•  47
    Social justice and the distribution of republican freedom
    European Journal of Political Theory (1): 147488511668475. 2016.
    A republican theory of social justice specifies how republican freedom should be distributed. The goal of this paper is to assess the plausibility of two recently proposed principles of republican social justice: an aggregative maximizing principle defended by Philip Pettit in Republicanism and a sufficiency principle of republican social justice offered by Pettit in On the People’s Terms. The maximizing principle must be rejected because it permits under-protecting vulnerable members of society…Read more
  •  42
    Lockean property and literary works
    Legal Theory 14 (4): 257-280. 2008.
    This paper develops a Lockean account of literary property. Seana Shiffrin has recently argued, on the basis of an egalitarian interpretation of Locke's theory of property, that the Lockean view does not justify property rights in intellectual works. I argue that Shiffrin fails to take an important strand of Locke's view into account, namely, the view that makers have rights to what they have made. If this aspect of Locke's view is given its proper place, a plausible Lockean account of property …Read more
  •  136
    Enlightenment and freedom
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (2). 2008.
    Kant’s main concern in his famous essay on enlightenment is the relation between enlightenment and the political order. His account of this relation turns on the idea of the freedom of public reason. This paper develops a new interpretation of Kant’s concept of public reason. First, it argues that Kant conceives of public reasoning as a matter of speaking in one’s own name to the commonwealth of the public. Second, it draws on Kant’s republican conception of freedom in order to develop an accoun…Read more
  •  11
    Legal moralists hold that the immorality of an action is a sufficient reason for the state to prevent it. Liberals in the tradition of Mill generally reject legal moralism. However, Larry Alexander has recently developed an argument that suggests that a class of legal restrictions on freedom that most liberals endorse is, and perhaps can only be, justified on moralistic grounds. According to Alexander, environmental restrictions designed to preserve nature or beauty are forms of legal moralism. …Read more