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87Hope in an Illiberal Age? (review)Ethics, Policy and Environment 2024 (January): 1-9. 2024.In this commentary on Darrel Moellendorf’s Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change & Global Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), I discuss his use of the precautionary principle, whether his hope for climate-friendly ‘green growth’ is realistic given the tendency for inequality to accelerate as it gets higher, and what I call his assumption of a liberal baseline. That is, I worry that the audience to whom the book is addressed are those who already accept the environmental and economic value…Read more
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167The libertarian argument for reparationsJournal of Social Philosophy 1-30. 2024.The case for reparations for grievous acts of historical injustice has been getting a lot of attention lately. But I aim to broaden the discussion in two ways. First, I am not only going to talk about reparations as a means of rectifying the injuries inflicted by slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of their land, and the ongoing ripple effects of these historic wrongs. I am also going to talk about reparations for a wider variety of historical injustices, including, most im…Read more
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242Left Libertarianism for the Twenty-First CenturyJournal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2): 191-211. 2023.There are many different kinds of libertarianism. The first is right libertarianism, which received its most powerful expression in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a book that still sets the baseline for discussions of libertarianism today. The second, I will call faux libertarianism. For reasons I will explain in this paper, most ‘man-on-the-street’ libertarians and most politicians who claim to be libertarians are actually this kind of libertarian. And third, there is left li…Read more
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136Neutrality and ExcellenceIn Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer, . pp. 271-296. 2022.In Liberalism with Excellence, Matthew Kramer makes an argument for how excellence may enter in into liberalism, despite liberalism’s strong commitment to neutrality. Kramer seeks to challenge not only the uncompromising rejection of this position by liberals such a Jonathan Quong, but also the so-called “blended” approach of “soft-perfectionist” scholars such as Joseph Raz and George Sher. In this essay, I do not so much challenge Kramer’s approach as offer an alternative for accomplishing th…Read more
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2The Union as a Basic Institution of SocietyAmerican Philosophical Association Blog. 2021.While unionization is usually evaluated as an aspect of freedom of association—the idea being that workers have the right to associate and form unions if they want and have an equal right not to do so if they don't, I argue that this is a mistake. Instead of merely allowing unions to form or not depending on the preferences of workers, I argue that unions are a basic and therefore necessary institution of a just society. After analyzing and criticizing the schema developed by John Rawls for eval…Read more
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623Can Liberal Capitalism Survive?The GCAS Review 1 (1): 1-46. 2021.For a long time, economic growth has been seen as the most promising source of funds to use toward reducing economic inequality, as well as a necessity if we are aiming at achieving full employment. But one of the most troubling aspects of the recent exponential rise in economic inequality is that this rise has occurred despite continued economic growth. Increases in national income have gone almost exclusively to the super-rich, while real wages for almost everybody else have stagnated or even …Read more
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340In the Name of Liberty: An Argument for Universal UnionizationCambridge University Press. 2020.For years now, unionization has been under vigorous attack. Membership has been steadily declining, and with it union bargaining power. As a result, unions may soon lose their ability to protect workers from economic and personal abuse, as well as their significance as a political force. In the Name of Liberty responds to this worrying state of affairs by presenting a new argument for unionization, one that derives an argument for universal unionization in both the private and public sector from…Read more
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3The just price, exploitation, and prescription drugs: why free marketeers should object to profiteering by the pharmaceutical industryReview of Social Economy 77 1-36. 2019.Many people have been enraged lately by the enormous increases in certain generic prescription drugs. But free marketeers defend these prices by arguing that they simply represent what the market will bear, and in a capitalist society there is accordingly nothing wrong with charging them. This paper argues that such a defense is actually contrary to the very principles that free marketeers claim to embrace. These prices are not only unjust and exploitative, but government interference with them …Read more
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77The Politics of MasochismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (1). 2003.This essay explores why people sometimes act against their economic interests, and, more particularly, why people sometimes knowingly and intentionally support economic inequality even though they are disadvantaged by it, a phenomenon I call masochistic inegalitarianism. The essay argues that such behavior is an inherent and widespread feature of human nature, and that this has important though previously overlooked practical and theoretical implications for any conception of distributive justic…Read more
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522Twenty-One Statements about Political Philosophy: An Introduction and Commentary on the State of the ProfessionTeaching Philosophy 41 (1): 65-115. 2018.While the volume of material inspired by Rawls’s reinvigoration of the discipline back in 1971 has still not begun to subside, its significance has been in serious decline for quite some time. New and important work is appearing less and less frequently, while the scope of the work that is appearing is getting smaller and more internal and its practical applications more difficult to discern. The discipline has reached a point of intellectual stagnation, even as real-world events suggest that th…Read more
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48International Criminal Law and Philosophy (review)Social Theory and Practice 37 (2): 370-378. 2011.
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37On Unemployment: Volume II: Achieving Economic Justice after the Great RecessionPalgrave-Macmillan. 2015.Unemployment has been at historically high rates for an extended period, and while it has recently improved in certain countries, the unemployment that remains may be becoming structural. Aside from inequality, unemployment is accordingly the problem that is most likely to put critical pressure on our political institutions, disrupt the social fabric of our way of life, and even threaten the continuation of liberalism itself. Despite the obvious importance of the problem of unemployment, howev…Read more
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119The Difference Principle, Rising Inequality, and Supply-Side Economics: How Rawls Got Hijacked by the RightRevue de Philosophie Économique 13 (2): 119-173. 2012.Rawls intended the difference principle to be a liberal egalitarian principle of justice. By that I mean he intended it to provide a moral justification for a moderate amount of redistribution of income from the most advantaged members of society to the least. But since the difference principle was introduced, economic inequality has increased dramatically, reaching levels now not seen since just before the Great Depression, levels that Rawls surely would have thought perverse. Many blame this i…Read more
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Antony Duff and the Philosophy of PunishmentIn Rowan Cruft, Matthew H. Kramer & Mark R. Reiff (eds.), Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility: The Jurisprudence of Antony Duff, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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432How to Pay for Public EducationTheory and Research in Education 12 (1): 4-52. 2014.For years now, public education, and especially public higher education has been under attack. Funding has been drastically reduced, fees increased, and the seemingly irresistible political force of ever-tightening austerity budgets threatens to cut it even more. But I am not going to take the standard line that government financial support for public higher education should be increased. I view that battle as already lost. What I am going to propose is that we stop arguing about the allocation …Read more
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1191Punishment, Compensation, and Law: A Theory of EnforceabilityCambridge University Press. 2005.This book is the first comprehensive study of the meaning and measure of enforceability. While we have long debated what restraints should govern the conduct of our social life, we have paid relatively little attention to the question of what it means to make a restraint enforceable. Focusing on the enforceability of legal rights but also addressing the enforceability of moral rights and social conventions, Mark Reiff explains how we use punishment and compensation to make restraints operative i…Read more
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412Punishment in the Executive Suite: Moral Responsibility, Causal Responsibility, and Financial CrimeIn Lisa Herzog (ed.), Just Financial Markets?: Finance in a Just Society, Oxford University Press. pp. 125-153. 2017.Despite the enormity of the financial losses flowing from the 2008 financial crisis and the outrageousness of the conduct that led up to it, almost no individual involved has been prosecuted for criminal conduct, much less actually gone to prison. What this chapter argues is that the failure to punish those in management for their role in this misconduct stems from a misunderstanding of the need to prove that they personally knew of this wrongdoing and harbored an intent to defraud. But not on…Read more
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176Terrorism, Retribution, and Collective ResponsibilitySocial Theory and Practice 34 (2): 209-242. 2008.Terrorism is commonly viewed as a form of war, and as a form of war, the morality of terrorism seems to turn on the usual arguments regarding the furtherance of political objectives through coercive means. The terrorist argues that his options for armed struggle are limited, and that the use of force against civilians is the only way he can advance his cause. But this argument is subject to a powerful response. There is the argument from consequences, which asserts that terrorism is almost alway…Read more
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2211Exploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist StateOxford University Press. 2013.Exploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist State offers the first new, liberal theory of economic justice to appear in more than 30 years. The theory presented is designed to offer an alternative to the most popular liberal egalitarian theories of today and aims to be acceptable to both right and left libertarians too.
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3No Such Thing as Accident: Rethinking the Relation between Causal and Moral ResponsibilityCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 28 371-397. 2015.According to the conventional view, causal and moral responsibility have a strict hierarchical relationship. Determining causal responsibility comes first; then we sort through the factors to which we have assigned causal responsibility and determine which, if any, should be assigned moral responsibility too. Moral inquiry accordingly stands not only apart but also above causal inquiry. But I am going to argue that this way of looking at causal and moral responsibility is a mistake. Rather t…Read more
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459Proportionality, Winner-Take-All, and Distributive JusticePolitics, Philosophy and Economics 8 (1): 5-42. 2009.When faced with multiple claims to a particular good, what does distributive justice require? To answer this question, we need a substantive moral theory that will enable us assign relative moral weights to the parties' claims. But this is not all we need. Once we have assessed the moral weight of each party's claim, we still need to decide what method of distribution to employ, for there are two methods open to us. We could take the winner-take-all approach, and award the good to the party with…Read more
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520Two Theories of Economic LiberalismThe Adam Smith Review 10 189-214. 2017.Within the Anglo-American world, economic liberalism is generally viewed as having only one progenitor—Adam Smith—and one offspring—neoliberalism. But it actually has two. The work of G. W. F. Hegel was also very influential on the development of economic liberalism, at least in the German-speaking world, and the most powerful contemporary instantiation of economic liberalism within that world is not neoliberlaism, but ordoliberalism, although this is generally unknown and certainly unacknowledg…Read more
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925Incommensurability and moral valuePolitics, Philosophy and Economics 13 (3): 237-268. 2014.Some theorists believe that there is a plurality of values, and that in many circumstances these values are incommensurable, or at least incomparable. Others believe that all values are reducible to a single super-value, or that even if there is a plurality of irreducible values these values are commensurable. But I will argue that both sides have got it wrong. Values are neither commensurable nor incommensurable, at least not in the way most people think. We are free to believe in incommensurab…Read more
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2093On Unemployment: Volume I: A Micro-Theory of Distributive JusticePalgrave-Macmillan. 2015.Unemployment has been at historically high rates for an extended period, and while it has recently improved in certain countries, the unemployment that remains may be becoming structural. Aside from inequality, unemployment is accordingly the problem that is most likely to put critical pressure on our political institutions, disrupt the social fabric of our way of life, and even threaten the continuation of liberalism itself. Despite the obvious importance of the problem of unemployment, howev…Read more
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484The Attack on LiberalismIn Michael D. A. Freeman & Ross Harrison (eds.), Law and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.Liberalism is today under attack. This attack is being fought along two fronts, and so appears to be coming from different directions, but it is actually coming exclusively from the right. One source is Islamic fundamentalism, and the other is American neo-conservatism, which in turn unites elements of Christian fundamentalism with elements of neo-Platonic political philosophy and neo-Aristotelian moral theory. Both Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-conservatism are perfectionist views,…Read more
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52Crime, punishment, and responsibility: the jurisprudence of Antony Duff (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.This volume collects essays by leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in his work.
Cambridge University
PhD, 2003
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |