•  4
    Beyond Self-Interest: A Personalist Approach to Human Action
    with Gregory R. Beabout, Ricardo F. Crespo, Stephen J. Grabill, and Kim Paffenroth
    Lexington 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
  •  8
    God’s Call
    Philosophia Christi 5 (1): 342-349. 2003.
  • Republican Liberty and Needs: A Kantian Welfare State
    Dissertation, 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
  •  114
    Moral judgment and emotions
    Journal 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.
  •  99
    Emotivism and deflationary truth
    Pacific 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
  •  13
    A Metaethical Option for Theists
    Journal 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
  •  4
    Copping Out on the Anything-Goes Objection
    Philosophia Christi 6 (2): 289-294. 2004.
  •  1
    God’s Call (review)
    Philosophia Christi 5 (1): 342-349. 2003.
  •  22
    Wealth and Poverty in the Liberal Tradition
    The Independent Review 13 (4): 493-510. 2009.
  •  71
    Three Concepts of Political Liberty
    Journal 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
  •  27
    Law, liberty, and Christian morality
    Religious Studies 43 (4): 395-415. 2007.
    There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should they. In the second part I argue that even if the Lockean arguments fail, committed biblical Christians sh…Read more
  •  72
    A Metaethical Option for Theists
    Journal 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
  •  85
    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.
  •  56
    Legal Toleration for Belief and Behaviour
    History 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
  •  2
    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
  •  22
    Legal punishment of immorality: once more into the breach
    Philosophical 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
  •  5
    A Metaethical Option for Theists
    Journal 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
  •  32
    Republican Equality
    Social 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
  •  7
    J.B. Schneewind, Essays On The History Of Moral Philosophy (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2): 295-298. 2012.
  •  63
    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.
  •  251
    The Normative Significance of Conscience
    Journal 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.