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44Wrongness, wisdom and wildernessJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 11 (1): 58-61. 1998.
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19Bastiat's great contribution to economics, in his own view, was his identification of service as the source of economic value. What is anything worth to anybody? In the cases where we are not dealing with what our fellow men do for us, the answer is to be found in its utility - how much the thing contributes to our satisfaction. In the case where we deal with our fellows, we are interested specifically in what they can do for us, that is, how much service they can render us - how much they can o…Read more
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184Cohen’s RescueThe Journal of Ethics 14 (3-4): 263-334. 2010.G. A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality proposes that both concepts need rescuing from the work of John Rawls. Especially, it is concerned with Rawls' famous second principle of justice according to which social primary goods should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to the benefit of the worst off. The question is why this would ever be necessary if all parties are just. Cohen and I agree that Rawls cannot really justify inequalities on the basis given. But he also thi…Read more
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2Violence and warIn Tom L. Beauchamp & Tom Regan (eds.), Matters of Life and Death, Temple University Press. 1980.
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24Gewirth's Reason and Morality – A Study in the Hazards of Universalizability in EthicsDialogue 19 (4): 651-674. 1980.
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19Moral issues (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1983.Though this moderately-priced anthology dates back to 1983, its lively articles are as relevant as ever. Topics covered include suicide, euthanasia, war, punishment,world hunger, abortion, sexual relations, equality, affirmative action, and future generations.
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20Communication and Human Good: The Twentieth Century's Main AchievementSocial Philosophy Today 17 91-102. 2001.The invention of computers, and especially their communication capabilities is revolutionary in several ways. They show the paramount importance of communication in human life, as well as facilitating revolutionary improvements in virtually all areas of social life: business, the arts, agriculture, and others. They put in perspective the erroneous outlook of "materialism" -the idea that human well-being is a matter of accumulating material objects, with a corollary that we must be using up the m…Read more
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13The Evaluation of Ethical Theories. By Charles B. Daniels. Halifax, Dalhousie University Press 1975. pp. 87 + viii. $3.00 (review)Dialogue 19 (2): 349-359. 1980.
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223Libertarianism vs. Marxism: Reflections on G. A. Cohen‘s Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (review)The Journal of Ethics 2 (1): 1-26. 1998.Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality is G.A. Cohens attempt to rescue something of the socialist outlook on society from the challenge of libertarianism, which Cohen identifies with the work of Robert Nozick in his famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sympathizing with the leading idea that a person must belong to himself, and thus be unavailable for forced redistribution of his efforts, Cohen is at pains to reconcile the two. This cannot be done – they are flatly contrary. Moreover, equalit…Read more
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47Anarchy, State and Utopica, by Robert NozickDialogue 16 (2): 298-327. 1977.Most books defending the position now know as “libertarianism”, the thesis that government ought to confine itself only to the most minimal functions of preventing or punishing force and fraud, can be dismissed with little scruple as the work of cranks. And some have already done so with this one as well: but wrongly. It is clearly the work of a person of extraordinary brilliance, penetration, and learning, possessed of a pungent style and an uncommon flair for paradox and counterexample. Those …Read more
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37Present Payments, Past Wrongs: Correcting Loose Talk about Nozick and RectificationLibertarian Papers 1 1. 2009.It is widely thought that Robert Nozick’s views on rectification of past injustices are of critical importance to his theory of distributive justice, even perhaps justifying wholesale redistributive taxes in the present because of the undoubted injustices that have pervaded much past history. This essay undertakes to correct this impression—not mostly by disagreeing with Nozick’s claims, but nevertheless proceeding on basic libertarian theory. Of enormous importance is the role of putative innoc…Read more
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23Tinkering and AbortionDialogue 17 (1): 125-128. 1978.The general anti-abortionist line is that abortion is wrong because it is the killing of innocent people. The main pro-abortionist response to this has been to deny that what is killed in an abortion is, properly speaking, a person. Killing these things merely prevents another person from being added to the world, just as would contraception, except at a later stage in the total process; abortion is not, therefore, any kind of murder, any deprivation of a person's life. Kelly and Schedler now ra…Read more
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19John Stuart Mill as PhilosopherDialogue 32 (2): 315-. 1993.This critical notice of Skorupski's large work is for the most part strongly positive: "Both as a work of scholarship and as a contribution to philosophy in its own right, an outstanding work". There are careful and detailed discussions of Mill's semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, logic of the moral sciences, and ethical writings (but not on religion, democracy, or women). Some issue is taken with Skorupski's account of and support for Mill's utilitarianism; broad agreement is expresse…Read more
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52A Contractarian Defense of the Liberal View on Abortion and of the Wrongness of InfanticideBowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy 8 76-89. 1986.
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44Promising, Expecting, and UtilityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2). 1971.In this paper, I shall be concerned to explore the utilitarian account of promising, which for some time has had, in many circles, the status of a dead horse. My aim is not to flog it, however, but to show that perhaps it yet lives. At least, I hope to show that some prominent and apparently powerful objections to this account do not find their mark. In the course of this, several subjects of wider interest will come in for review as well, and it is hoped that some further light on the utilitari…Read more
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University of WaterlooDepartment of Philosophy
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |