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62Human health and stoic moral normsJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (2). 2003.For the philosophy of medicine, there are two things of interest about the stoic account of moral norms, quite apart from whether the rest of stoic ethical theory is compelling. One is the stoic version of naturalism: its account of practical reasoning, its solution to the is/ought problem, and its contention that norms for creating, sustaining, or restoring human health are tantamount to moral norms. The other is the stoic account of human agency: its description of the intimate connections bet…Read more
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25Edward Craig, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (review)Ethics 109 (3): 651-656. 1999.
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28Unity, coincidence, and conflict in the virtuesPhilosophia 20 (1-2): 127-143. 1990.This paper argues for an ordinal account of the unity of the virtues in the following way: (1) by showing the importance of a neglected class of questions about coherence - questions referred to here as coincidence problems; (2) by organizing conventional accounts of the unity of the virtues in a perspicuous way, and showing that they fail to solve coincidence problems; and (3) by describing the sorts of ordinal accounts that are available, sketching the outlines of one organized around practica…Read more
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253The finality of moral judgments: A reply to mrs. FootPhilosophical Review 82 (3): 364-370. 1973.
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21Rethinking Democracy, by Carol C. Gould (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (2): 444-448. 1991.
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28Knowledge as Doubly Anchored True BeliefPhilosophy Research Archives 8 223-241. 1982.Some ambiguities in the verb ‘to know’ are analyzed, and it is argued that “undefeatably justified true belief” is the meaning of most philosophical interest with respect to specifying truth conditions for ‘S knows that p’. Two general conditions for an adequate definition of ‘S knows that p’ are discussed. Then a proposal for a quasi-causal theory of knowledge is introduced and defended
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5Welfare Rights and Duties of Charity: Rights and Duties (edited book)Routledge. 2002.First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company
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15Book Review:Law and Logic: A Critical Account of Legal Argument. Joseph Horovitz (review)Ethics 84 (1): 89-. 1973.
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276Criminal attempt and the theory of the law of crimesPhilosophy and Public Affairs 3 (3): 262-294. 1974.
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68Axiology, deontology, and agent morality: The need for coordination (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 6 (3): 213-220. 1972.
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Social contractIn Lawrence C. Becker & Charlotte B. Becker (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Ethics, Garland Publishing. pp. 2--1170. 1992.
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267Property Rights : Philosophic FoundationsRoutledge. 1977._Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations,_ first published in 1977, comprehensively examines the general justifications for systems of private property rights, and discusses with great clarity the major arguments as to the rights and responsibilities of property ownership. In particular, the arguments that hold that there are natural rights derived from first occupancy, labour, utility, liberty and virtue are considered, as are the standard anti-property arguments based on disutility, virtue an…Read more
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79This unpublished paper from 2004 argues that the agenda for positive psychology laid out by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in their massive work Character Strengths and Virtues: a Handbook and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) might be improved by making several conceptual changes: 1) by developing general concepts of virtue (singular), and of positive health to clarify the relationships between specific virtues and competing conceptions of positive health; 2) by…Read more
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36A note on Religious Experience Arguments: LAWRENCE C. BECKERReligious Studies 7 (1): 63-68. 1971.When philosophers speak of the inconclusiveness of arguments for the existence of God, they often do so as if they were talking about a matter of principle—as if it were in principle impossible to prove God's existence, that every proof was in principle inconclusive. Of course, rebutals of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments are usually designed to show that these types of arguments are in principle inconclusive. But one supposes that religious experience arguments are not …Read more
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342The labor theory of property acquisitionJournal of Philosophy 73 (18): 653-664. 1976.This symposium paper for the APA analyzes Locke's labor theory of property acquisition as a formal argument – or set of alternative arguments – and shows how several of them are indeed sound, if appropriately limited by what amounts to a social welfare proviso. That proviso is, however, strong enough to limit the acquisition of private property in a significant way. The argument here anticipates fuller and more decisive ones in later work by the same author.
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90A New StoicismPrinceton University Press. 1998.The question addressed by this book is what, if anything, stoic ethics would be like today if stoicism had had a continuous history to the present day as a plausible and coherent set of philosophical commitments and methods. The book answers that question by arguing that most of the ancient doctrines of Stoic ethics remain defensible today, at least when ancient Stoicism's cosmological commitments are replaced by modern scientific ones.
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69Good Lives: Prolegomena*: LAWRENCE C. BECKERSocial Philosophy and Policy 9 (2): 15-37. 1992.A philosophical essay under this title faces severe rhetorical challenges. New accounts of the good life regularly and rapidly turn out to be variations of old ones, subject to a predictable range of decisive objections. Attempts to meet those objections with improved accounts regularly and rapidly lead to a familiar impasse — that while a life of contemplation, or epicurean contentment, or stoic indifference, or religious ecstasy, or creative rebellion, or self-actualization, or many another th…Read more
Lawrence C. Becker
(1939 - 2018)
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |