•  25
    Anodyne Privatization
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 16 (2). 2023.
    Privatization of state services has been a flashpoint for political conflict over the past several decades. The goal of this paper is to explain why someone who is a supporter of the welfare state might also support the privatization of certain state services, in certain cases. Recent philosophical literature has focused on the most problematic privatization initiatives, especially the introduction of private prisons and military contractors. As a counterpoint, this paper describes a set of anod…Read more
  •  36
    Three Sources of Economic Inequality
    Social Philosophy and Policy 39 (2): 99-121. 2022.
    There are three distinct forces that conspire to produce a great deal of economic misery. We can refer to them, for convenience, as misfortune, unfairness, and improvidence. Political philosophers have often shown an interest in one or another of these, but seldom all three. Furthermore, those who do acknowledge all three have often felt driven to collapse them into one root cause of inequality. My goal in this essay will be to argue that the three are independent of one another, but more import…Read more
  •  206
    The challenge of policing minorities in a liberal society
    Journal of Political Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  29
    The violence inherent in the system
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 49 (8): 883-902. 2023.
    The concept of ‘the violence inherent in the system’ was famously satirized by Monty Python in their movie The Holy Grail. In order to avoid ridicule, left-wing theorists and activists for a long time stopped using the expression. The underlying social critique, which had given rise to the expression, was also widely dismissed from serious consideration, merely through invocation of the phrase. Because of this, there has been little explicit discussion of the actual political theory that was bei…Read more
  •  18
    Unpacking the nudge muddle
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    Libertarian paternalism initially focused on policy domains in which the state was prohibited from interfering coercively in decision making out of respect for individual autonomy. Because adjustment of the s-frame was not an option, achieving better outcomes through manipulation of the i-frame seemed attractive. This original motivation was unfortunately lost in the transition from libertarian paternalism to the nudge framework.
  •  44
    Ethics for Capitalists
    Friesen Press. 2023.
    Ethics for Capitalists offers an accessible, comprehensive statement of the Market Failures Approach to business ethics. While the competitive context of the market economy provides economic actors greater freedom to pursue their interests, it also imposes moral constraints on the range of strategies they may employ. The pursuit of profit must be consistent with the overall objective of market institutions, which is to promote efficiency in the production and allocation of goods and services. Et…Read more
  •  1
    Jürgen Habermas
    In John R. Shook & Joseph Margolis (eds.), A Companion to Pragmatism, Blackwell. 2006.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Transcendental Arguments The Linguistic Turn Differences From Apel.
  •  4
    An Explicitative Conception of Moral Theory
    In Jacob Levy, Jocelyn Maclure & Daniel Weinstock (eds.), Interpreting Modernity: Essays on the Work of Charles Taylor, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 160-181. 2020.
  •  32
    Mistakes Were Made: The Role of Catallactic Bias in the Financial Crisis
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 42 (1): 229-247. 2018.
  •  79
    Why do people behave immorally when drunk?
    Philosophical Explorations 18 (3): 310-329. 2015.
    Alcohol intoxication is a major source of antisocial behavior in our society, strongly implicated in various forms of interpersonal aggression. Yet, moral philosophers have paid surprisingly little attention to the literature on alcohol and its effects. In part, this is because philosophers who have adopted a more empirically informed approach to moral psychology have gravitated toward moral sentimentalism, while the literature on alcohol intoxication fits very poorly with the sentimentalist acc…Read more
  •  2
    Why a UBI Will Never Be High Enough
    Journal of Applied Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Schemes to replace traditional welfare programmes with a universal basic income (UBI) are sometimes presented as a way to reduce overall economic inequality. But because they lower the implicit marginal taxation rate of individuals entering the workforce, they have the effect of increasing economic inequality between those who opt out of the workforce and those who choose to participate. This article examines the effect that an increase in this income gap can be expected to have on the perceived…Read more
  •  8
    Why a UBI Will Never Be High Enough
    Journal of Applied Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Schemes to replace traditional welfare programmes with a universal basic income (UBI) are sometimes presented as a way to reduce overall economic inequality. But because they lower the implicit marginal taxation rate of individuals entering the workforce, they have the effect of increasing economic inequality between those who opt out of the workforce and those who choose to participate. This article examines the effect that an increase in this income gap can be expected to have on the perceived…Read more
  •  42
    Review of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments. San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018, 158 pp (review)
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 12 (1): 114-124. 2019.
  •  64
    Morality, convention and conventional morality
    Philosophical Explorations 20 (3): 276-293. 2017.
    Among anthropologists and sociologists, it is widely believed that moral rules are best understood as a type of social norm. Moral philosophers, however, have largely been hostile to this suggestion. In recent years, the impulse to distinguish moral rules from others types of social norm has received what many take to be empirical support from the work of Elliot Turiel and his collaborators, who have argued that there are two distinct “domains” of social cognition, the “moral” and the “conventio…Read more
  •  38
    Is Majority Privilege Unjust?
    Public Affairs Quarterly 36 (4): 257-279. 2022.
    One of the most important themes in recent thinking about racial justice in the United States has been a shift in emphasis away from the traditional issue of racial discrimination, toward an exploration of the various forms of privilege that dominant groups enjoy. Many of the privileges that whites have been encouraged to explore, however, do not stem directly from their racial identity, but rather from the fact that they belong the majority demographic group. Describing these benefits as a “pri…Read more
  • The contribution of economics to business ethics
    In Eugene Heath, Byron Kaldis & Alexei M. Marcoux (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Business Ethics, Routledge. 2018.
  •  17
    "Although the task of formulating an appropriate policy response to the problem of anthropogenic climate change is one that raises a number of very difficult normative issues, environmental ethicists have not played an influential role in government deliberations. This is primarily due to their rejection of many of the assumptions that structure the debates over policy. This book offers a philosophical defense of these assumptions, in order to overcome the major conceptual barriers to the partic…Read more
  •  25
    Cooperation and Social Justice
    University of Toronto Press. 2022.
    This book analyses tensions that arise between the principles of social justice and the need for cooperation to advance collective goals.
  •  21
    7 The Ethics of Public Administration
    In Edward Hall & Andrew Sabl (eds.), Political Ethics: A Handbook, Princeton University Press. pp. 147-169. 2022.
  •  393
    A market failures approach to justice in health
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (2): 165-189. 2022.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 165-189, May 2022. It is generally acknowledged that a certain amount of state intervention in health and health care is needed to address the significant market failures in these sectors; however, it is also thought that the primary rationale for state involvement in health must lie elsewhere, for example in an egalitarian commitment to equalizing access to health care for all citizens. This paper argues that a complete theory of justic…Read more
  •  524
    What are the obligations of pharmaceutical companies in a global health emergency?
    with Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Allen Buchanan, Shuk Ying Chan, Cécile Fabre, Daniel Halliday, Lisa Herzog, R. J. Leland, Matthew S. McCoy, Ole F. Norheim, Carla Saenz, G. Owen Schaefer, Kok-Chor Tan, Christopher Heath Wellman, Jonathan Wolff, and Govind Persad
    Lancet 398 (10304): 1015. 2021.
    All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including…Read more
  •  89
    Post-deliberative Democracy
    Analyse & Kritik 43 (2): 285-308. 2021.
    Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can …Read more
  •  58
    Why a UBI Will Never Be High Enough
    Journal of Applied Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Schemes to replace traditional welfare programmes with a universal basic income (UBI) are sometimes presented as a way to reduce overall economic inequality. But because they lower the implicit marginal taxation rate of individuals entering the workforce, they have the effect of increasing economic inequality between those who opt out of the workforce and those who choose to participate. This article examines the effect that an increase in this income gap can be expected to have on the perceived…Read more
  •  19
    In most liberal democracies for example, the central bank is as independent as the supreme court, yet deals with a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. How do these public servants make these policy decisions? What normative principles inform their judgments? In The Machinery of Government, Joseph Heath attempts to answer these questions. He looks to the actual practice of public administration to see how normative questions are addressed. More broadly, he attempts to provide th…Read more
  • Rawls on Global Justice: A Defence
    In Daniel M. Weinstock (ed.), Global Justice, Global Institutions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 31--193. 2007.
  •  200
    The Benefits of Cooperation
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (4): 313-351. 2006.
    There is an idea, extremely common among social contract theorists, that the primary function of social institutions is to secure some form of cooperative benefit. If individuals simply seek to satisfy their own preferences in a narrowly instrumental fashion, they will find themselves embroiled in collective action problems – interactions with an outcome that is worse for everyone involved than some other possible outcome. Thus they have reason to accept some form of constraint over their cond…Read more
  •  36
    Threats, Promises and Communicative Action
    European Journal of Philosophy 3 (3): 225-241. 1995.
  •  105
    The structure of hip consumerism
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 27 (6): 1-17. 2001.
    Critics of mass culture often identify 1950s-style status competition as one of the central forces driving consumerism. Thomas Frank has challenged this view, arguing that countercultural rebellion now provides the primary source of consumerism in our society, and that ‘cool’ has become its central ideological expression. This paper provides a rearticulation and defense of Frank's thesis, first identifying consumerism as a type of collective action problem, then showing how the ‘hip consumer’ is…Read more
  •  10
    The Transcendental Necessity of Morality
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2): 378-395. 2003.
    David Gauthier tries to defend morality by showing that rational agents would choose to adopt a fundamental choice disposition that permits them to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas. In this paper, I argue that Gauthier, rather than trying to work out a prudential justification for his favored choice disposition, should opt for a transcendental justification. I argue that the disposition in question is the product of socialization, not rational choice. However, only agents who are socialized in s…Read more