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3Anthony Simon Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 22 (6): 419-421. 2002.
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46Disputed practices and reasonable pluralismRes Publica 10 (1): 43-67. 2004.This paper addresses the problem of disputed cultural practices within liberal, deliberative democracies, arguing against the currently dominant view, advocated by Susan Okin among others, that such problems represent a fundamental tension between two liberal values: gender equality and cultural autonomy. Such an approach, I argue, requires the state to render normative judgements about conceptions of the good life, something which is both arbitrary and unfair in societies characterised by reaso…Read more
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5Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 23 (5): 347-349. 2003.
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151Justice Beyond EqualitySocial Theory and Practice 36 (2): 315-340. 2010.This essay reviews G.A. Cohen’s final major work, Rescuing Justice and Equality. In the book, Cohen challenges the Rawlsian account of the content and the concept of justice. This essay offers a summary of Cohen’s main arguments, and develops objections to several of those arguments, particularly Cohen’s claim that his proposed egalitarian ethos is not vulnerable to a well-known trilemma (liberty, equality, efficiency) that might be pressed against it. The essay’s final section offers critical r…Read more
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201Contractualism, reciprocity, and egalitarian justicePolitics, Philosophy and Economics 6 (1): 75-105. 2007.Can contractualism yield a suitably egalitarian conception of social justice? G.A. Cohen has forcefully argued that it cannot - that one cannot be both a contractualist and an egalitarian. Cohen presents a number of arguments to this effect, the particular target of which is John Rawls’s version of contractualism. In this article, I show that, contra Cohen, the Rawlsian model of contractualism, and the ideal of reciprocity on which it relies, can coherently yield egalitarian principles of distri…Read more
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173Agent-Relative Prerogatives to Do HarmCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (4): 815-829. 2016.In this paper, I offer two arguments in support of the proposition that there are sometimes agent-relative prerogatives to impose harm on nonliable persons. The first argument begins with a famous case where most people intuitively agree it is permissible to perform an act that results in an innocent person’s death, and where there is no liability-based or consequentialist justification for acting. I show that this case is relevantly analogous to a case involving the intentional imposition of le…Read more
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124Necessity, Moral Liability, and Defensive HarmLaw and Philosophy 31 (6): 673-701. 2012.A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust harm. Others may favour a pur…Read more
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152Cultural exemptions, expensive tastes, and equal opportunitiesJournal of Applied Philosophy 23 (1). 2006.abstract The most well‐known liberal‐egalitarian defence of cultural rights, provided by Will Kymlicka, presents culture as a primary good, and thus a resource that ought to be distributed according to some fair egalitarian criteria. Kymlicka relies on the intuition that inequalities between persons that are the result of brute luck rather than personal choice are unjust in making the case for various multicultural rights. This article makes two main claims. First, the standard luck egalitarian …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |