•  22
    Strategic Justice, Conventions, and Game Theory
    Synthese 204 (28): 1-12. 2024.
    Evolutionary, game-theoretic approaches to justice and the social contract have become increasingly popular in contemporary moral and political philosophy. Peter Vanderschraaf’s (2019) theory of strategic justice represents the most recent contribution to this tradition and, in many ways, can be viewed as a culmination of it. This article discusses some of the central features of Vanderschraaf’s theory and relates them to contributions in this collection on strategic justice, conventions, and ga…Read more
  •  44
    Ownership and convention
    Cognition 237 (C): 105454. 2023.
    The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent of human conventions. In this article, we examine adult judgments on this issue. We find evidence that familiar property norms regarding external objects (e.g., fish and strawberries) are treated as conventional on standard measures of authority dependence and context relativism. Previous work on the moral/conventional distincti…Read more
  •  45
    New Social Contract Theory
    In Michael Moehler & John Thrasher (eds.), New Approaches to Social Contract Theory: Liberty, Equality, Diversity, and the Open Society, Oxford University Press. pp. 3-14. 2024.
    Social contract theory enjoys a long history in moral and political philosophy. Since the European Enlightenment, social contract theory has become one of the most important traditions in moral and political philosophy. This chapter provides a brief introduction to central concepts in social contract theory and their development over time. Most importantly, the chapter clarifies some of the distinct features of new approaches to social contract theory (or “new social contract theory” for short) …Read more
  • Experimental political philosophy : a manifesto
    In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
  • What does labor mixing get you?
    In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
  •  45
    Green beards and signaling: Why morality is not indispensable
    with Toby Handfield and Julian García
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
  •  155
    The Fragility of Consensus: Public Reason, Diversity and Stability
    European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 933-954. 2013.
    John Rawls's transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism was driven by his rejection of Theory's account of stability. The key to his later account of stability is the idea of public reason. We see Rawls's account of stability as an attempt to solve a mutual assurance problem. We maintain that Rawls's solution fails because his primary assurance mechanism, in the form of public reason, is fragile. His conception of public reason relies on a condition of consensus that we argue is…Read more
  •  11
    When Equality Matters
    In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 409-419. 2018.
    Equality is at the heart of liberal, democratic political theory. Despite this, there is considerable disagreement about how we should understand equality in the context of liberal politics. Several different conceptions of equality will recommend different and often conflicting policies and institutions. Further, we can expect, in democratic societies, that citizens will disagree on the correct conception of equality. This leads to the diversity problem of equality—there is no one conception of…Read more
  •  94
    This book features new approaches to social contract theory. Whereas traditional social contract theories and their adaptations in the twentieth century were developed for fairly homogeneous societies, societies in the twenty-first century often are characterized by conflicting first-order directives that stem from deep moral, political, religious, and cultural diversity. To address such diversity and the complexities of contemporary societies, new approaches (including formal approaches) to soc…Read more
  •  46
    For more than twenty years, Peter Vanderschraaf’s work has combined rigorous game-theoretic analysis, innovative use of (social) scientific method, and normative analysis in the context of the social contract. Vanderschraaf’s work has influenced a significant interdisciplinary field of study and culminated in the publication of his book, Strategic Justice: Convention and Problems of Balancing Divergent Interests (OUP, 2019). Building upon his previous work, Vanderschraaf developed a new theory o…Read more
  •  42
    Self-Ownership as Personal Sovereignty
    Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (2): 116-133. 2019.
    Abstract:Self-ownership has fallen out of favor as a core moral and political concept. I argue that this is because the most popular conception of self-ownership, what I call the property conception, is typically linked to a libertarian (of the left or right) political program. Seeing self-ownership and libertarianism as being necessarily linked leads those who are not inclined toward libertarianism to reject the idea of self-ownership altogether. This, I argue, is a mistake. Self-ownership is a…Read more
  •  17
    Social evolution
    In Gerald F. Gaus & Fred D'Agostino (eds.), Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 643-655. 2012.
    It is a matter of dispute how far back evolutionary explanations of social order should be traced. Evolutionary ideas certainly appear in the work of the ancient Greek philosophers, but it seems reasonable to identify the origins of modern evolutionary thinking in the eighteenth-century natural histories of civil society such as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1750: Pt III), Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and Adam Smit…Read more
  •  36
    This is an undergraduate-level textbook that introduces classical political philosophy as a framework to evaluate the ethics of capitalism up to the present day. It is rooted in historical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century defenses of capitalism, as written by key proponents such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, and applies these arguments to contemporary issues such as wage inequality, global trade, climate change, and the welfare state. The authors aim to engage students in debating the et…Read more
  •  34
    On Minimal Morality
    Analytic Philosophy 61 (1): 46-56. 2020.
  •  78
    Two of a kind: Are norms of honor a species of morality?
    Biology and Philosophy 34 (3): 39. 2019.
    Should the norms of honor cultures be classified as a variety of morality? In this paper, we address this question by considering various empirical bases on which norms can be taxonomically organised. This question is of interest both as an exercise in philosophy of social science, and for its potential implications in meta-ethical debates. Using recent data from anthropology and evolutionary game theory, we argue that the most productive classification emphasizes the strategic role that moral n…Read more
  •  30
    Evaluating bad norms
    Social Philosophy and Policy 35 (1): 196-216. 2018.
  •  71
    Honor and Violence
    Human Nature 29 (4): 371-389. 2018.
    We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out-groups to draw inferences about the nature of the signaling group, thereby helping to solve perennial problems of social cooperation: deterrence and assurance. The analysis shows that apparently gratuitous acts of violence can be part of a system o…Read more
  •  31
    When Justice Demands Inequality
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (2): 172-194. 2015.
  •  69
    Public reason theories are characterized by three conditions: constructivism, representation, and stability. Constructivism holds that justification does not rely on any antecedent moral or political values outside of the procedure of agreement. Representation holds that the reasons for the choice in the model must be rationally explicable to real agents outside the model. Stability holds that the principles chosen in the procedure should be stable upon reflection, especially in the face of dive…Read more
  •  36
    When Justice Demands Inequality
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (4). 2014.
    In Rescuing Justice and Equality G.A. Cohen argues that justice requires an uncompromising commitment to equality. Cohen also argues, however, that justice must be sensitive to other values, including a robust commitment to individual freedom and to the welfare of the community. We ask whether a commitment to these other values means that, despite Cohen’s commitment to equality, his view requires that we make room for inequality in the name of justice? We argue that even on Cohen’s version of eg…Read more
  •  11
    Review of Bounds of Reason (review)
    Journal of Value Inquiry 45 (1). 2011.
  •  11
    Ordering Anarchy
    Rationality, Markets and Morals 5 (1): 30-46. 2014.
    Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things that we might otherwise not do. The question for the contractarian is whether the costs of these social rules can be rationally justified. I argue that traditional contract theories have tended to underestim…Read more
  • Bounds of Reason (review)
    Journal of Value Inquiry. 2011.
  •  105
    Uniqueness and symmetry in bargaining theories of justice
    Philosophical Studies 167 (3): 683-699. 2014.
    For contractarians, justice is the result of a rational bargain. The goal is to show that the rules of justice are consistent with rationality. The two most important bargaining theories of justice are David Gauthier’s and those that use the Nash’s bargaining solution. I argue that both of these approaches are fatally undermined by their reliance on a symmetry condition. Symmetry is a substantive constraint, not an implication of rationality. I argue that using symmetry to generate uniqueness un…Read more
  •  25
    Free Market Fairness (review)
    Public Choice. 2012.
  •  34
    The Virtues of Justice1
    In Timpe Kevin & Boyd Craig (eds.), Virtues and Their Vices, Oxford University Press. pp. 59. 2013.
  •  77
    When Justice Demands Inequality
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (4): 172-194. 2013.
    In Rescuing Justice and Equality G.A. Cohen argues that justice requires an uncompromising commitment to equality. Cohen also argues, however, that justice must be sensitive to other values, including a robust commitment to individual freedom and to the welfare of the community. We ask whether a commitment to these other values means that, despite Cohen’s commitment to equality, his view requires that we make room for inequality in the name of justice? We argue that even on Cohen’s version of eg…Read more