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57Robert Nozick (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.This is an introductory volume to Robert Nozick, one of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. It is part of a new series, Contemporary Philosophy in Focus. Each volume in the series will consist of newly commissioned essays that will cover all the major contributions of a preeminent philosopher in a systematic and accessible manner. Robert Nozick is one of the most creative and individual philosophical voices of the last 25 years. His most famous book, Anarchy, State and Utopia…Read more
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101Environmental Virtue Ethics: What It Is and What It Needs to BeIn Daniel C. Russell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to virtue ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 221. 2013.
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13An Essay on the Modern State (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2): 491-494. 2000.Christopher Morris’s book is a product of years of reflection, scholarship, and worldly experience. I have read books that were too long in the making, such that the young author who began and the older author who finished did not even use basic terms in the same way. In Morris’s case, however, the years of reflection were altogether salutary. Morris’s book started out clever and ended up wise. Any reader interested in political philosophy is bound to find it richly rewarding. Morris makes bold …Read more
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3PropertyIn George Klosko (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. 2011.
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81Mark Sagoff 's price, principle, and the environment: Two commentsEthics, Place and Environment 9 (3). 2006.I will discuss two themes that can be found in Mark Sagoff's most recent book, Price, Principle, and the Environment. Built from pieces fashioned in his entertaining and incisive critical es...
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5The Elements of JusticeCambridge University Press. 2006.What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due. However, what that means in practice depends on the context in which the question is raised. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity. Nonetheless, the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a n…Read more
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138Book Review:Value in Ethics and Economics. Elizabeth Anderson (review)Ethics 105 (3): 662-. 1995.
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9Freedom in the best of all possible worldsAmerican Journal of Theology and Philosophy 9 (3). 1988.
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1Satisficing as a humanly rational strategyIn Michael Byron (ed.), Satisficing and Maximizing: Moral Theorists on Practical Reason, Cambridge University Press. pp. 30--59. 2004.
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26Deterrence and Criminal AttemptsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (3). 1987.It is widely held that the proper role of criminal punishment is to ensure in a cost-efficient manner that criminal laws will be obeyed. As James Buchanan puts it,the reason we have courts is not that we want people to be convicted of crimes but that we want people not to commit them. The whole procedure of the law is one, essentially, of threatening people with unpleasant consequences if they do things which are regarded as objectionable.According to the deterrence theory of punishment, which I…Read more
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25Practical Reasoning About Final Ends (review)International Studies in Philosophy 28 (4): 144-145. 1996.
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42What We Deserve, and how We ReciprocateThe Journal of Ethics 9 (3-4): 435-464. 2005.Samuel Scheffler says, “none of the most prominent contemporary versions of philosophical liberalism assigns a significant role to desert at the level of fundamental principle.” To the extent that this is true, the most prominent contemporary versions of philosophical liberalism are mistaken. In particular, there is an aspect of what we do to make ourselves deserving that, although it has not been discussed in the literature, plays a central role in everyday moral life, and for good reason. As w…Read more
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138Are all species equal?Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (1). 1998.Species egalitarianism is the view that all species have equal moral standing. To have moral standing is, at a minimum, to command respect, to be something more than a mere thing. Is there any reason to believe that all species have moral standing in even this most minimal sense? If so — that is, if all species command respect — is there any reason to believe they all command equal respect. The article summarises critical responses to Paul Taylor’s argument for species egalitarianism, then expla…Read more
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48Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental ConflictEnvironmental Ethics 22 (4): 397-408. 2000.Sometimes people act contrary to environmentalist values because they reject those values. This is one kind of conflict: conflict in values. There is another kind of conflict in which people act contrary to environmentalist values even though they embrace those values: because they cannot afford to act in accordance with them. Conflict in priorities occurs not because people’s values are in conflict, but rather because people’s immediate needs are in conflict. Conflict in priorities is not only …Read more
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14The Oxford Handbook of Freedom (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2016.The Oxford Handbook of Freedom crafts the first wide-ranging analysis of freedom in all its dimensions: legal, cultural, religious, economic, political, and psychological. This volume includes 28 new essays by well regarded philosophers, as well some historians and political theorists.
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54How to DeservePolitical Theory 30 (6): 774-799. 2002.People ought to get what they deserve. And what we deserve can depend on effort, performance, or on excelling in competition, even when excellence is partly a function of our natural gifts. Or so most people believe. Philosophers sometimes say otherwise. At least since Karl Marx complained about capitalist society extracting surplus value from workers, thereby failing to give workers what they deserve, classical liberal philosophers have worried that to treat justice as a matter of what pe…Read more
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3Social Welfare and Individual ResponsibilityCambridge University Press. 1998.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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266A Place for Cost-Benefit AnalysisNoûs 35 (s1). 2001.What next? We are forever making decisions. Typically, when unsure, we try to identify, then compare, our options. We weigh pros and cons. Occasionally, we make the weighing explicit, listing pros and cons and assigning numerical weights. What could be wrong with that? In fact, things sometimes go terribly wrong. This paper considers what cost-benefit analysis can do, and also what it cannot
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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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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
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |