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A Progressive Case for a Universal Transaction Tax.Maine Law Review 58 1-16. 2006.Concerns with autonomy and privacy, among other factors (including the potential to move toward a basic income scheme), could give progressives reason to favor replacing the personal income tax with a universal transaction tax (so named to distinguish it from transaction taxes just applied to consumer sales, for instance).
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Toward a New Employer-Worker CompactEmployee Rights and Employment Policy Journal 9 51-119. 2005.Proposes a new model of worker-employer relationships in the US employment context, involving shifts in law and social norms and designed to offer options of potential value to both progressives and libertarians. Emphasizes the importance of decentralized governance and of decoupling income support and other social services from employment.
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Niebuhr's Ghost?Conversations in Religion and Theology 5 91-115. 2006.Critically examines Peter Beinart's attempt to articulate a muscular liberalism with parallels to Cold War liberalism. Challenges Beinart's position as risking inconsistency with just war norms, among others.
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16The Incarnation and the Problem of EvilHeythrop Journal 49 (1): 110-27. 2008.While the incarnation is often invoked as part of a response to the problem of evil (as by the early Kenneth Surin), affirming something like an orthodox view of the incarnation also seems to accentuate the problem of evil by incorporating belief in miraculous divine action. I suggest a possible line of response that allows for the incarnation to be understood as historically particular but non-miraculous.
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16On the Threshold Argument against Consumer Meat PurchasesJournal of Social Philosophy 37 (2): 235-51. 2006.Lodges a number of challenges to the threshold argument on the basis of which some consequentialists have objected to consumer meat purchases. Maintains that the argument misunderstands relevant market dynamics.
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24Self-Integration as a Basic Good: A Response to Chris TollefsenAmerican Journal of Jurisprudence 52 (1): 293-96. 2007.Defends my proposed account of lying (framed in terms of new classical natural law theory) against Chris Tollefsen's objections, centering on the objection that, whatever else it involves, lying necessarily involves an attack on the basic good of self-integration.
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Consumption, Development Aid, and Natural LawWashington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 13 205-57. 2007.Examines how new classical natural law theory might respond to the question what kind of personal giving in support of international development efforts might be morally obligatory. Examines a range of examples offered by natural law thinkers.
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Two Faces of the Right to Privacy in Litigators' EthicsLitigation Ethics 4 (2). 2006.Explores a tension between clients' rights to informational privacy and lawyers' rights to flourishing privates lives.
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Marriage: A Normative FrameworkFlorida Coastal Law Review 9 347-434. 2008.Develops a model of marriage as the chosen institutionalization of love. Builds on a phenomenological account of love to make sense of marital promises and to identify the kinds of promises it makes sense for marriage partners to make.
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Divorce: A Normative AnalysisFlorida Coastal Law Review 10 1-32. 2008.Is divorce reasonable, given that marital promises are often apparently unqualified? I explain a variety of ways in which one can take promises seriously and recognize the value of genuinely unqualified love in marriage while recognizing that it may be reasonable in particular cases to treat marital promises as non-binding.
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Peoples or Person?: Revising Rawls on Global JusticeBoston College International and Comparative Law Review 27 1-97. 2004.Argues that the reasons Rawls offers in The Law of Peoples for rejecting cosmopolitanism are unpersuasive and that Rawls's resistance to cosmopolitanism is associated with other problematic features of his approach, including his stance regarding justice in warfare; an individualist, cosmopolitan approach would resolve evident difficulties in Rawls's position.
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1Richard Rorty's American FaithAnglican Theological Review 85 255-82. 2003.Critiques the political theory articulated in and evidently presupposed by Rorty's Achieving Our Country. Argues for greater political radicalism and theological realism.
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Truth-Telling, Incommensurability, and the Ethics of GradingBrigham Young University Education and Law Journal 3 37-81. 2003.Develops an approach to think normatively about the assignment of grades. Argues that grades should reflected reasonably estimated subject-matter competence rather than the quantity of submitted work or moral character. Responds to alternatives labeled "academic retributivism" and "academic consequentialism." Applies to the model to a variety of concrete grading policy issues.
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6Natural Law, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Politics of VirtueUCLA Law Review 48 1593-1632. 2001.Argues that natural law theory provides no credible basis for objecting to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage and offers a two-fold defense of marriage equality: natural-law arguments against marriage equality are unsuccessful; and, even if they are; proponents of new classical natural law theory should still see legally recognizing same-sex marriages as reasonable.
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Righting Narrative: Robert Chang, Poststructuralism, and the Limits of CritiqueUCLA Asian Pacific-American Law Journal 7 105-32. 2001.Suggests that radical critique in support of empowerment and inclusion is best undertaken from a standpoint that endorses moral objectivity, and that affirming such a standpoint is compatible with an awareness of historical and cultural situatedness.
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Civil Rights and Economic DemocracyWashburn Law Journal 40 267-87. 2001.Suggests that there is an integral relationship between support for civil rights and support for a cluster of practices that might be characterized under the heading off "economic democracy." These include participatory workplace governance schemes and basic income schemes as alternatives to conventional income support programs.
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Loving Friends and Loving GodSpectrum 27 (4): 11-22. 1999.Examines issues in ethics and philosophical theology raised by the attempt to understand the relationship between particular creaturely loves and love for God.
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Richard SwinburneIn Ian Markham (ed.), Blackwell Companion to the Theologians, 2 Volume Set, Wiley. 2009.Examines the distinguished philosopher Richard Swinburne's project in philosophical theology.
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1Aligning Natural and Positive Law: The Case of Non-Human SentientsIn Andreas Blank (ed.), Animals: New Essays, Philosophia. pp. 355-75. 2016.Examines the possibility of converging support for animal well being rendered by a non-standard version of new classical natural law theory and the kind of institutional framework suggested by spontaneous-order natural law theory. Argues that non-state mechanisms consistent with the latter kind of natural law theory could maintain the rights defended by the former.
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Radical Liberalism and Social FreedomIn Roger Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra & Ed Younkins (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, Roman & Littlefield. pp. 255-74. 2019.Defends a link between political and social freedom, and argues both for an understanding of social freedom and for institutional safeguards for this kind of freedom.
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Incommensurable GoodsIn Jonathan Crowe & Constance Youngwon Lee (eds.), Research Handbook on Natural Law Theory, Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 252-65. 2019.Updates earlier arguments for the plausibility of the thesis that basic aspects of well being are incommensurable, a thesis central to new classical natural law theory. Responds to objections from Jonathan Crowe and Jason Brennan.
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Natural Law, the Common Good, and the StateIn Jonathan Crowe & Constance Youngwon Lee (eds.), Research Handbook on Natural Law Theory, Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 347-68. 2019.Argues for a framework understanding of the common good, one that does not depend on the existence and operation of the state, in the context of new classical natural law theory.
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Natural Law and Non-AggressionActa Juridica Hungarica 51 (2): 79-96. 2010.Argues that new classical natural law theory can provide an alternative grounding for what is often called the "non-aggression principle."
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Intellectual Property and Natural LawAustralian Journal of Legal Philosophy 36 58-88. 2011.Explains why a natural law theory of property rights need not be hospitable to intellectual property.
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Anarchism as a Research Program in LawGriffith Law Review 21 293-206. 2012.Examines various aspects of anarchism relevant to or illuminated by legal theory.
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Reconciling Rawls and Hayek?The Independent Review 17 577-88. 2013.Assesses John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness
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Left-Wing Market Anarchism and Natural LawStudies in Emergent Order 7 314-24. 2014.Defends the variety of natural-law anarchism developed in Anarchy and Legal Order against multiple criticisms, primarily methodological.
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Incommensurable Basic GoodsAustralian Journal of Legal Philosophy 40 1-16. 2015.Defends the view that basic aspects of well being should be understood as incommensurable.
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Toward a Theology and Ethics of FriendshipDissertation, Cambridge University. 1991.Examines a range of issues related to the experience of close interpersonal friendship, including the nature of friendship and links between friendship and spirituality, ethics, and politics. Combines philosophical, religious, and social-scientific perspectives.
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Contracts and VowsOxford Journal of Law and Religion 5 (3): 482-509. 2016.Examines analogies between contracts and vows and uses analytical tools from contract law to highlight the limits of religious vows.
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La Sierra UniversityDepartment of Management and Marketing, Zapara School of BusinessDistinguished Professor