•  329
    The labor theory of property acquisition
    Journal of Philosophy 73 (18): 653-664. 1976.
    This symposium paper for the APA analyzes Locke's labor theory of property acquisition as a formal argument – or set of alternative arguments – and shows how several of them are indeed sound, if appropriately limited by what amounts to a social welfare proviso. That proviso is, however, strong enough to limit the acquisition of private property in a significant way. The argument here anticipates fuller and more decisive ones in later work by the same author.
  •  261
    _Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations,_ first published in 1977, comprehensively examines the general justifications for systems of private property rights, and discusses with great clarity the major arguments as to the rights and responsibilities of property ownership. In particular, the arguments that hold that there are natural rights derived from first occupancy, labour, utility, liberty and virtue are considered, as are the standard anti-property arguments based on disutility, virtue an…Read more
  •  237
    The finality of moral judgments: A reply to mrs. Foot
    Philosophical Review 82 (3): 364-370. 1973.
  •  206
    From the editor
    Ethics 105 (2). 1995.
  •  147
    Trust as noncognitive security about motives
    Ethics 107 (1): 43-61. 1996.
  •  131
    How should we respond to individuals with disabilities? What does it mean to be disabled? Over fifty million Americans, from neonates to the fragile elderly, are disabled. Some people say they have the right to full social participation, while others repudiate such claims as delusive or dangerous. In this compelling book, three experts in ethics, medicine, and the law address pressing disability questions in bioethics and public policy. Anita Silvers, David Wasserman, and Mary B. Mahowald test i…Read more
  •  122
    Reciprocity
    Routledge. 1986.
    The tendency to reciprocate – to return good for good and evil for evil – is a potent force in human life, and the concept of reciprocity is closely connected to fundamental notions of ‘justice’, ‘obligation’ or ‘duty’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘equality’. In _Reciprocity_, first published in 1986,_ _Lawrence Becker presents a sustained argument about reciprocity, beginning with the strategy for developing a moral theory of the virtues. He considers the concept of reciprocity in detail, contending that i…Read more
  •  92
    Analogy in legal reasoning
    Ethics 83 (3): 248-255. 1973.
  •  90
    Encyclopedia of ethics (edited book)
    with Charlotte B. Becker
    Routledge. 1992.
    The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded, and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Aristotelian Ethics * Avicenna * Bad Faith * Ben…Read more
  •  88
    The obligation to work
    Ethics 91 (1): 35-49. 1980.
  •  86
    A New Stoicism
    Princeton University Press. 1998.
    The question addressed by this book is what, if anything, stoic ethics would be like today if stoicism had had a continuous history to the present day as a plausible and coherent set of philosophical commitments and methods. The book answers that question by arguing that most of the ancient doctrines of Stoic ethics remain defensible today, at least when ancient Stoicism's cosmological commitments are replaced by modern scientific ones.
  •  79
    This unpublished paper from 2004 argues that the agenda for positive psychology laid out by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in their massive work Character Strengths and Virtues: a Handbook and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) might be improved by making several conceptual changes: 1) by developing general concepts of virtue (singular), and of positive health to clarify the relationships between specific virtues and competing conceptions of positive health; 2) by…Read more
  •  68
    Axiology, deontology, and agent morality: The need for coordination (review)
    Journal of Value Inquiry 6 (3): 213-220. 1972.
  •  67
    Good Lives: Prolegomena*: LAWRENCE C. BECKER
    Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (2): 15-37. 1992.
    A philosophical essay under this title faces severe rhetorical challenges. New accounts of the good life regularly and rapidly turn out to be variations of old ones, subject to a predictable range of decisive objections. Attempts to meet those objections with improved accounts regularly and rapidly lead to a familiar impasse — that while a life of contemplation, or epicurean contentment, or stoic indifference, or religious ecstasy, or creative rebellion, or self-actualization, or many another th…Read more
  •  66
    Reissue of Becker's 1973 monograph, which argues the following: Much discussion of morality presupposes that moral judgments are always, at bottom, arbitrary. Moral scepticism, or at least moral relativism, has become common currency among the liberally educated. This remains the case even while political crises become intractable, and it is increasingly apparent that the scope of public policy formulated with no reference to moral justification is extremely limited. The thesis of _On Justifying…Read more
  •  60
    Human health and stoic moral norms
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (2). 2003.
    For the philosophy of medicine, there are two things of interest about the stoic account of moral norms, quite apart from whether the rest of stoic ethical theory is compelling. One is the stoic version of naturalism: its account of practical reasoning, its solution to the is/ought problem, and its contention that norms for creating, sustaining, or restoring human health are tantamount to moral norms. The other is the stoic account of human agency: its description of the intimate connections bet…Read more
  •  56
    A definition of philosophy
    Metaphilosophy 8 (2-3): 249-252. 1977.
  •  33
    A note on Religious Experience Arguments: LAWRENCE C. BECKER
    Religious Studies 7 (1): 63-68. 1971.
    When philosophers speak of the inconclusiveness of arguments for the existence of God, they often do so as if they were talking about a matter of principle—as if it were in principle impossible to prove God's existence, that every proof was in principle inconclusive. Of course, rebutals of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments are usually designed to show that these types of arguments are in principle inconclusive. But one supposes that religious experience arguments are not …Read more
  •  33
    Introduction
    Ethics 105 (3): 465-467. 1995.
  •  32
  •  31
    Review: Too Much Property (review)
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (2). 1992.