•  6
    Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe by John Skorupski (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 61 (4): 714-718. 2023.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe by John SkorupskiJ. P. MessinaJohn Skorupski. Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 560. Hardcover, $130.00.John Skorupski's Being and Freedom traces the development of modern ethics in France, Germany, and England, as set in motion by two great revolutions: the French Revolution and Kant's methodological revolution…Read more
  • Public Calls for Censorship as Bad Speech
    Free Speech Law 2 (1): 87-106. 2022.
    Responsible speakers avoid trafficking in bad speech, that is, speech that they have reason to believe causes or constitutes net harm. Moreover, third parties have prima facie reason to suppress such speech. As recent events have made salient just how harmful speech can be, there has been a corresponding increase in calls to suppress or censor such speech. This article argues that there are three mechanisms by which calls to suppress bad speech themselves tend to cause or constitute harm. Parado…Read more
  • Although many recent free speech skeptics claim Millian credentials, they neglect the more pessimistic elements of Mill's account of human nature. Once we recover the darker elements of Mill's thought, American-style laissez-faire in the domain of expression looks significantly more attractive. Indeed, this paper argues that if Mill is correct about human nature, we have good reason to oppose recent proposed restrictions on expression and to embrace a legal regime that tolerates much speech that…Read more
  •  7
    Private Censorship
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorsh…Read more
  •  14
    In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims that “the first command” of all self-regarding duties is to know our “heart.” Kant ostensibly identifies our heart with our moral disposition. Strangely, this appears to be precisely the sort of knowledge that, elsewhere, Kant claims is epistemically inaccessible to us. While the more sophisticated attempts to resolve this difficulty succeed in situating an injunction to know the quality of one’s disposition within a Kantian epistemic framework, no accou…Read more
  •  10
    This book features new perspectives on the ethics and politics of free speech. Contributors draw on insights from philosophy, psychology, political theory, journalism, literature, and history to respond to pressing problems involving free speech in liberal societies. Recent years have seen an explosion of academic interest in free speech. However, most recent work has focused on constitutional protections for free speech and on issues related to academic freedom and campus politics. The chapters…Read more
  •  4
    Kant against Legal Paternalism: A Conditional Defense
    In Camilla Serck-Hanssen & Beatrix Himmelmann (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress, De Gruyter. pp. 1827-1834. 2021.
  •  35
    The postulate of private right and Kant’s semi-historical principles of property
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (1): 64-83. 2021.
    Whereas several commentators have held that Kant’s argument for the postulate of private right fails insofar as it begs the question, I argue here that this criticism misses the mark. Critics have...
  •  621
    Morals From Rationality Alone? Some Doubts
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (3): 248-273. 2020.
    Contractarians aim to derive moral principles from the dictates of instrumental rationality alone. But it is well-known that contractarian moral theories struggle to identify normative principles that are both uniquely rational and morally compelling. Michael Moehler's recent book, *Minimal Morality* seeks to avoid these difficulties by developing a novel "two-level" social contract theory, which restricts the scope of contractarian morality to cases of deep and persistent moral disagreement. Ye…Read more
  •  27
    Kant’s Provisionality Thesis
    Kantian Review 24 (3): 439-463. 2019.
    I argue that Kant’s mature political philosophy entails the provisionality thesis. The provisionality thesis asserts that in a world like ours, populated with beings sufficiently like us, acquired rights (rights to external objects of choice, including property, sovereignty and territory) are necessarily provisional. I motivate the standard view, which restricts the notion of provisional right to the state of nature and the transition from the state of nature to the civil condition. I then provi…Read more
  •  44
    Desert in liberal justice: beyond institutional guarantees
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2): 248-267. 2016.
    I argue that a theory of distributive justice is sensitive to desert if and only if it does not require an institutional scheme that prevents individuals from treating one another as they deserve, and requires a desert ethos. A desert ethos is a set of principles that, though not embodied in a society’s basic coercive structure, nevertheless governs interpersonal relations between citizens. These two necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for ‘giving desert its due’ in a theory of justice. …Read more
  •  57
    Situationism and the Neglect of Negative Moral Education
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (4): 835-849. 2015.
    This paper responds to the recent situationist critique of practical rationality and decision-making. According to that critique, empirical evidence indicates that our choices are governed by morally irrelevant situational factors and not durable character traits, and rarely result from overt rational deliberation. This critique is taken to indicate that popular moral theories in the Western tradition are descriptively deficient, even if normatively plausible or desirable. But we believe that th…Read more