• God
    Reason Papers 22 109-119. 1997.
  •  37
    The Medical Minimum: Zero
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 36 (6): 558-571. 2011.
    The question is what the mandated medical minimum for all should be. The correct answer is zero. That is to say, the government should not be forcing anyone to pay for anyone. The most popular arguments within the liberal framework, presumed to be shared by all, are briefly surveyed. Health care is provided by someone to someone else, and that someone else should either be paying for it, or recognize that someone is providing it charitably to him or her. Compelling someone else to pay for it is …Read more
  •  26
    Kerrey and Calley
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 16 (2): 153-162. 2002.
    In the Vietnam war, Lieutenant Calley, claiming to be following orders, ordered the killing of several hundred women, children, and elderly people in the village of My Lai. In 1969, Lieutenant (later Senator) Kerrey led a small group of SEALs in the dead of night on a dangerous military venture. In course, a dozen or so innocent villagers were either shot in crossfire or killed intentionally because there seemed a real chance that they would inform the enemy, endangering themselves and the missi…Read more
  •  4
    Professor Filice’s Defense of Pacifism
    Journal of Philosophical Research 17 483-491. 1992.
  •  30
  •  23
    Equality and Liberty (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 26 (2): 192-195. 1986.
  •  14
    On the Rationality of Revolutions
    Social Philosophy Today 3 223-251. 1990.
  •  8
    Understanding Rawls (review)
    Social Theory and Practice 4 (4): 483-503. 1978.
  •  31
    Semantics, Future Generations, and the Abortion Problem
    Social Theory and Practice 3 (4): 461-485. 1975.
  •  66
    Justice in health care
    Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (2-3): 371-384. 2006.
    In this discussion, we will consider arguments against the view that one person is entitled to medical care at the expense of another person, just because the one person might be able to extend it to the other. We all accept the view that we are entitled to nonviolence from each other, which in the medical case is roughly that we are entitled to other people not making us sick, at least insofar as this is something they can readily avoid. But how are we also entitled to their help in making us w…Read more
  •  128
    On a Case for Animal Rights
    The Monist 70 (1): 31-49. 1987.
    Down through the past decade and more, no philosophical writer has taken a greater interest in the issues of how we ought to act in relation to animals, nor pressed more strongly the case for according them rights, than Tom Regan, in many articles, reviews, and exchanges at scholarly conferences and in print. Now, in The Case for Animal Rights we have a substantial volume in which Regan most fully and systematically presents his case for a strong panoply of rights for animals. The argument is di…Read more
  •  299
    Collective responsibility
    The Journal of Ethics 6 (2): 179-198. 2002.
    The basic bearer of responsibility is individuals, because that isall there are – nothing else can literally be the bearer of fullresponsibility. Claims about group responsibility therefore needanalysis. This would be impossible if all actions must be understoodas ones that could be performed whether or not anyone else exists.Individuals often act by virtue of membership in certain groups;often such membership bears a causal role in our behavior, andsometimes people act deliberately in order to …Read more
  •  12
    Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice is a collection of essays of the moral and political philosophy of Jan Narveson. The essays in this collection share a consistent theme running through much of Narveson's moral and political philosophy, namely that politics and morals stem from the interests of individual people, and have no antecedent authority over us. The essays in this collection, in various ways and as applied to various aspects of the scene, argue that the ultimate and true point o…Read more
  •  3
    Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 5 (9): 382-385. 1985.
  •  22
    Morals by Agreement (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (3): 336-338. 1987.
  • Commentaries
    Journal of Value Inquiry 4 (4): 267. 1970.
  •  35
    Reason and Morality in the Age of Nuclear Deterrence
    Analyse & Kritik 10 (2): 206-232. 1988.
    The argument in this paper is that although rationality and morality are distinguishable concepts, there is nevertheless a rational morality, a set of principles, namely, which it is rational of all to require of all. The argument of this paper is that such a morality would certainly issue in a general condemnation of aggressive war. (Whether this also makes it irrational for States to engage in such activities is another, and not entirely settled, matter). Correlatively, it would issue in a str…Read more
  •  1
    Ayn Rand as Moral and Political Philosopher
    Reason Papers 23 96-100. 1998.
  •  25
    Political platonism, liberalism, and democracy
    Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (1). 2003.
  •  11
    Introduction
    Journal of Value Inquiry 34 (2/3): 151-166. 2000.
  •  20
    Equality vs. Liberty: Advantage, Liberty
    Social Philosophy and Policy 2 (1): 33-60. 1984.
    The subject of this essay is political, and therefore social, philosophy; and therefore, ethics. We want to know whether the right thing for a society to do is to incorporate in its structure requirements that we bring about equality, or liberty, or both if they are compatible, and if incompatible then which if either, or what sort of mix if they can to some degree be mixed. But this fairly succinct statement of the issue before us requires considerable clarification, even as a statment of the i…Read more
  •  165
    The case for free market environmentalism
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 8 (2): 145-156. 1995.
    Environmental Ethics is the ethics of how we humans are to relate to each other about the environment we live in. The best way to adjust inevitable differences among us in this respect is by private property. Each person takes the best care of what he owns, and ownership entails the free market, which enables people to make mutually advantageous trades with those who might use it even better. Public regulation, by contrast, becomes management in the interests of the regulators, or of special int…Read more
  •  12
    J.J.C. Smart., Ethics, Persuasion and Truth
    International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1): 116-118. 1989.