University of Arizona
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2000
Louisville, Kentucky, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Law
  •  4
    Solidarism and the Struggle Against Environmental Racism
    Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 14 (1): 103-123. 2024.
    Margaret Kohn has argued that fin-de-siècle French Solidarists such as Alfred Fouillée developed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism which still provides a powerful justification for “welfare state” institutions and public-goods provision. But how does Solidarism respond to the demands for environmental justice, and against environmental racism, which have emerged in the past 50 years, mostly in Women of Color-led social movements. Distinguishing three elements of environmental justic…Read more
  •  5
    Introduction to Symposium: Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements
    with Margaret Kohn
    Ethics and Global Politics 16 (2): 1-7. 2023.
    This introductory article summarizes some key elements of Monique Deveaux’s book Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements and situates that book in the philosophical literature on global poverty. It then provides an outline of the symposium contributions by Ashwini Vasanthakumar, Luis Cabrera, Brooke Ackerly, Catherine Lu, and Avery Kolers.
  •  6
    Collective political capabilities
    Ethics and Global Politics 16 (2): 46-54. 2023.
    Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-led Social Movements makes a significant contribution to contemporary capability theories by challenging their individualism. Mainline versions of the Capabilities Approach (CA), including those developed by Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Ingrid Robeyns, insist on a methodological and normative individualism. And with good reason: communitarianism most often reinscribes patriarchal power, especially within the family. Deveaux, however, argues th…Read more
  •  9
    States as agents and as trustees
    European Journal of Political Theory 21 (3): 587-593. 2021.
    In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar observes that the ‘beast’ of state migration policy has broken out of its cage and shifted both outward – to intercept migrants before they can ‘touch base’ and thereby gain rights – and inward, to restrict and subvert the rights of migrants and others in Exclusionary Zones within state territory. Shachar wants to ‘tame’ the beast by obligating states and their agents to uphold basic rights wherever they act. The current article first questions whether this…Read more
  •  9
    Magnificent Utopian games
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 49 (2): 263-277. 2022.
    The Grasshopper’s game-playing Utopia collapses because, ideal though it might seem to some, ultimately most of us want more out of life than game-play. Building on both The Grasshopper and the published sequels in which Bernard Suits attempts to vindicate his Utopia, the current paper reconstructs Suits’s Utopia in a new way. I start from deeper reflection on Suits’s example of John Striver, a Utopian citizen who wants to work but whose profound boredom occasions Utopia’s collapse. Although the…Read more
  •  155
    Latin America in Theories of Territorial Rights
    Revista de Ciencia Politica 37 (3): 737-53. 2017.
  •  42
    What does solidarity do for bioethics?
    Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (2): 122-128. 2021.
    Bioethical work on solidarity has yielded an array of divergent conceptions. But what do these accounts add to normative bioethics? What is solidarity’s distinctive social normative role? Prainsack and Buyx suggest that solidarity be understood as the ‘putty’ of justice. I argue here that the putty metaphor is deeply insightful and—when spelled out in detail—successfully explicates solidarity’s social normative function. Unfortunately, Prainsack and Buyx’s own account cannot play this role. I pr…Read more
  •  30
    Groundwork for the Mechanics of Morals
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5): 636-651. 2020.
    Ethics is a skill set. But what skill set is it? An answer to this question would help make progress for both theory and moral agency. I argue that moral performance may best be understood on the model of athletic performance; both moral and athletic performance are rule-structured unions of efficiency and inefficiency, enabling us to engage in the wholehearted and autonomous pursuit of goals subject to constraints. By understanding how athletics demands embodied performance, we better understan…Read more
  •  35
    Ludic Constructivism: Or, Individual Life and the Fate of Humankind
    Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 13 (3-4): 392-405. 2018.
    In The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits argues that the best life is the one whose essence is game-play. In fact, only through the concept of game-play can we understand how anything at all is worth doing. Yet this seems implausible: morality makes things worth doing independently of any game, and games are themselves subject to moral evaluation. So games must be logically posterior to morality. The current paper responds to these objections by developing the theory of Ludic Constructivism. Constructi…Read more
  •  37
    Locating the people
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21 (6): 782-789. 2018.
  •  22
    Solidarity as environmental justice in brownfields remediation
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 1-16. 2017.
    What do individuals owe to affected communities in the name of environmental justice? Principal accounts of environmental justice have made inroads in developing a pluralistic and activist-led approach. Yet precisely because of their strengths, such accounts face three problems – indeterminacy, epistemology, and structure/agency – that hinder activism and widespread engagement and threaten to leave “every neighborhood for itself.” The current article examines an effort at brownfields remediation…Read more
  •  37
    Floating Provisos and Sinking Islands
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (4): 333-343. 2012.
    Rising sea levels may sink entire countries. Individualistic solutions to this climate catastrophe, such as those proposed by Meisels and Risse, are inadequate on both Kantian and Lockean criteria. This article concurs with Cara Nine's recent argument that such ‘ecological refugee states’ are entitled to territorial remedies. But Nine's proposal, founded on Locke's ‘sufficiency’ proviso and Nozick's famous application of it to waterholes in the desert, is instructively incorrect. Careful conside…Read more
  • Grounds of Global Justice
    Dissertation, The University of Arizona. 2000.
    Currently available political theories all fail to explain the nature or justification of territorial claims. My dissertation fills these gaps. In chapter one I distinguish between property and territory, explaining the inapplicability of property theories to territorial claims. Chapter two raises a challenge to egalitarian and cosmopolitan theories of global justice. The central claim of the chapter is that local democracy is an essential part of global justice, but that cosmopolitan theories c…Read more
  •  91
    Social movements
    Philosophy Compass 11 (10): 580-590. 2016.
    Social movements are ubiquitous in political life. But what are they? What makes someone a member of a social movement, or some action an instance of movement activity? Are social movements compatible with democracy? Are they required for it? And how should individuals respond to movement calls to action? Philosophers have had much to say on issues impinging on social movements but much less to say on social movements as such. The current article provides a philosophical overview of social movem…Read more
  •  111
    Dynamics of Solidarity
    Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (4): 365-383. 2011.
    Solidarity is a significant but poorly understood feature of political life. It is typically conceived, in “associative and teleological” terms, as working together for common political aims. But this conception misses the fact that solidarity requires individuals to will collective ends despite incompletely shared interests. Careful consideration of these elements reveals four “dynamics of solidarity”: its characteristic duties, the durability of commitments made in solidarity, the deference it…Read more
  •  20
    Am I My Profession's Keeper?
    Bioethics 28 (1): 1-7. 2013.
    Conscientious refusal is distinguished by its peculiar attitude towards the obligations that the objector refuses: the objector accepts the authority of the institution in general, but claims a right of conscience to refuse some particular directive. An adequate ethics of conscientious objection will, then, require an account of the institutional obligations that the objector claims a right to refuse. Yet such an account must avoid two extremes: ‘anarchism,’ where obligations apply only insofar …Read more
  •  84
    The Priority of Solidarity to Justice
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (4): 420-433. 2014.
    Recognising and responding to injustices that benefit us is a pervasive problem of contemporary life, and arguably a mark of moral seriousness in anyone who presumes to take moral stands at all. In response, a number of authors have defended the view that such benefits normally bring with them prima facie obligations of compensation. This ‘wrongful-benefits’ approach has considerable intuitive plausibility, much of it founded in the financial metaphor that gives it an appearance of precision. Ye…Read more
  •  21
    Territorial disputes have defined modern politics, but political theorists and philosophers have said little about how to resolve such disputes fairly. Is it even possible to do so? If historical attachments or divine promises are decisive, it may not be. More significant than these largely subjective claims are the ways in which people interact with land over time. Building from this insight, Avery Kolers evaluates existing political theories and develops an attractive alternative. He presents …Read more
  •  35
    Book review (review)
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (5): 463-470. 2006.
  •  55
    Subsidiarity, Secession, and Cosmopolitan Democracy
    Social Theory and Practice 32 (4): 659-669. 2006.
  •  115
    Ethical investing: The permissibility of participation
    Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (4). 2001.
    Ethical investing is all the rage. Unfortunately, excitement about it has outpaced plausible philosophical discussions. This article asks and answers two questions: “What counts as investment?”, and “What moral choices do investors have?”. I answer the first question broadly. Investment is pervasive in our economy, and by participating we share responsibility for corporate practices. These facts lead to an “austere conclusion”: short of outright withdrawal from the standard forms of investment, …Read more
  •  61
    A Moral Theory of Solidarity
    Oxford University Press UK. 2016.
    Accounts of solidarity typically defend it in teleological or loyalty terms, justifying it by invoking its goal of promoting justice or its expression of support for a shared community. Such solidarity seems to be a moral option rather than an obligation. In contrast, A Moral Theory of Solidarity develops a deontological theory grounded in equity. With extended reflection on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the US Civil Rights movement, Kolers defines solidarity as political action on ot…Read more
  •  45
    The Territorial State in Cosmopolitan Justice
    Social Theory and Practice 28 (1): 29-50. 2002.
    Cosmopolitans oppose excluding persons from political institutions on grounds of geographic location. But this problem of illegitimate exclusion is parallel to an equally pressing, but widely ignored, problem of illegitimate inclusion. Best understood, cosmopolitanism requires small-scale territorial self-determination. Impoverished states' inability to exclude powerful governments and regulatory institutions from decision procedures is a grave injustice that cosmopolitans ignore. Cultural group…Read more
  •  41
    Resilience as a Political Ideal
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 19 (1): 91-107. 2016.
    “Resilience” is booming. No longer a mere metaphor or abstract reference to dispositional properties, the resilience of communities or social-ecological systems is increasingly grounded in specific first-order properties. Consequently, resilience now constitutes a contentful and achievable partial conception of a good society. Yet political philosophers have taken little notice. The current article first discerns within recent social-scientific literature a set of attainable and measurable first…Read more
  •  39
    Cloning and Genetic Parenthood
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 12 (4): 401-410. 2003.
    This paper explores the implications of human reproductive cloning for our notions of parenthood. Cloning comes in numerous varieties, depending on the kind of cell to be cloned, the age of the source at the time the clone is created, the intended social relationship, if any, between source and clone, and whether the clone is to be one of one, or one of many, genetically identical individuals alive at a time. The moral and legal character of an act of cloning may, moreover, differ in light of th…Read more
  •  127
    The Grasshopper’s Error: Or, On How Life is a Game
    Dialogue 54 (4): 727-746. 2015.
    I here defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game—specifically, a ‘Suitsian’ game that meets the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one from Thomas Hurka (2006) and another from within The Grasshopper itself. In the process, I …Read more
  •  61
    Floating Provisos and Sinking Islands
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (3): 333-343. 2012.
    Rising sea levels may sink entire countries. Individualistic solutions to this climate catastrophe, such as those proposed by Meisels and Risse, are inadequate on both Kantian and Lockean criteria. This article concurs with Cara Nine's recent argument that such ‘ecological refugee states’ are entitled to territorial remedies. But Nine's proposal, founded on Locke's ‘sufficiency’ proviso and Nozick's famous application of it to waterholes in the desert, is instructively incorrect. Careful conside…Read more