•  99
    Replies to critics
    Philosophical Studies 178 (7): 2439-2472. 2020.
    I offer replies to critical comments on my book, Utopophobia: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, in four pieces appearing in the same issue of this journal.
  •  40
    Precis of Utopophobia: on the limits (if any) of political philosophy
    Philosophical Studies 178 (7): 2359-2364. 2020.
  •  15
    Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory
    Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 821-825. 1996.
  •  36
    A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political chan…Read more
  • Democracy
    In Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2005.
  •  22
    What is circumstantial about justice?
    Social Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2): 292-311. 2016.
    :Does social justice lose all application in the condition in which people are morally flawless? The answer, I will argue, is that it does not — justice might still have application. This is one lesson of my broader thesis in this paper, that there is a variety of conditions we would all regard as highly idealistic and unrealistic which are, nevertheless, not beyond justice. The idea of “circumstances of justice” developed especially by Hume and Rawls may seem to point in a more realistic direct…Read more
  •  29
  •  144
    What's So Rickety? Richardson's Non‐Epistemic Democracy
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 204-204. 2007.
  •  9
    Sex, Preference, and Family: Essays on Law and Nature (edited book)
    Oxford University Press USA. 1997.
    In this timely, provocative volume, essayists including Susan Moller Okin, Catherine A. MacKinnon, Cass Sunstein, Martha Minow, William Galston, and Sara McLanahan argue positions on sexuality, on the family, and on the proper role of law in these areas.
  •  5
    Books in Review
    Political Theory 20 (4): 694-697. 1992.
  •  593
    Jeremy Waldron on law and disagreement
    Philosophical Studies 99 (1): 111-128. 2000.
    Waldron argues that recent treatments of justice have neglected reasonable disagreement about justice itself. So Waldron offers a procedural account of democratic legitimacy, in which contending views of justice can be brought together to arrive at a decision without deciding which one is correct. However, if there is reasonable disagreement about everything, then this includes his preferred account of legitimacy. On the other hand, it is not clear that Waldron is right to count so much disagree…Read more
  •  556
    Democratic theory
    In Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 208--30. 2005.
  •  2
    The Theoretical Interpretation of Voting
    Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison. 1986.
    The present thesis is intended as a contribution toward a Rousseauean theory of democracy. The central problem discussed is how the act of voting must be interpreted in democratic theory. The notion of a theoretical interpretation of voting is discussed in Chapter One. A theory of democracy must include an interpretation of the act of voting if any praise or criticism of democracy is to be possible. The theoretical interpretation is distinct from an empirical account of voting behavior, and also…Read more
  •  224
    The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority
    Modern Schoolman 74 (4): 259-276. 1997.
  •  67
    Mutual Benevolence and the Theory of Happiness
    Journal of Philosophy 87 (4): 187-204. 1990.
  •  20
    Introduction: Epistemic Approaches to Democracy
    Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 5 (1): 1-4. 2008.
  •  209
    The persuasiveness of democratic majorities
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 3 (2): 131-142. 2004.
    Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent the other, then average …Read more
  •  5
    Controversy has recently erupted, at least in a recent story in the Independent, over the question of whether Brown's Philosophy Department has been inappropriately exclusionary of courses in other departments, of diverse philosophical traditions, and of non-white philosophers. These are questions well worth asking, although the article's critical stance requires some scrutiny. It is worth supplementing the article with some information that might help students think about whether they ought to …Read more