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101Culture: Choice or Circumstance?Constellations 5 (2): 183-200. 1998.In this paper, I would like to discuss two recent attempts to incorporate groupdifferentiated rights and entitlements into a broadly liberal conception of distributive justice. The first is John Roemer’s “pragmatic theory of responsibility,” and the second is Will Kymlicka’s defense of minority rights in “multinational” states.1 Both arguments try to show that egalitarianism, far from requiring a “color-blind” system of institutions and laws that is insensitive to ethnic, linguistic or subcultur…Read more
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98Post-deliberative DemocracyAnalyse & Kritik 43 (2): 285-308. 2021.Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can …Read more
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92Climate Ethics: Justifying a Positive Social Time PreferenceJournal of Moral Philosophy 14 (4): 435-462. 2017._ Source: _Page Count 28 Recent debates over climate change policy have made it clear that the choice of a social discount rate has enormous consequences for the amount of mitigation that will be recommended. The social discount rate determines how future costs are to be compared to present costs. Philosophers, however, have been almost unanimous in endorsing the view that the only acceptable social rate of time preference is zero, a view that, taken literally, has either absurd or extremely rad…Read more
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91Why do people behave immorally when drunk?Philosophical Explorations 18 (3): 310-329. 2015.Alcohol intoxication is a major source of antisocial behavior in our society, strongly implicated in various forms of interpersonal aggression. Yet, moral philosophers have paid surprisingly little attention to the literature on alcohol and its effects. In part, this is because philosophers who have adopted a more empirically informed approach to moral psychology have gravitated toward moral sentimentalism, while the literature on alcohol intoxication fits very poorly with the sentimentalist acc…Read more
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87Is the “Point” of the Market Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency?Business Ethics Journal Review 7 (4): 21-26. 2019.Moriarty argues that the Market Failures Approach to business ethics is inapplicable to “real world” problems, because it treats “market failure” as a failure to achieve Pareto efficiency. Depending upon how it is applied, Pareto efficiency is either trivially easy to satisfy or else so demanding that no real-world market could ever satisfy it. In this Commentary, I argue that Moriarty overstates these difficulties. The regulatory structure governing markets is best understood as an attempt to m…Read more
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87Brandom et les sources de la normativitéPhilosophiques 28 (1): 27-46. 2001.RÉSUMÉ. — Robert Brandom a tenté de déplacer le concept de représentation de sa position de concept explicatif central en philosophie du langage et de le remplacer par un ensemble de concepts explicatifs dérivés de l’analyse de l’action sociale. Il soutient que le concept de norme sociale peut servir de concept primitif dans le développement d’une théorie générale de la signification. Selon Brandom, le problème central lié au fait de considérer la représentation comme un primitif explicatif est …Read more
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85Methodological individualismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.(1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. It involves, in other words, a commitment to the primacy of what Talcott Parsons would later call “the action frame of reference” (Parsons 1937: 43-51) in social-scientific explanation. It is also sometimes described as the claim that explanations of “macr…Read more
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84Following the rules: practical reasoning and deontic constraintOxford University Press. 2008.Introduction -- Instrumental rationality -- Social order -- Deontic constraint -- Intentional states -- Preference noncognitivism -- A naturalistic perspective -- Transcendental necessity -- Weakness of will -- Normative ethics.
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82The Failure of Traditional Environmental PhilosophyRes Publica 28 (1): 1-16. 2021.A notable feature of recent philosophical work on climate ethics is that it makes practically no reference to ‘traditional’ environmental philosophy. There is some irony in this, since environmental ethics arose as part of a broader movement within philosophy, starting in the 1960s, aimed at developing different fields of applied philosophy, in order to show how everyday practice could be enriched through philosophical reflection and analysis. The major goal of this paper is to explain why this …Read more
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77Morality, convention and conventional moralityPhilosophical Explorations 20 (3): 276-293. 2017.Among anthropologists and sociologists, it is widely believed that moral rules are best understood as a type of social norm. Moral philosophers, however, have largely been hostile to this suggestion. In recent years, the impulse to distinguish moral rules from others types of social norm has received what many take to be empirical support from the work of Elliot Turiel and his collaborators, who have argued that there are two distinct “domains” of social cognition, the “moral” and the “conventio…Read more
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76An Adversarial Ethic for Business: or When Sun-Tzu Met the StakeholderJournal of Business Ethics 72 (4): 359-374. 2007.In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction-cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between thes…Read more
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75The Structure of Normative ControlLaw and Philosophy 17 (4). 1998.One of the most commonly observed peculiarities of the instrumental conception of rationality is that when applied in contexts of social interaction it sometimes prescribes actions that will predictably result in suboptimal outcomes. Often these outcomes could be avoided if agents were able to credibly commit themselves to refraining from exercising certain options available to them. The prisoners’ dilemma is the classic example. This problem has generated a small growth industry of attempts to …Read more
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74The spectacular corporate scandals and bankruptcies of the past decade have served as a powerful reminder of the risks that are involved in the ownership of enterprise. Unlike other patrons of the firm, owners are residual claimants on its earnings.1 As a result, they have no explicit contract to protect their interests, but rely instead upon formal control of the decision-making apparatus of the firm in order to ensure that their interests are properly respected by managers. In a standard busin…Read more
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74Market Failure or Government Failure? A Response to JaworskiBusiness Ethics Journal Review 50-56. forthcoming.
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72The past decade has seen intensified calls for the reform of democratic political institutions in Canada, on the grounds that there is a “democracy deficit” at the level of federal politics. Some commentators have even begun to describe the country as a “banana republic,” or a “friendly dictatorship.”1 Yet any attempt to assess the state of democracy in Canada must naturally presuppose some theory of what democracy is – how to identify it, and how to tell whether it is performing well or not. Un…Read more
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69Habermas and analytical MarxismPhilosophy and Social Criticism 35 (8): 891-919. 2009.John Roemer once described the ‘intellectual foundations’ of analytical Marxism as the recognition that, despite having a valid core, Marxism rested upon outdated social science. The solution, he believed, was to update the theory ‘using state-of-the-art methods of analytical philosophy and “positivist” social science’. If one takes this definition literally, Jürgen Habermas’ early work qualifies as that of an analytical Marxist. Yet although he developed his project in a way that was independen…Read more
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69Ideal theory in an nth-best world: the case of pauper laborJournal of Global Ethics 9 (2). 2013.One of the most troubling features of international trade is that it often involves exchange between individuals facing dramatically different life circumstances, who therefore derive different levels of benefit from the exchange. Most obviously, wages are extremely low in underdeveloped countries. However, the principle underlying these wages is the same as the one the dictates wage levels in wealthy countries. It is, therefore, difficult to criticize the wages paid to ?pauper labor? without at…Read more
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69Intergenerational Cooperation and Distributive JusticeCanadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (3). 1997.Kevin Sauvé has recently argued in this journal that David Gauthier's conception of ‘morals by agreement’ is inimical to the development of long-term productive investment and sustainable levels of resource exploitation. According to Sauvé, this is because society is confronted with an intergenerational interaction problem whose strategic equilibrium is suboptimal. However, unlike the ‘contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma’ that Gauthier analyzes, the intergenerational version cannot be solved by a…Read more
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65The Structure of Intergenerational CooperationPhilosophy and Public Affairs 41 (1): 31-66. 2013.
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61Rational choice as critical theoryPhilosophy and Social Criticism 22 (5): 43-62. 1996.Habermas has argued that many of the endemic socio- economic problems of Western society are either symptoms or prod ucts of a 'lopsided' process of cultural rationalization, one that has emphasized instrumental forms of rationality over communicative. But other than presenting a rather general typology of lifeworld pathologies, Habermas has not done much to specify what these problems might be, nor has he provided any 'middle-range' analysis of the mechanisms through which they might be generat…Read more
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60Why a UBI Will Never Be High EnoughJournal of Applied Philosophy 41 (2): 289-305. 2024.Schemes to replace traditional welfare programmes with a universal basic income (UBI) are sometimes presented as a way to reduce overall economic inequality. But because they lower the implicit marginal taxation rate of individuals entering the workforce, they have the effect of increasing economic inequality between those who opt out of the workforce and those who choose to participate. This article examines the effect that an increase in this income gap can be expected to have on the perceived…Read more
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60An Adversarial Ethic for Business: or When Sun-Tzu Met the StakeholderJournal of Business Ethics 72 (4): 359-374. 2007.In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction–cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between thes…Read more
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60Attributing Weather Extremes to Climate Change and the Future of Adaptation PolicyEthics, Policy and Environment 19 (3): 239-255. 2016.Until recently, climate scientists were unable to link the occurrence of extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change. In recent years, however, climate science has made considerable advancements, making it possible to assess the influence of anthropogenic climate change on single weather events. Using a new technique called ‘probabilistic event attribution’, scientists are able to assess whether anthropogenic climate change has changed the likelihood of the occurrence of a recorded ex…Read more
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57Business Ethics and the 'End of History' in Corporate LawJournal of Business Ethics 102 (S1): 5-20. 2011.Henry Hansmann has claimed we have reached the “end of history” in corporate law, organized around the “widespread normative consensus that corporate managers should act exclusively in the economic interests of shareholders.” In this paper, I examine Hansmann’s own argument in support of this view, in order to draw out its implications for some of the traditional concerns of business ethicists about corporate social responsibility. The centerpiece of Hansmann’s argument is the claim that ownersh…Read more
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56Ethics for CapitalistsFriesen Press. 2023.Ethics for Capitalists offers an accessible, comprehensive statement of the Market Failures Approach to business ethics. While the competitive context of the market economy provides economic actors greater freedom to pursue their interests, it also imposes moral constraints on the range of strategies they may employ. The pursuit of profit must be consistent with the overall objective of market institutions, which is to promote efficiency in the production and allocation of goods and services. Et…Read more
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55Book Review: Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, by Hartmut Rosa, translated by Jonathan Trejo-MathysSocial Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, by RosaHartmut, translated by Trejo-MathysJonathan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 (review)Political Theory 44 (1): 150-153. 2016.
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55Gosseries, Axel , and Meyer, Lukas H. , eds. Intergenerational Justice . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 419. $99.00 (cloth) (review)Ethics 120 (4): 851-855. 2010.
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55Yet this is precisely what I intend to do. As a way of conferring some initial legitimacy Perhaps the most fundamental axiom of upon this enterprise, I would like to start out modern economic science is that there simply by appealing to the “no free lunch” is no such thing as a free lunch. It is principle. To adopt productivity growth as a this axiom that gives us the concept of opporsocial priority is to set aside other objectives tunity cost, an idea that has led to enormous that we might like…Read more
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53“But Everyone Else Is Doing It”: Competition and Business Self‐RegulationJournal of Social Philosophy 49 (4): 516-535. 2018.
Areas of Specialization
Political Ethics |
Business Ethics and Public Policy |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Political Ethics |
Business Ethics and Public Policy |
Value Theory |