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Racism, Instrumental Value, and Black ReparationsIn G. John M. Abbarno (ed.), Inherent and Instrumental Values: Excursions in Value Inquiry, University Press of America. 2014.
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10A Theory of Collective Responsibility and Some ApplicationsHeythrop Journal 23 (4): 395-412. 1982.
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43Minorities and Racist SymbolsPhilosophy 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
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The Justification of the Institution of Legal PunishmentDissertation, University of California, San Diego. 1973.
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28Abortion and TinkeringDialogue 17 (1): 122-125. 1978.Recent defences of abortion on demand have located the morally relevant difference between normal adult human beings and non-viable fetuses in the possession of personhood by the former but not by the latter. It is, so the story goes, morally wrong to kill innocent human beings because they are persons, but non-viable fetuses, though they be biologically human, are nevertheless not persons and may therefore be killed without doing anything morally wrong.
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15The Role and Responsibility of the Moral PhilosopherProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 61-69. 1982.
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50Does Society Have the Right to Force Pregnant Drug Addicts to Abort Their Fetuses?Social Theory and Practice 17 (3): 369-384. 1991.
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32Should Lawyers Be Prohibited From Misleadng Juries?Southwest Philosophy Review 10 (1): 67-75. 1994.
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28Principles for Measuring the Damages of American SlaveryPublic 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.
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59Can 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
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236Are 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
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66The Radical Feminist View of MotherhoodInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 4 (4): 25-34. 1989.
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19Does 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
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79Retributivism and Fallible Systems of PunishmentCriminal 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
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34Does strict judicial scrutiny involve thetu quoque fallacy?Law and Philosophy 9 (3). 1990.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
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218Blame for Nazi ReprisalsSymposion: 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
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56Anselm and Aquinas on the Fall of SatanProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 (n/a): 61-69. 1982.
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102Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?Social Theory and Practice 29 (4): 567-588. 2003.
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79Should 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
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18James P. Sterba, From Rationality to Equality (review)Social Theory and Practice 40 (3): 534-540. 2014.
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Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, ILDepartment Of PhilosophyProfessor
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |