModern Theories of Justice, Serge-Christophe KolmTheories of Distributive Justice, John Roemer.
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688The rights and duties of childrearingWilliam and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 11 991-1010. 2003.What rights and duties do adults have with respect to raising children? Who, for example, has the right to decide how and where a particular child will live, be educated, receive health care, and spend recreational time? I argue that neither biological (gene-provider) nor..
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457Left-Libertarian Theories of JusticeRevue Economique 50 859-878. 1999.Libertarian theories of justice hold that agents, at least initially, own themselves fully, and thus owe no service to others, except through voluntary action. The most familiar libertarian theories are right-libertarian in that they hold that natural resources are initially unowned and, under a broad range of realistic circumstances, can be privately appropriated without the consent of, or any significant payment to, the other members of society. Leftlibertarian theories, by contrast, hold that…Read more
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390On Original AppropriationIn Malcolm Murray (ed.), Liberty, Games, and Contracts: Jan Narveson and the Defence of Libertarianism, Aldershot: Ashgate Press. 2007.Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves. Lockean libertarianism further holds that agents have the moral power to acquire private property in external things as long as a Lockean Proviso—requiring that “enough and as good” be left for others—is satisfied. Radical right-libertarianism, on the other hand, holds that satisfaction of a Lockean Proviso is not necessary for the appropriation of unowned things. This is sometimes defended on the ground that the initial status of …Read more
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869Brute luck equality and desertIn Sabrina Olsaretti (ed.), Desert and Justice, Clarendon Press. pp. 169--185. 2003.In recent years, interest in desert-based theories of justice has increased, and this seems to represent a challenge to equality-based theories of justice.[i] The best distribution of outcomeadvantage with respect to desert, after all, need not be the most equal distribution of outcomeadvantage. Some individuals may deserve more than others. Outcome egalitarianism is, however, implausible, and so the conflict of outcome desert with outcome equality is of little significance.[ii] Most contemporar…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |