•  56
    Amartya Sen has argued that contractarian theories of justice inevitably fall victim to the problem of parochialism, for the reason that they rely on a problematically narrow conception of impartiality. Sen finds a corrective model of impartiality in Adam Smith’s figure of the impartial spectator. In this essay, I argue that Sen’s invocation of the spectator to resolve the problem of parochialism is unfounded, as the impartial spectator is fundamentally a product of socialization that serves to …Read more
  •  23
    Pluralism, conflict, and justification: the stability function of religious exemptions
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 24 (4): 1-25. 2018.
    Legal and philosophical theories of religious exemptions have primarily understood them as a means toward one or more moral ends: protecting rights and securing equality, primarily. But exemptions also serve an under-theorized stabilizing function in resolving conflicts between law and belief. In this paper, I argue that these conflicts pose a challenge to public justification, and ipso facto to political stability. I then show how religious exemptions can support stability by ameliorating these…Read more
  •  16
    Many theories of liberal public reason exclude claims derived from religion on grounds that religious beliefs are not publicly ‘accessible’, because they are not amenable to meaningful evaluation by outsiders to the faith. Some authors, though, have argued that at least some religious beliefs are, in fact, publicly accessible. This paper examines the consequences of these arguments by exploring the accessibility requirement in relation to U.S. judicial precedent concerning religious accommodatio…Read more
  •  14
    The Globalization of Catholic Social Teaching
    Journal of Catholic Social Thought 12 (1): 87-108. 2015.
  •  5
    Pluralism, conflict, and justification: the stability function of religious exemptions
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 24 (4): 460-484. 2021.
    Legal and philosophical theories of religious exemptions have primarily understood them as a means toward one or more moral ends: protecting rights and securing equality, primarily. But exemptions also serve an under-theorized stabilizing function in resolving conflicts between law and belief. In this paper, I argue that these conflicts pose a challenge to public justification, and ipso facto to political stability. I then show how religious exemptions can support stability by ameliorating these…Read more