Matthew Henry Kramer

During the past several decades, political philosophers have frequently clashed with one another over the question whether governments are morally required to remain neutral among reasonable conceptions of excellence and human flourishing. Whereas the numerous followers of John Rawls have maintained that a requirement of neutrality is indeed incumbent on every system of governance, other philosophers -- often designated as 'perfectionists' -- have argued against the existence of such a requirement. Liberalism with Excellence enters these debates not by plighting itself unequivocally to one side or the other, but instead by reconceiving each of the sides and thus by redirecting the debates that have occurred between them. On the one hand, the book rejects the requirement of neutrality by contending that certain subsidies for the promotion of excellence in sundry areas of human endeavour can be proper and vital uses of resources by governments. Advocating such departures from the constraint of neutrality, the book presents a version of liberalism that can rightly be classified as 'perfectionist'. On the other hand, the species of perfectionism espoused in Liberalism with Excellence diverges markedly from the theories that have usually been so classified. Indeed, much of the book assails various aspects of those theories. What is more, the aspirational perfectionism elaborated in the closing chapters of the volume is reconcilable in most key respects with a suitably amplified version of Rawlsianism. Hence, by reconceiving both the perfectionist side and the neutralist side of the prevailing disputation, Liberalism with Excellence combines and transforms their respective insights.

RÉSUMÉ: Les philosophes, au cours des cinquante dernières années, se sont efforcés de démontrer qu’un professeur peut, d’une manière cohérente et exacte, annoncer à ses étudiants qu’un examen surprise aura lieu lors d’une journée non spécifiée d’une période donnée, le problème étant qu’une telle annonce peut sembler s’annuler ellemême lorsqu’elle est soumise à une induction régressive. Deux grandes approches, l’une épistémique et l’autre logique, one été développées à ce propos. Le présent article adopte une approche logique, mais repose aussi d’une manière cruciale sur une compréhension épistémique du problème, pour essayer de montrer que l’annonce du professeur peut effectivement être cohérente et exacte.

RÉSUMÉ: Les philosophes, au cours des cinquante dernières années, se sont efforcés de démontrer qu’un professeur peut, d’une manière cohérente et exacte, annoncer à ses étudiants qu’un examen surprise aura lieu lors d’une journée non spécifiée d’une période donnée, le problème étant qu’une telle annonce peut sembler s’annuler ellemême lorsqu’elle est soumise à une induction régressive. Deux grandes approches, l’une épistémique et l’autre logique, one été développées à ce propos. Le présent article adopte une approche logique, mais repose aussi d’une manière cruciale sur une compréhension épistémique du problème, pour essayer de montrer que l’annonce du professeur peut effectivement être cohérente et exacte.

During the past few decades, Quentin Skinner has been one of the most prominent critics of the ideas about negative liberty that have developed out of the writings of Isaiah Berlin. Among Skinner?s principal charges against the contemporary doctrine of negative liberty is the claim that the proponents of that doctrine have overlooked the putative fact that people can be made unfree to refrain from undertaking particular actions. In connection with this matter, Skinner contrasts the present-day theories with the prototypical liberal account of negative freedom propounded by Thomas Hobbes. The present essay challenges Skinner?s position both philosophically and exegetically. Because an agent can always elect to cease his activity as an agent, the ostensible inescapability of certain actions is not the same as the outright inescapability of certain instances of inaction. Once this point is properly recognized, the way is clear for a re-evaluation of Hobbes (and of Skinner on Hobbes).

All or virtually all moral philosophers agree that moral properties supervene on natural properties; that is, two actions or situations cannot differ in their moral properties unless there are differences in their natural properties that account for the moral difference between them. Virtually all moral philosophers also believe that supervenience is a conceptual or logical feature of moral discourse and judgments. While accepting that supervenience is a fundamental feature of morality, this essay contends that it is a basic substantive moral constraint rather than a purely conceptual or logical feature

Two recent high-quality articles, including one in this journal, have challenged the Inclusivist and Incorporationist varieties of legal positivism. David Lefkowitz and Michael Giudice, writing from perspectives heavily influenced by the work of Joseph Raz, have endeavored—in sophisticated and interestingly distinct ways—to vindicate Raz's contention that moral principles are never among the law-validating criteria in any legal system nor among the laws that are applied as binding bases for adjudicative and administrative decisions in such a system. The present article responds to their defenses of Raz's Exclusive Legal Positivism

Legal positivism’s multi-faceted insistence on the separability of law and morality includes an insistence on the thoroughly conventional status of legal norms as legal norms. Yet the positivist affirmation of the conventionality of law may initially seem at odds with the mind-independence of the existence and contents and implications of legal norms. Mind-independence, a central aspect of legal objectivity, has been seen by some theorists as incompatible with the mind-dependence of conventions. Such a perception of incompatibility has led some anti-positivist theorists to reject the notion of law’s conventionality, and has led some positivist theorists to query law’s mind-independence. What will be contended here is that both camps are mistaken.

This note will challenge G. A. Cohen's view of the interaction between legal systems and economic structures; such interaction raises the so‐called problem of legality, which Cohen sets out to solve in the eighth chapter of Karl Marx's Theory of History . In the course of this note, we shall interrogate the presumed rigor of Cohen's theory of base/superstructure relations, to which his understanding of law is central. His approach will not be simply destroyed, but will be resituated in a network of problems that can highlight a certain fissure between his aspirations and his performance

Critical Legal Theory and the Challenge of Feminism provides both a thorough overview and a refinement of the ideas that underlie critical legal theory. Arguing with the rigor of analytic philosophy and the alertness to paradoxes characteristic of deconstructive philosophy, Matthew Kramer begins by exploring the tangled relations between metaphysics and politics. He then attempts to transform the discourses of the critical legal studies movement by laying out a framework of five general themes: contradictions, contingency, patterning, perspective, and ideology. Kramer calls for a more sophisticated awareness of their paradoxes, explaining why the paradoxes are by no means disabling or demobilizing. Finally, Kramer explores some of feminist theory's major controversies and problems, and argues that feminist theory can profit greatly by giving due attention to inescapable paradoxes. The book is an important contribution to political philosophy, jurisprudence, feminist philosophy and metaphysics, with powerful implications for epistemology and literary theory

Some important recent articles, including one in this journal, have sought to devise theories of rights that can transcend the longstanding debate between the Interest Theory and the Will Theory. The present essay argues that those efforts fail and that the Interest Theory and the Will Theory withstand the criticisms that have been levelled against them. To be sure, the criticisms have been valuable in that they have prompted the amplification and clarification of the two dominant theories of rights; but their upshot has been to reveal the need for the improvement, rather than the abandonment, of those theories

If there is one doctrine distinctively associated with legal positivism, it is the separability of law and morality. Both in opposition to classical natural-law thinkers and in response to more recent theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and Lon Fuller, positivists have endeavored to impugn any number of ostensibly necessary connections between the legal domain and the moral domain. Such is the prevailing view of legal positivism among people familiar with jurisprudence. During the past couple of decades, however, that prevailing view has come into question among some estimable legal positivists. In particular, Joseph Raz and his followers have queried the importance and the very tenability of an insistence on the separability of law and morality. The present article maintains that the traditional view of legal positivism is correct and that the recent skepticism about it on the part of some positivists is unfounded. When the notion of the disjoinability of law and morality is understood properly as a large array of theses, it proves to be resistant to the challenges that have been mounted against it