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830There’s Nothing Quasi About Quasi-Realism: Moral Realism as a Moral DoctrineThe Journal of Ethics 21 (2): 185-212. 2017.This paper seeks to clarify and defend the proposition that moral realism is best elaborated as a moral doctrine. I begin by upholding Ronald Dworkin’s anti-Archimedean critique of the error theory against some strictures by Michael Smith, and I then briefly suggest how a proponent of moral realism as a moral doctrine would respond to Smith’s defense of the Archimedeanism of expressivism. Thereafter, this paper moves to its chief endeavor. By differentiating clearly between expressivism and quas…Read more
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9Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 14 (1): 29-54. 2001.This essay maintains that the question in its title is really three sets of questions: a conceptual inquiry, a moral/political inquiry, and an empirical inquiry. After devoting some attention to the relevant conceptual issues, the essay ponders in detail the moral/political issues. It suggests some answers to the germane moral/political questions, and it takes pains to distinguish those questions from other lines of inquiry with which they might be confused. Although only animals and dead people…Read more
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15Reason Without Reasons: A Critique of Alan Gewirth's Moral PhilosophySouthern Journal of Philosophy 34 (3): 301-315. 2010.
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19Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice: Themes and Challenges (edited book)Routledge. 2009.Throughout the English-speaking world, and in the many other countries where analytic philosophy is studied, Hillel Steiner is esteemed as one of the foremost contemporary political philosophers. This volume is designed as a festschrift for Steiner and as an important collection of philosophical essays in its own right. The editors have assembled a roster of highly distinguished international contributors, all of whom are eager to pay tribute to Steiner by focusing on topics on which he himself …Read more
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48On the counterfactual dimension of negative libertyPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 2 (1): 63-92. 2003.This article explores some implications of the counterfactual aspect of freedom and unfreedom. Because actions can be unprevented even if they are not undertaken, and conversely because actions can be prevented even if they are not attempted and are thus not overtly thwarted, any adequate account of negative liberty must ponder numerous counterfactual chains of events. Each person's freedom or unfreedom is affected not only by what others in fact do, but also by what they are disposed to do. The…Read more
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107Moral principles and legal validityRatio Juris 22 (1): 44-61. 2009.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 adju…Read more
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48Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, £22.95/$35.00, ISBN 067402167-3, 308 ppCriminal Law and Philosophy 1 (3): 337-342. 2007.
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71Is Law’s Conventionality Consistent with Law’s Objectivity?Res Publica 14 (4): 241-252. 2008.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.…Read more
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50G. A. Cohen's Conception of Law: A CritiqueRatio Juris 2 (3): 283-298. 1989.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…Read more
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1The Big Bad Wolf: Legal Positivism and Its DetractorsAmerican Journal of Jurisprudence 48 1-10. 2003.
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35Critical Legal Theory and the Challenge of Feminism: A Philosophical ReconceptionRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1994.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: …Read more