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12Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept of universal human rights. This collection of essays explores the foundations of universal human rights in four sections devoted to their nature, application, enforcement, and limits, concluding that shared rights help to constitute a universal human community, which supports local customs and separate state sovereignty. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives…Read more
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12Tolerance, Liberalism, and CommunityThe Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 41 98-103. 1998.The liberal principle of tolerance limits the use of coercion by a commitment to the broadest possible toleration of rival religious and moral conceptions of the worthy way of life. While accepting the communitarian insight that moral thought is necessarily rooted in a social self with conceptions of the good, I argue that this does not undermine liberal tolerance. There is no thickly detailed way of life so embedded in our self-conceptions that liberal neutrality is blocked at the level of refl…Read more
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1Children and the Individualism of Mill and NozickPacific Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4): 415. 1978.
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Constitutional Integrity and CompromiseIn Diana T. Meyers & Kenneth Kipnis (eds.), Philosophical Dimensions of the Constitution, Westview Press. 1988.
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65Protestant Hermeneutics and the Rule of Law: Gadamer and DworkinRatio Juris 3 (1): 14-28. 1990.The rule of law demands that the state's coercive power be used only according to settled general laws, applied impersonally. But an individualist theory of legal inter pretation cannot provide the shared understanding required. Gadamer appeals to the practical wisdom of judges and lawyers, who will agree on how to apply law to new cases. But this account is adequate only for very cohesive societies. Dworkin's account rests on propositional knowledge of a supposed best interpretation of an entir…Read more
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30Hume’s “Wilt Chamberlain Argument” and taxationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (S1): 148-160. 2012.Robert Nozick addresses the idea of egalitarian redistribution in an argument standardly considered original: the “Wilt Chamberlain Argument”. However, this argument is found in David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, first published in 1751. Placing this argument within a Humean and Hayekian, rather than a Lockean or Kantian, perspective radically changes its import for issues of economic justice. Rather than vindicating the radical individualism of Nozick and other liberta…Read more
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25Sovereignty, Augusto Pinochet, and legal positivismHuman Rights Review 8 (1): 67-77. 2006.The imperativist strand of positivism derives law from an actual person or set of persons wielding a monopoly of force. The rule-based positivism of H.L.A. Hart has more sublty identified a matter-of-fact rule of recognition in place of such a sovereign one or many. But sovereignty is not a matter-of-fact of any kind; rather it is partly the product of what I call qua arguments. I reconstruct the reasoning, in the extradition case of Augusto Pinochet in the British House of Lords, providing a fo…Read more
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2NE Simmonds, Central Issues in Jurisprudence Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 8 (4): 155-157. 1988.
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Areas of Interest
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Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Social Sciences |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |