•  198
    Contractualism, reciprocity, and egalitarian justice
    Politics, 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
  •  35
    Review: Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism (review)
    Mind 115 (459): 769-773. 2006.
  •  30
    Are Identity Claims Bad for Deliberative Democracy?
    Contemporary Political Theory 1 (3): 307-327. 2002.
    Identity claims are a common feature of political debate in many Western democracies. Cultural, linguistic, and religious minorities often defend or attack particular political proposals by appealing to the effect the proposal will have on their group's identity. Is this form of reasoning compatible with the normative ideal of deliberative democracy? This article examines and refutes two powerful arguments recently advanced in the literature which suggest the answer is no. First, there is the pu…Read more
  •  170
  •  133
    Disagreement, asymmetry, and liberal legitimacy
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 4 (3): 301-330. 2005.
    Reasonable people disagree deeply about the nature of the good life. But reasonable people also disagree fundamentally about principles of justice. If this is true, then why does political liberalism permit the state to act on reasons of justice, but not for reasons grounded in conceptions of the good life? There appears to be an indefensible asymmetry in the way political liberalism treats disagreements about justice and disagreements about the good life. This is the asymmetry objection to poli…Read more
  •  169
    Agent-Relative Prerogatives to Do Harm
    Criminal 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
  •  120
    Necessity, Moral Liability, and Defensive Harm
    Law 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
  •  149
    Cultural exemptions, expensive tastes, and equal opportunities
    Journal 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