William A. Edmundson

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 theory calls “norm seeding.” These drivers are trying to get others to conform to a different norm than what the posted speed limit dictates. The posted speed limit, which is the legal norm, reflects legislative judgments based on concerns of safety and fuel economy. The higher, informal, speed limit reflects something else: the impatience many drivers feel as they drive larger distances and spend correspondingly greater amounts of time in traffic

Morality 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 be practiced in a way that dispenses altogether with praise, blame, resentment, and desert - the concepts that constitute what we understand as holding agents morally responsible for their deeds? I distinguish three aspects of moral practice, which I term "naming," "shaming," and "blaming." Of the three, only the last, blaming, implicates the idea of moral - as opposed to merely causal - responsibility. I defend what I term the "Enlightened View" that accepts naming and shaming as essential to morality, but holds blaming to be inessential. I distinguish the Enlightened View from the "Abolitionist View" that holds blaming to be not merely inessential to morality but undesirable and unworthy. Crucial to the defense of the Enlightened View is an account of moral guidance restricted to the devices of naming and shaming. This discussion uncovers a very weak sense of blame and desert implicit in the practice of morality - one too weak to require any major qualification of the Enlightened and Abolitionist Views. I conclude by defending the Enlightened View against the charge (by e.g. Smilansky) that it would diminish our conception of ourselves as persons.

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 specifically political liberalism, leaving it at a disadvantage with respect to comprehensive liberalism itself. I argue that no coherent account is available. But, because Rawls’s Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, along with its implied stricture against “indoctrination in the pejorative sense,” is a creature of ideal rather than non-ideal theory, the deficiency is far less significant than many would assume. In non-ideal circumstances -- such as ours -- political liberalism does not disallow, and in fact requires, compulsory, free early education informed by the best available comprehensive liberal philosophy.

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-of-nature theory has three components. One is an account of the native normative endowment, or “NNE.” Two is an account of how the state is constructed using the tools included in the NNE. Three is an account of the state's resulting normative endowment, which includes a (purported) moral power to impose duties of obedience. State-of-nature theories disagree about the NNE. For Locke, it included a “natural executive right” to punish wrongdoing. Recent social scientific findings suggest a quite different NNE. Contrary to Locke, people do not behave in experimental settings as one would predict if they possessed a “natural executive right” to punish wrongdoing. Moral reproof is subject to standing norms. These norms limit the range of eligible reprovers. The social science can support two claims. One, is that the NNE is (as Aristotle held) already political. The other is that political authority can be re-conceived as a matter of standing—that is, as the state's unique moral permission coercively to enforce moral norms, rather than as a moral power to impose freestanding duties of obedience

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 worthy ideal. This is an important book for all philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique

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 cannot know that a client is factually guilt.