•  21
    Prospect Utilitarianism and the Original Position
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (4): 670-704. 2023.
    Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect th…Read more
  •  26
    The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles …Read more
  •  21
    Locke rejected anarchism. Locke defended the universal necessity of political governments on the grounds that the state of nature will occasionally generate the inconveniences of war. The standard interpretation of Locke identifies three main causes of war in the state of nature: the lack of a common judge, moral disagreement over the law of nature, and self-love. In this paper, I argue that the combination of these three factors does not guarantee that war will occur in every plausible scenario…Read more
  •  34
    In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrat…Read more
  •  434
    A Formal Theory of Democratic Deliberation
    with Hun Chung and John Duggan
    American Political Science Review 114 (1): 14-35. 2020.
    Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has be…Read more
  •  365
    A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature—namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses …Read more
  •  80
    Rawls’s Self-Defeat: A Formal Analysis
    Erkenntnis 85 (5): 1169-1197. 2020.
    One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’s worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls’s main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believe…Read more
  •  18
    A Critical Analysis of Michael Smith’s Defense of Ethical Internalism
    Journal of Ethics: The Korean Association of Ethics 1 (95): 85-105. 2014.
  •  31
    Philippa Foot’s Ethical Naturalism: A Defense
    Journal of Ethics: The Korean Association of Ethics 1 (101): 101-135. 2015.
  • Understanding Rationality in Hobbes and Hume
    Filozofia 69 (8): 687-696. 2014.
    Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of rationality which foreshadows that of David Hume. The Humean conception of instrumental rationality is a conjunction of the following two claims: (a) no preferences or desires can properly be said to be irrational in themselves, and (b) the role of reason or rationality can only be confined to informing the agent with true beliefs about the world, and revealing the most effective means that could satisfy the agent’s cur…Read more
  •  591
    Is Harry Frankfurt’s ‘Doctrine of Sufficiency’ Sufficient?
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 23 (1): 50-71. 2016.
    In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitarianism and presents what he calls the “doctrine of sufficiency.” According to the doctrine of sufficiency, what is morally important is not relative economic equality, but rather, whether somebody has enough, where “having enough” is a non-comparative standard of reasonable contentment that may differ from person to person given his/her aims and circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to show that Fr…Read more
  • Psychological Egoism and Hobbes
    Filozofia 71 (3): 197-208. 2016.
    Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is a theory of human psychology that claims that all human actions are ultimately motivated solely by one’s own self-interest. In this paper, I argue that there are reasons to think that Hobbes was not committed to psychological egoism in any of its plausible formulations.
  •  515
    In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (1) justice is the advantage of the stronger, and (2) justice is the good of the other, while injustice is to one’s own profit and advantage. In the beginning of Book II, Glaucon self-proclaims that he will be representing Thrasymachus’ claims in a better way, and provides a story of how justice has originated from a state of nature situation. However, Glaucon’s story of the origin of justice has an implication that justice i…Read more
  •  44
    John Rawls’s most mature notion of political order is “stability for the right reasons.” Stability for the right reasons is the kind of political order that Rawls hoped a well-ordered society could ideally achieve. In this paper, I demonstrate through the tools of modern game theory, the instability of “stability for the right reasons.” Specifically, I will show that a well-ordered society can completely destabilize by the introduction of an arbitrarily small number of non- compliers whenever in…Read more
  •  53
    Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements—or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world—obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibi…Read more
  •  4
    Directional Equilibria
    with John Duggan
    Journal of Theoretical Politics 30 (3): 272-305. 2018.
    We propose the solution concept of directional equilibrium for the multidimensional model of voting with general spatial preferences. This concept isolates alternatives that are stable with respect to forces applied by all voters in the directions of their gradients, and it extends a known concept from statistics for Euclidean preferences. We establish connections to the majority core, Pareto optimality, and existence and closed graph, and we provide non-cooperative foundations in terms of a loc…Read more
  •  25
    The impossibility of liberal rights in a diverse world
    Economics and Philosophy 35 (1): 1-27. 2019.
    A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person’s private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person’s basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especia…Read more
  •  21
    Can Classical Utilitarianism Participate in Overlapping Consensus?‐Why Not? (A Reply to Samuel Scheffler)
    Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 50 93-100. 2008.
    The main objective of Rawls’ Political Liberalism was to explain how a workable theory of justice can be established and sustained within a society that is marked by reasonable pluralism. In order to meet this end, Rawls introduces the following three concepts: political conception of justice, public reason, andoverlapping consensus. By relying on these three concepts, Rawls presents his two principles of justice as a two stage process. In the first stage, the two principles of justice are prese…Read more
  •  90
    Hobbes’s State of Nature: A Modern Bayesian Game-Theoretic Analysis
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3): 485--508. 2015.
    Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, without a government, our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes’s state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far do not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of conflict …Read more
  •  92
    Prospect utilitarianism: A better alternative to sufficientarianism
    Philosophical Studies 174 (8): 1911-1933. 2017.
    Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” :21–43, 1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough, relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have pr…Read more
  •  33
    Can Classical Utilitarianism Participate in Overlapping Consensus?‐Why Not? (A Reply to Samuel Scheffler)
    Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 50 93-100. 2008.
    The main objective of Rawls’ Political Liberalism was to explain how a workable theory of justice can be established and sustained within a society that is marked by reasonable pluralism. In order to meet this end, Rawls introduces the following three concepts: political conception of justice, public reason, andoverlapping consensus. By relying on these three concepts, Rawls presents his two principles of justice as a two stage process. In the first stage, the two principles of justice are prese…Read more