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14Review of Saba Bazargan-Forward: Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability (review)Ethics 134 (2): 273-278. 2023.
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15Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Power and Accountability From a Pragmatic Point of ViewUniversity of Chicago Press. 1992.The question of responsibility plays a critical role not only in our attempts to resolve social and political problems, but in our very conceptions of what those problems are. Who, for example, is to blame for apartheid in South Africa? Is the South African government responsible? What about multinational corporations that do business there? Will uncovering the "true facts of the matter" lead us to the right answer? In an argument both compelling and provocative, Marion Smiley demonstrates how a…Read more
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1Gender Justice Without FoundationsMichigan Law Review 89 (6): 1574-1590. 1991.This article addresses the possibility of developing a critical feminist philosophy outside the bounds of foundational thinking
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520Democratic Justice in TransitionMichigan Law Review 99 (6): 1332-1347. 2001.This essay defends a pragmatic approach to transitional justice by arguing that it provides a convincing view of the relationships between theory and practice and is true to the nature of democratic justice itself.
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47Review Essay: Alexander Brown's Theory of Personal ResponsibilityNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (8). 2010.This article reflects upon what can go wrong when we merge causal responsibility for past harms with a duty-based responsibility for remedying these harms and/or preventing them in the future.
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1Making Sense of Analytic MarxismPolity (4): 734-744. 1988.This article underscores how analytic philosophy can help develop, as well as distort, Marxism and then provides criteria for avoiding the latter.
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Moral Inquiry Within the Bounds of PoliticsIn Fox And Westbrook (ed.), Facing Up to the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship, Cambridge University Press. 1997.This essay argues against conventional approaches to applied ethics on the grounds that they embrace a mistaken view of the relationship between theory and practice; it then goes on to develop a pragmatic alternative with reference to a series of arguments about moral responsibility for external harm.
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864`Welfare Dependence': The Power of a ConceptThesis Eleven (64): 21-38. 2001.This essay argues that the concept of dependence now invoked in noramtive discussions of the welfare state is both incoherent and biased as a result of its conflation of four distinctly different notions of dependence, ranging from the purely causal to that associated with lower class identities.
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331Collective responsibilityStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.This essay discusses the nature of collective responsibility and explores various controversies associated with its possibility and normative value.
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1Pragmatism as a Critical Political TheoryUniversity of Southern California Law Review 63 (6): 1843-1853. 1990.
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Case Study: Liberty and PaternalismIn Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (ed.), Ethics and Politics, Harvard University Press. 1989.
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129Paternalism and democracyJournal of Value Inquiry 23 (4): 299-318. 1989.This essay argues that Dworkin, Feinberg and others who claim exceptions against the principle of paternalism for the sake of preventing seroius physical harm are forced to treat mature adults as mental incompetents and that they are forced to do so by the prevailing concept of paternalism itself. The essay then shows how we can get around this dilemma by re-thinking paternalism as part of distinctly paternal relationships of domination and inequality.
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23Book in Review: After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender, by Georgia Warnke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 251 pp. + xiii. $29.99 (review)Political Theory 37 (4): 585-590. 2009.
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64Feminist Theory and the Question of IdentityWomen and Politics 13 (2): 91-122. 1993.This article reflects upon what can go wrong when feminist philosophers begin with a universal identity, rather than with the needs of particular individuals, and argues that we can group individuals together without such a universal identity if we develop a practice of social generalization that places shared needs, rather than identities, at the center of attention.
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58Volitional excuses, self-narration, and blamePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (1): 85-101. 2014.“I didn’t know what I was doing”. “I was totally out of control.” Since we accept and reject such excuses all the time in practice—and frequently do so with great confidence—we might be expected to have grasped what it means for a volitional excuse to be valid in general and to have developed a well thought out set of criteria for judging the validity of such excuses in practice. But, as it turns out, we have not done either of these things. Hence, we are not now able to argue openly about the v…Read more
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Pragmatic Inquiry and Social Conflict: A Critical Reconstruction of Dewey's Model of DemocracyPraxis International 9 (4): 365-380. 1990.This article reconstructs John Dewey's philosophy of the public by replacing its emphasis on scientific truth with an interpretive model of inquiry; it then shows how we can use this interpretive model of inquiry both to prevent collective harms and to expand the boundaries of our moral community
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49Democratic Citizenship V. Patriarchy: A Feminist Perspective on RawlsFordham Law Review (5): 1599-1627. 2004.This essay articulates a series of questions that can be used to explore the gendered nature of any work of philosophy and then answers these questions in the context of John Rawls' moral and political thought. The author finds that while Rawls' social contract assumes a patriarchal family, it can be revised for the purpose of securing gender equality in both theory and practice.
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2743From Moral Agency to Collective Wrongs: Re-Thinking Collective Moral ResponsibilityJournal of Law and Policy (1): 171-202. 2010.This essay argues that while the notion of collective responsibiility is incoherent if it is taken to be an application of the Kantian model of moral responsibility to groups, it is coherent -- and important -- if formulated in terms of the moral reactions that we can have to groups that cause harm in the world. I formulate collective responsibility as such and in doing so refocus attention from intentionality to the production of harm.
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23[Book review] moral responsibility and the boundaries of community, power and accountability from a pragmatic point of view (review)Social Theory and Practice 20 (2): 203-220. 1994.The question of responsibility plays a critical role not only in our attempts to resolve social and political problems, but in our very conceptions of what those problems are. Who, for example, is to blame for apartheid in South Africa? Is the South African government responsible? What about multinational corporations that do business there? Will uncovering the "true facts of the matter" lead us to the right answer? In an argument both compelling and provocative, Marion Smiley demonstrates how a…Read more
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1Is Corporatism the Answer?Law and Social Inquiry 18 (1): 115-134. 1993.This essay argues that corporatism in not only inadequate as a social and political philosophy but anti-egalitarian and hierarchical by nature.
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60Volitional excuses, self-narration, and blamePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (1): 85-101. 2016.This article has three parts. The first argues that excuses such as "I didn't know" and "I couldn't help myself" are not, as we are frequently led to believe, vehicles for discovering whether or not an individual's will was free. Instead, they are self-narratives that we produce for the purpose of avoiding blame. The second part explores the particular notion of non-responsibility that governs these self-narratives. The third articulates the role that our judgments of fairness play in decisi…Read more
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96Future‐Looking Collective Responsibility: A Preliminary AnalysisMidwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1): 1-11. 2014.How can we make sense of future-looking collective responsibility? What is its moral basis and how -- under what conditions -- can we ascribe it to particular groups? I address these questions below and, in doing so, argue that in ascribing future-looking collective responsibility we need to bring claims of backward-looking (causal) responsibility together with judgments of fairness, practicality, and group identity.
Waltham, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |