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10A. From Private Ranchers................................................................ 205 B. From Kruger Park........................................................................ 207.
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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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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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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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52When 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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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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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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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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31Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods ProblemInternational Philosophical Quarterly 30 (3): 369-370. 1990.
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |