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58Comments on Richard Arneson's “Joel Feinberg and the justification of hard paternalism”Legal Theory 11 (3): 285-291. 2005.
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740Ought We to Do What We Ought to Be Made to Do?In Georgios Pavlakos Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (ed.), Practical Normativity. Essays on Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Reason, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.The late Jerry Cohen struggled to reconcile his egalitarian political principles with his personal style of life. His efforts were inconclusive, but instructive. This comment locates the core of Cohen’s discomfort in an abstract principle that connects what we morally ought to be compelled to do and what we have a duty to do anyway. The connection the principle states is more general and much tighter than Cohen and others, e.g. Thomas Nagel, have seen. Our principles of justice always put our pe…Read more
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433State of the Art: The Duty to Obey the LawLegal Theory 10 (4). 2004.Philosophy, despite its typical attitude of detachment and abstraction, has for most of its long history been engaged with the practical and mundane-seeming question of whether there is a duty to obey the law. As Matthew Kramer has recently summarized: “For centuries, political and legal theorists have pondered whether each person is under a general obligation of obedience to the legal norms of the society wherein he or she lives. The obligation at issue in those theorists' discussions is usuall…Read more
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67Rethinking exclusionary reasons: A second edition of Joseph Raz's (review)Law and Philosophy 12 (3): 329-343. 1993.
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36Is Law Coercive?Legal Theory 1 (1): 81-111. 1995.That lawiscoercive is something we all more or less take for granted. It is an assumption so rooted in our ways of thinking that it is taken as a given of social reality, an uncontroversial datum. Because it is so regarded, it is infrequently stated, and when it is, it is stated without any hint of possible complications or qualifications. I will call this the “prereflective view,” and I want to examine it with the care it deserves.
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79Civility as political constraintRes Publica 8 (3): 217-229. 2002.The everyday virtue of civility functions as a constraint upon informal social pressures. Can civility also be understood, as John Rawls has proposed, as a distinctively political constraint? I contrast Rawls's project of constraining the political with Mill's of constraining both the social and the political, and explore Rawls's account of the relation between the two. I argue that Rawls's political duty of civility rests on the assumption that the political is peculiarly coercive; ignores the …Read more
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8The "Race-of-the-Victim" Effect in Capital Sentencing: McClesky v. Kemp and Underadjustment BiasJurimetrics 32 125-41. 1990.This is a critical discussion of the Baldus study of capital sentencing in Georgia. It concludes that the Baldus finding of a "race-of-the-victim" effect is less robust than capital-punishment abolitionists have claimed. But the flaws in the Baldus study should not comfort death-penalty advocates, for they reveal an epistemological barrier to the US Supreme Court's ever being able to satisfy itself both that the sentence reflects particularized consideration of the circumstances and character of…Read more
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73The virtue of law-abidancePhilosophers' Imprint 6 1-21. 2006.The last half-century has seen a steady loss of confidence in the defensibility of a duty to obey the law — even a qualified, pro tanto duty to obey the laws of a just or nearly just state. Over roughly the same period, there has been increasing interest in virtue ethics as an alternative to the dominant consequentialist and deontological approaches to normative ethics. Curiously, these two tendencies have so far only just barely linked up. Although there has been discussion of the question whet…Read more
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3Speeding: A Sprawling Offense?Fulton County Daily Report 10. 2002.Urban sprawl and aggressive driving are two problems that afflict many of America’s major cities. The two affect Atlanta to a notoriously high degree. The two problems are connected. Aggressive driving is not so much a symptom of “road rage” as it is an attempt to communicate with slower drivers. The aggressive driver tailgates other drivers with the intention of letting them know that they are impeding the flow of faster traffic. Aggressive drivers are engaged in what “New Chicago School” legal…Read more
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75Morality as we know it seems inextricably involved with notions of responsibility, desert, and blame. But a number of philosophers (e.g., Pereboom, G. Strawson) have concluded that responsibility in the desert-supporting sense rests upon metaphysical presuppositions that are unsatisfiable whether or not determinism is true. Some of these philosophers go on to argue that we ought - morally ought - to discard the idea of moral responsibility. Is this proposal coherent? Could morality intelligibly …Read more
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29John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that “justice as fairness…is likely to have greater stability than the traditional alternatives since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology”. In support, he presented a psychology of moral development that was informed by a comprehensive liberalism. In Political Liberalism, Rawls confessed that the argument was “unrealistic and must be recast”. Rawls, however, never provided a psychology of moral development informed by a specifically…Read more
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148Politics in a State of NatureRatio Juris 26 (2): 149-186. 2013.Aristotle thought we are by nature political animals, but the state-of-nature tradition sees political society not as natural but as an artifice. For this tradition, political society can usefully be conceived as emerging from a pre-political state of nature by the exercise of innate normative powers. Those powers, together with the rest of our native normative endowment, both make possible the construction of the state, and place sharp limits on the state's just powers and prerogatives. A state…Read more
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5Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political AuthorityMind 109 (436): 896-900. 2000.How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a…Read more
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64CoercionIn Andrei Marmor (ed.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, Routledge. 2012.This chapter explains the concept of coercion as it features in recent legal and political philosophical work.
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19Review of Tom Campbell, Rights: A Critical Introduction (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (12). 2006.
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2Jaap C. Hage, Reasoning with Rules: An Essay on Legal Reasoning and Its Underlying Logic Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 18 (3): 178-179. 1998.
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38Contextualist Answers to Skepticism, and What a Lawyer Cannot KnowFlorida State University Law Review 30 1-23. 2002.Contextualism answers skepticism by proposing a variable standard of justification, keyed to the context of utterance. A lawyer's situation with respect to a criminal defendant's factual guilt is a special one. The argument here is that in this special context an especially high standard of epistemic justification applies. The standard is even more exacting than the proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt standard that juries are sworn to follow. The upshot is that criminal defense lawyers normally ca…Read more
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Antony Duff, ed., Philosophy and the Criminal Law: Principle and Critique Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 19 (5): 325-327. 1999.
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772Why legal theory is political philosophyLegal Theory 19 (4): 331-346. 2013.The concept of law is not a theorist's invention but one that people use every day. Thus one measure of the adequacy of a theory of law is its degree of fidelity to the concept as it is understood by those who use it. That means as far as possible. There are important truisms about the law that have an evaluative cast. The theorist has either to say what would make those evaluative truisms true or to defend her choice to dismiss them as false of law or not of the essence of law. Thus the legal t…Read more
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118An ambitious proposal by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka seeks to break out of an impasse that animal-rights advocacy seems to have reached. They divide the animal kingdom into three categories and distribute rights accordingly. Domesticated animals are to be treated as citizens, enjoying the same rights and duties as human citizens (adjusting for relevant differences in ability, just as we do for children and the severely cognitively handicapped). Wild animal species are to be treated as sovere…Read more
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1Social Meaning, Compliance Conditions, and Law's Claim to AuthorityCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 15 (1): 51-67. 2002.Political authorities claim to be able to impose moral duties on citizens by the mere expedient of legislating. This claim is problematic -- in fact, among theorists, it is widely denied that political authorities have such powers. I argue that the legitimacy of political authority is not contingent upon the truth of its claim to be able to impose moral duties by mere legislation. Such claims are better seen as exercises of semiotic techniques to alter social meanings. These alterations serve to…Read more
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5PrivacyIn Martin P. Golding & William A. Edmundson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Blackwell. 2004.This chapter contains section titled: Dimensions of Privacy Theories of Privacy Liberty and Decisional Privacy Justifying a Right to Informational Privacy Secrecy and Authority Note References.
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30Coercion, Stability, and Indoctrination in the Pejorative SenseJurisprudence 7 (3): 540-556. 2016.John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that ‘justice as fairness … is likely to have greater stability than the traditional alternatives since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology'. In support, he presented a psychology of moral development that was informed by a comprehensive liberalism. In Political Liberalism, Rawls confessed that the argument was 'unrealistic and must be recast'. Rawls, however, never provided a psychology of moral development informed by a specifical…Read more
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44Pluralism, Intransitivity, IncoherenceIn Mark White (ed.), THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF LAW AND ECONOMICS, Cambridge University Press. 2009.Pluralism is an appealing and now orthodox view of the sources of value. But pluralism has led to well-known difficulties for social-choice theory. Moreover, as Susan Hurley has argued, the difficulties of pluralism go even deeper. In 1954, Kenneth May suggested an intrapersonal analogue to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. In brief, May showed that an individual's response to a plurality of values will, given certain additional assumptions, lead to intransitive preference orderings. (Daniel Kahnem…Read more
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23Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political AuthorityCambridge University Press. 1998.How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a…Read more
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Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |