-
6Beyond Self-Interest: A Personalist Approach to Human ActionLexington Books. 2001.Foundations of Economic Personalism is a series of three book-length monographs, each closely examining a significant dimension of the Center for Economic Personalism's unique synthesis of Christian personalism and free-economic market theory. In the aftermath of the momentous geo-political and economic changes of the late 1980s, a small group of Christian social ethicists began to converse with free-market economists over the morality of market activity. This interdisciplinary exchange eventual…Read more
-
Republican Liberty and Needs: A Kantian Welfare StateDissertation, Bowling Green State University. 2003.The distinction between negative and positive liberty is familiar to political philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as non-interference. The positive variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently there has been an attempt on the part of a growing number of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars to recapture a third concept of political liberty. Philip Pettit has argued that political liberty is non-domination. People are free when no one has the capacity to interfere arbit…Read more
-
82A Metaethical Option for TheistsJournal of Religious Ethics 34 (1): 3-20. 2006.John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle-ground position in the twentieth century Anglo-American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist-expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds in establishing the middle-ground position Hare intended. However, I argue that prescriptive realism c…Read more
-
90Can a Good Christian be a Good Liberal?In Public Affairs Quarterly, . pp. 163-173. 2006.A good Christian can be a good liberal, and perhaps should be, because liberalism is the political theory most consistent with the biblical mandate concerning the role of the state and its officers. The argument for this is made in terms that any good Christian should find acceptable, and then two policy implications are briefly discussed.
-
63Legal Toleration for Belief and BehaviourHistory of Political Thought 31 (1): 87-106. 2010.While most Christians have come to accept that there should be no attempt on the part of the state to coerce strict matters of conscience, many actively support the state coercively interfering with certain modes of conduct that violate God’s moral law. The development of this stance occurred during the seventeenth century English toleration debates. Then, tolerationists argued that there should be toleration for dissenting Protestant denominations, and eventually for Catholics, heretics, and …Read more
-
2When experiments in living go awryIn Jonathan Riley (ed.), Studies in the History of Ethics, Symposium: J.S. Mill's Ethics, . 2007.What reactions are legitimate when someone is pursuing an experiment in living that has, in your considered view, gone awry? This essay discusses how the way Mill expressed his concern over the cultivation of individuality places some stress on the harm principle and on the permissibility of making the sort of judgments about another person that seem fairly natural to make when someone is pursuing an experiment in living that has gone considerably awry. It is surprisingly difficult, but I argue …Read more
-
25Legal punishment of immorality: once more into the breachPhilosophical Studies 174 (4): 983-1000. 2017.Gerald Dworkin’s overlooked defense of legal moralism attempts to undermine the traditional liberal case for a principled distinction between behavior that is immoral and criminal and behavior that is immoral but not criminal. According to Dworkin, his argument for legal moralism “depends upon a plausible idea of what making moral judgments involves.” The idea Dworkin has in mind here is a metaethical principle that many have connected to morality/reasons internalism. I agree with Dworkin that t…Read more
-
9Critical Study of Michael Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (review)Philo 10 (2): 158-167. 2007.
-
9A Metaethical Option for TheistsJournal of Religious Ethics 34 (1): 3-20. 2006.ABSTRACT John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle‐ground position in the twentieth century Anglo‐American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist‐expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds in establishing the middle‐ground position Hare intended. However, I argue that prescriptive …Read more
-
37Republican EqualitySocial Theory and Practice 38 (3): 432-454. 2012.Philosophers attracted to the republican ideal of freedom as nondomination sometimes offer the thought that a state concerned to promote this ideal would be more committed to economic justice than a liberal state pursuing freedom as noninterference. The republican commitment to economic justice is more demanding and its provisions are more substantial. These philosophers overstate republican redistributive commitments. The state need only provide a basic set of capabilities in order to achieve t…Read more
-
8J.B. Schneewind, Essays On The History Of Moral Philosophy (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2): 295-298. 2012.
-
63Copping Out on the Anything-Goes ObjectionIn Philosophia Christi, . pp. 289-294. 2004.I suggest a strategy for defending the Divine Command Theory of morality against the familiar “anything goes” objection. The objection is that this theory of morality has counter-intuitive moral implications. I argue that the objection fails to notice the difference between a first-order expression of a moral proposition and a second-order metaethical account of what justifies moral standards. The objection treats the theory as if it were the former, when it is actually the latter.
-
264The Normative Significance of ConscienceJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (3): 1-21. 2012.Despite the increasing amount of literature on the legal and political questions triggered by a commitment to liberty of conscience, an explanation of the normative significance of conscience remains elusive. We argue that the few attempts to address this fail to capture the reasons people have to respect the consciences of others. We offer an alternative account that utilizes the resources of the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy to explain why conscience matters.
-
118Moral judgment and emotionsJournal of Value Inquiry 38 (3): 375-381. 2004.Linda Zagzebski’s recent account of the role of emotion in the structure of moral judgments aims to reconcile the role of affect in these judgments with moral cognitivism. The account is implausible because it is based on a problematic analysis of what it is to express a moral attitude and because it makes making a moral judgment unduly difficult. I suggest a way to reconcile Zagzebski’s intuitions about moral judgments that does not encounter these two problems.
-
117Emotivism and deflationary truthPacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (3). 2002.The paper investigates different ways to understand the claim that non-cognitivist theories of morality are incoherent. According to the claim, this is so because, on one theory of truth, non-cognitivists are not able to deny objective truth to moral judgments without taking a substantive normative position. I argue that emotivism is not self-defeating in this way. The charge of incoherence actually only amounts to a claim that emotivism is incompatible with deflationary truth, but this claim is…Read more
-
18A Metaethical Option for TheistsJournal of Religious Ethics 34 (1): 3-20. 2006.ABSTRACT John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle‐ground position in the twentieth century Anglo‐American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist‐expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds in establishing the middle‐ground position Hare intended. However, I argue that prescriptive …Read more
-
28J.B. Schneewind, Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 447 pages. ISBN: 978-0199563012 (hbk.). Hardback/Paperback: $90/35 (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2): 295-298. 2012.
-
20Alexander Kaufman, welfare in the Kantian state (book review)Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (4): 563-566. 2002.
-
71Three Concepts of Political LibertyJournal of Markets and Morality 6 (1): 117-142. 2003.The distinction between negative and positive liberty is familiar to political philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as noninterference. The positive variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently there has been an attempt on the part of a growing number of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars to recapture a third concept of political liberty uncovered from within the rich tradition of civic republicanism. Republican political liberty is freedom as nondomination. I argue t…Read more