-
Situation ethicsIn Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 738. 1995.
-
5Social Trust and Human Communities (review)Dialogue 39 (1): 173-. 2000.In her many articles on the subject, Trudy Govier has made a substantial contribution to the recent philosophical literature on trust—not only to the discussion kindled by Annette Baier's provocative article "Trust and Anti-Trust", but to the larger, much older, low-intensity discussion among social scientists and philosophers about the relation between trust and effective government, stable social relationships, and psychological health. This book is devoted to the varieties and uses of trust i…Read more
-
1Edward Craig, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (review)Ethics 109 (3): 651-656. 1999.
-
3Human 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
-
2Unity, 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
-
19The finality of moral judgments: A reply to mrs. FootPhilosophical Review 82 (3): 364-370. 1973.
-
3Rethinking Democracy, by Carol C. Gould (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (2): 444-448. 1991.
-
1Welfare 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
-
1Knowledge 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
-
1Book Review:Law and Logic: A Critical Account of Legal Argument. Joseph Horovitz (review)Ethics 84 (1): 89-. 1973.
-
15Criminal attempt and the theory of the law of crimesPhilosophy and Public Affairs 3 (3): 262-294. 1974.
-
2Axiology, deontology, and agent morality: The need for coordination (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 6 (3): 213-220. 1972.
-
Social contractIn Lawrence C. Becker & Charlotte B. Becker (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Ethics, Garland Publishing. pp. 2--1170. 1992.
-
9Property 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
-
1This 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
-
4A 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
-
20The 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.
-
14A 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.
Lawrence C. Becker
(1939 - 2018)
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |