• Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
    Department Of Philosophy
    Professor
University of California, San Diego
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 73
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law
  •  7
    Consciousness and Social Life
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38 (3): 437-438. 1978.
  •  34
    Minorities and Racist Symbols
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 7 (2-3): 5-10. 2000.
    Suppose there arose a racist group which began terrorizing Arab-Americans. They always scrawled a Star of David wherever they committed their crimes, and they conducted parades in which they carried the Israeli flag. Suppose further that most Americans, but not a small group of American Jews, developed a strong, widespread, and long-standing association between the Star of David and racism. Finally, suppose someone suggested that those Jews who persisted in displaying the Israeli flag in their s…Read more
  • The Justification of the Institution of Legal Punishment
    Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. 1973.
  •  48
    Capital punishment and rehabilitation
    with Matthew J. Kelly
    Philosophical Studies 34 (3). 1978.
  •  19
    Should Lawyers Be Prohibited From Misleadng Juries?
    Southwest Philosophy Review 10 (1): 67-75. 1994.
  •  28
    Principles for Measuring the Damages of American Slavery
    Public Affairs Quarterly, 16 (4): 377-404. 2002.
    Either slavery has done no measurable damage to the descendants of slaves, or. if it has. that there are no individuals in the present generation who are obligated to make payments to them,though the federal government may be responsible for a portion of the damages.
  •  45
    Justice in Marx, Engels, and Lenin
    Studies in Soviet Thought 18 (3): 223-233. 1978.
  •  52
    Can Retributivists Support Legal Punishment?
    The Monist 63 (2): 185-198. 1980.
    In the first half of this century, Anglo-American moral philosophers concerned themselves with the vexing question of whether legal officials could deliberately “punish” the innocent and whether a utilitarian justification for such a practice is possible. Interest in this topic waned after Rawls drew a crucial distinction in his article, “Two Concepts of Rules,” between two kinds of systems for dealing with wrongdoing. One was legal punishment, as we understand it; the other was the practice of …Read more
  •  221
    Are Confederate Monuments Racist?
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (2): 287-308. 2001.
    I offer a way of classifying Confederate monuments and two ways of extracting meaning from these monuments. A few of them are racist on one of the two interpretations. Most of them, in the final analysis, implicitly acknowledge racial equality by extolling in African Americans the same virtues to which southern whites themselves aspired. Toppling those which seem racist entails serious difficulties, constitutional and philosophical. Additional interpretive material about the controversial ones i…Read more
  •  50
    The Radical Feminist View of Motherhood
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 4 (4): 25-34. 1989.
  •  12
    Does the threat of aids create difficulties for Lord Devlin's critics?
    Journal of Social Philosophy 20 (3): 33-45. 1989.
    Although over twenty years have passed since the Hart-Devlin exchange, the controversy over society's right to punish homosexuals remains alive, as is shown by recent concern over the spread of AIDS and the recent announcement of the Supreme Court that “majority sentiments about the morality of homosexuality” constitute an adequate justification for sodomy statutes under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. Lord Devlin's moral justification for punishing homosexual conduct seems t…Read more
  •  74
    Retributivism and Fallible Systems of Punishment
    Criminal Justice Ethics 30 (3): 240-266. 2011.
    Abstract I argue for the following, which I dub the ?fallibility syllogism?: (1) All systems of criminal punishment that inflict suffering on the innocent are unjust from a desert-based, retributivist point of view. (2) All past or present human systems of criminal punishment inflict suffering on the innocent. (3) Therefore, all such human systems of criminal punishment are unjust from a desert-based, retributivist point of view. My argument for the first premise is organized in the following wa…Read more
  •  28
    To protect what it deems fundamental rights, the Supreme Court strictly scrutinizes legislation that impinges on these rights. The Court views such legislation as a means to some end the legislation seeks to accomplish. The Court requires that the statute be neither overinclusive nor underinclusive; the legislation may not affect more people than necessary to achieve its end, nor is the statute permitted to leave some people out in achieving its end.I argue that when legislation imposes burdens,…Read more
  •  166
    Blame for Nazi Reprisals
    Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 3 (3): 325-335. 2016.
    I examine the blameworthiness of the resistance for Nazi reprisals in three morally disturbing cases which occurred in Nazi occupied Europe. I have organized my argument in the following way. After describing the cases, I propose a set of criteria for assessing the degree to which actors are blameworthy for the deaths of innocents. Using these criteria, I then explore the blameworthiness of the resistance members in these cases. I follow this analysis with an application of the doctrine of doubl…Read more
  •  49
    Anselm and Aquinas on the Fall of Satan
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 (n/a): 61-69. 1982.
  •  71
    Should there be an Apology for American slavery?
    Should There Be an Apology for American Slavery? 21 (2): 125-148. 2007.
    Contemporary white Americans cannot meaningfully ask forgiveness from present-day African Americans for slavery, because such a group apology does not have the mental state needed to communicate regret and intend that listeners forgive the group. Even if the requisite mental state were present, contemporary white Americans are not responsible for the wrong and cannot apologize for wrongs for which they are not responsible. Additionally, such a purported apology is not directed to the victims of…Read more
  •  9
    James P. Sterba, From Rationality to Equality (review)
    Social Theory and Practice 40 (3): 534-540. 2014.
  •  79
    Does Ethical Meat Eating Maximize Utility?
    Social Theory and Practice 31 (4): 499-511. 2005.
  •  10
    A Catholic, Non-Thomist View of Human Rights
    New Scholasticism 54 (2): 153-167. 1980.
  •  34
    The soviet view of the moral and legal obligation of states
    Studies in East European Thought 33 (4): 341-361. 1987.
  •  19
    The Concept of Democracy In Gregg v. Georgia
    Journal of Social Philosophy 8 (1): 1-3. 1977.
  •  22
    In this book, George Schedler offers moral and legal perspectives on two legacies of the Civil War: the adoption of the Confederate flag by Southern states and the question of African American reparations. Schedler's analysis of reparations focuses on the principle that whatever the enslaved would have earned and enjoyed had they not been enslaved should determine compensation
  •  36
    Forcing Pregnant Drug Addicts to Abort
    Social Theory and Practice 18 (3): 347-358. 1992.
  •  23
    Criminal Justice and Strict Liability: The Obligation of Society to Punish Only the Guilty
    with Matthew J. Kelly
    American Journal of Jurisprudence 27 (1): 109-113. 1982.
    We argue in this essay that any society that organizes itself to punish criminals should in justice consider itself strictly liable to punish only those who are guilty in fact of the crimes for which they are punished. We argue that justice, not utility, is the basis of the obligation society has not to punish the innocent and that any society that is just would bind itself by statute to compensate the innocents it punishes by mistake. We hope to have made it evident that when the justice of cri…Read more
  •  12
    Anselm and Aquinas on the Fall of Satan: A Case Study of Retributive Punishment
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 56 (n/a): 61. 1982.
  • The argument from ignorance
    International Logic Review 11 66-71. 1980.