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77Elements of justiceCambridge University Press. 2006.What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due, but what that means in practice depends on context. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, thus, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity, but the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood rather than that of a building. A theory of…Read more
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10A. From Private Ranchers................................................................ 205 B. From Kruger Park........................................................................ 207.
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111Virtue ethics and repugnant conclusionsIn Philip Cafaro & Ronald Sandler (eds.), Environmental Virtue Ethics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 107--17. 2005.Both utilitarian and deontological moral theories locate the source of our moral beliefs in the wrong sorts of considerations. One way this failure manifests itself, we argue, is in the ways these theories analyze the proper human relationship toward the non-human environment. Another, more notorious, manifestation of this failure is found in Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. Our goal is to explore the connection between these two failures, and to suggest that they are failures of act-centere…Read more
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155Property and justiceSocial Philosophy and Policy 27 (1): 79-100. 2010.When we’re trying to articulate principles of justice that we have reason to take seriously in a world like ours, one way to start is with an understanding of what our world is like, and of which institutional frameworks promote our thriving in communities and which do not. If we start this way, we can sort out alleged principles of justice by asking which ones license mutual expectations that promote our thriving and which ones do otherwise. This is an essay in the how and why of nonideal theor…Read more
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51When justice mattersEthics 117 (3): 433-459. 2007.Reasonable people disagree about what is just. Why? This itself is an item over which reasonable people disagree. Our analyses of justice (like our analyses of knowledge, free will, meaning, etc.) all have counterexamples. Why? In part, the problem lies in the nature of theorizing itself. A truism in philosophy of science: for any set of data, an infinite number of theories will fit the facts. So, even if we agree on particular cases, we still, in all likelihood, disagree on how to pull those ju…Read more
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69Market failureCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 7 (4): 525-537. 1993.The Theory of Market Failure explores how markets respond, both in theory and in practice, to public‐goods and externality problems. Most of the articles in this anthology find that markets often meet the demand for public goods in a variety of cases where existing theory would lead one to expect market failure. Moreover, upon reflection, existing theory reveals itself to be in need of supplementation by a more realistic picture of how flexible markets (and evolving systems of property rights) r…Read more
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347The Institution of PropertySocial Philosophy and Policy 11 (2): 42-62. 1994.The typical method of acquiring a property right involves transfer from a previous owner. But sooner or later, that chain of transfers traces back to the beginning. That is why we have a philosophical problem. How does a thing legitimately become a piece of property for the first time ? In this essay, I follow the custom of distinguishing between mere liberties and full-blooded rights. If I have the liberty of doing X , then it is permissible for me to do X . But the mere fact that I am at liber…Read more
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1Our days are a vast, intricate, evolving dance of mutual understandings. We stop at a traffic light, offer a plastic card as payment for a meal, leave our weapons at home, or enter a voting booth. We live and work in close proximity, at high speed, with few collisions: on our roads and in our neighborhoods, places of worship, and places of business. Somehow, having all those people around is more liberating than stifling. The secret is that we know roughly what to expect from each other. Knowing…Read more
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31Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods ProblemInternational Philosophical Quarterly 30 (3): 369-370. 1990.
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91Debra Satz: Why some things should not be for sale: The moral limits of marketsJournal of Philosophy 108 (4): 219-223. 2011.
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85Reasons for AltruismSocial Philosophy and Policy 10 (1): 52-68. 1993.This essay considers whether acts of altruism can be rational. Rational choice, according to the standard instrumentalist model, consists of maximizing one's utility, or more precisely, maximizing one's utility subject to a budget constraint. We seek the point of highest utility lying within our limited means. The term ‘utility’ could mean a number of different things, but in recent times utility has usually been interpreted as preference satisfaction . To have a preference is to care , to want …Read more
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28Because It's RightCanadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (sup1): 63-95. 2007.Morality teaches us that, if we look on her only as good for something else, we never in that case have seen her at all. She says that she is an end to be desired for her own sake, and not as a means to something beyond. Degrade her, and she disappears.— F. H. Bradley
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66Review of Dale Jamieson, ed. A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (review)Environmental Ethics 25 (1): 99-104. 2003.
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94Islands in a sea of obligation: Limits of the duty to rescue (review)Law and Philosophy 19 (6): 683-705. 2000.No Abstract
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30Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility (M. van Roojen)Philosophical Books 41 (1): 62-63. 2000.The issue of social welfare and individual responsibility has become a topic of international public debate in recent years as politicians around the world now question the legitimacy of state-funded welfare systems. David Schmidtz and Robert Goodin debate the ethical merits of individual versus collective responsibility for welfare. David Schmidtz argues that social welfare policy should prepare people for responsible adulthood rather than try to make that unnecessary. Robert Goodin argues agai…Read more
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41A Survey of Ecological Economics, Rajaram Krishnan, Jonathan M. Harris and Neva R. Goodwin . Island Press, 1995, 384 + xxxix Pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 15 (1): 152. 1999.
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148Equal respect and equal sharesSocial Philosophy and Policy 19 (1): 244-274. 2002.We are all equal, sort of. We are not equal in terms of our physical or mental capacities. Morally speaking, we are not all equally good. Evidently, if we are equal, it is not in virtue of our actual characteristics, but despite them. Our equality is of a political rather than metaphysical nature. We do not expect people to be the same, but we expect differences to have no bearing on how people ought to be treated as citizens. Or when differences do matter, we expect that they will not matter in…Read more
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36Pettit's 'free riding and foul dealing'Australasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (2). 1988.This Article does not have an abstract
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |