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94Encyclopedia of ethics (edited book)Routledge. 2001.The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded, and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Aristotelian Ethics * Avicenna * Bad Faith * Ben…Read more
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22A rejoinder to O'ConnorMind 84 (333): 95. 1975.Continuation of the discussion of the author's paper "Foreknowledge and Predestination." Mind 81 (1972): 138-41.
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19Review of John M. Rist, Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (5). 2002.
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25Habilitation, Health, and Agency: a Framework for Basic JusticeOxford University Press. 2012.This book argues for adopting a new account of the circumstances of justice ("the habilitation framework") for philosophical theories of basic justice. It proposes a concept of basic health as a metric for such theories, and healthy agency as a target for them. It does not, however, propose a specific distributive rule or set of distributive principles. Nor does it propose a specific type of theory to pursue (e.g., utilitarian, contractarian, etc.). The book is thus meant to be largely theory-in…Read more
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68On Justifying Moral JudgementsRoutledge. 1973.Reissue of Becker's 1973 monograph, which argues the following: Much discussion of morality presupposes that moral judgments are always, at bottom, arbitrary. Moral scepticism, or at least moral relativism, has become common currency among the liberally educated. This remains the case even while political crises become intractable, and it is increasingly apparent that the scope of public policy formulated with no reference to moral justification is extremely limited. The thesis of _On Justifying…Read more
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21The Encyclopedia of Ethics (edited book)Garland Publishing. 1992.The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Cheating * Dirty hands * Gay ethics * Holocaust *…Read more
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Individual rightsIn Tom Regan & Donald VanDeVeer (eds.), And Justice for All: New Introductory Essays in Ethics and Public Policy, Rowman & Littlefield. 1982.
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146Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public PolicyRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.How should we respond to individuals with disabilities? What does it mean to be disabled? Over fifty million Americans, from neonates to the fragile elderly, are disabled. Some people say they have the right to full social participation, while others repudiate such claims as delusive or dangerous. In this compelling book, three experts in ethics, medicine, and the law address pressing disability questions in bioethics and public policy. Anita Silvers, David Wasserman, and Mary B. Mahowald test i…Read more
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29Against the supposed difference between historical and end-state theoriesPhilosophical Studies 41 (2). 1982.
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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
Lawrence C. Becker
(1939 - 2018)
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |