Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, United States of America
  • Terrorism as Ethical Singularity
    Public Affairs Quarterly 24 (3): 229-246. 2010.
    Virginia Held, in her thoughtful collection of essays How Terrorism Is Wrong, explores many facets of the moral significance of terrorism. Perhaps the most important contribution Held makes is a step toward a more rigorous contextualization of terrorism within the broader spectrum of violence, and in particular within the context of war. This welcome subtlety prompts the discussion of terrorism found in this essay. In particular, I eschew making any axiological or deontic judgments about terrori…Read more
  •  5
    Can the laws produced by patently illegitimate political institutions be authoritative, or are they like the rules of etiquette – rules we might have conclusive reasons to follow but which are not authoritative?[2] Exclude from the scope of this question laws that recapitulate or contradict independently valid moral principles and so are authoritative in virtue of their content. Let us instead query only whether laws that (i) do not recapitulate or contradict valid moral principles, and (ii) are…Read more
  • Can there be an obligation to obey laws produced by patently illegitimate political institutions, or are these laws like rules of etiquette – rules we might have reasons to follow but which we are not obligated to obey?2 Exclude from the scope of this question laws that recapitulate or contradict independently valid moral principles. Let us instead query only whether there is an obligation to obey laws that (i) do not recapitulate or contradict valid moral principles, and (ii) are products of il…Read more
  •  118
    The importance of what they care about
    Philosophical Studies 165 (2): 297-314. 2013.
    Many forms of contemporary morality treat the individual as the fundamental unit of moral importance. Perhaps the most striking example of this moral vision of the individual is the contemporary global human rights regime, which treats the individual as, for all intents and purposes, sacrosanct. This essay attempts to explore one feature of this contemporary understanding of the moral status of the individual, namely the moral significance of a subject’s actual affective states, and in particula…Read more
  •  6
    Reliance Structures: How Urban Public Policy Shapes Human Agency
    In David Boonin, Katrina L. Sifferd, Tyler K. Fagan, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Michael Huemer, Daniel Wodak, Derk Pereboom, Stephen J. Morse, Sarah Tyson, Mark Zelcer, Garrett VanPelt, Devin Casey, Philip E. Devine, David K. Chan, Maarten Boudry, Christopher Freiman, Hrishikesh Joshi, Shelley Wilcox, Jason Brennan, Eric Wiland, Ryan Muldoon, Mark Alfano, Philip Robichaud, Kevin Timpe, David Livingstone Smith, Francis J. Beckwith, Dan Hooley, Russell Blackford, John Corvino, Corey McCall, Dan Demetriou, Ajume Wingo, Michael Shermer, Ole Martin Moen, Aksel Braanen Sterri, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Jeppe von Platz, John Thrasher, Mary Hawkesworth, William MacAskill, Daniel Halliday, Janine O’Flynn, Yoaav Isaacs, Jason Iuliano, Claire Pickard, Arvin M. Gouw, Tina Rulli, Justin Caouette, Allen Habib, Brian D. Earp, Andrew Vierra, Subrena E. Smith, Danielle M. Wenner, Lisa Diependaele, Sigrid Sterckx, G. Owen Schaefer, Markus K. Labude, Harisan Unais Nasir, Udo Schuklenk, Benjamin Zolf & Woolwine (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Springer Verlag. pp. 809-825. 2018.
    This chapter attempts to articulate a novel approach to thinking about urban politics and urban public policy. Building on the observation that all action requires reliance, the chapter argues that elements of the urban environment function as what we call reliance structures. These are the structures that allow agents to realize their intentions as actions. That is, reliance structures are constitutive features of the capacity for action, that is, for agency. The chapter then argues that the ur…Read more
  •  114
    Reliance
    Noûs 44 (1): 135-157. 2010.
    A version of this paper is forthcoming in Nous.
  •  97
    Political Obligation and the Self
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2): 347-375. 2011.
  •  91
    One dogma of philosophy of action
    Philosophical Studies 173 (8): 2249-2266. 2016.
    An oft-rehearsed objection to the claim that an intention can give one reasons is that if an intention could give us reasons that would allow an agent to bootstrap herself into having a reason where she previously lacked one. Such bootstrapping is utterly implausible. So, intentions to φ cannot be reasons to φ. Call this the bootstrapping objection against intentions being reasons. This essay considers four separate interpretations of this argument and finds they all fail to establish that non-a…Read more
  •  20
    Officials and Subjects in Gardner’s Law as a Leap of Faith
    Law and Philosophy 33 (6): 795-811. 2014.
    In his collection of essays, Law as a Leap of Faith, John Gardner lucidly develops a powerful account of legal positivism, primarily via a careful interrogation of H. L. A. Hart’s work, with a particular focus on Hart’s most important text, The Concept of Law. In this essay, I raise a question regarding the significance of legal subjects’ understanding of themselves as legal subjects. I claim that as Gardner fills out the picture of what it takes to have an ideal legal system, we will find that …Read more
  •  22
    Legal truths and falsities
    Ratio Juris 22 (1): 95-109. 2009.
    This paper has a two-pronged thesis. First, laws should be understood as making factual claims about the moral order. Second, the truth or falsity of these claims depends as much on the content of the law as on whether the lawmaker has political authority. In particular, laws produced by legitimate authorities are successful as laws when they guide subjects’ behavior by giving subjects authoritative reasons for action. This paper argues that laws produced by legitimate authorities accomplish thi…Read more
  •  21
    Intentions: past, present, future
    Philosophical Explorations 20 (sup2): 1-12. 2017.
    Intentions have been a central subject of research since contemporary philosophy of action emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. For almost that entire period, the approach has been to treat the study of intentions as separate from the study of morality. This essay offers a brief overview of that history and then suggests some ways forward, as exemplified by the essays collected in this volume.
  •  92
    Terrorism, shared rules and trust
    Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2). 2007.
    No Abstract
  •  64
    Rethinking sovereignty, rethinking revolution
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (4): 405-440. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  2
    This is paper argues for the view that rules produced by illegitimate authorities may nonetheless be authoritative for those to whom the rules are addressed. (draft only - please do not quote).
  •  27
    This paper argues for a rehabilitation of philosophical engagement with the question of whether revolution can be justified. Such a renewed engagement with the problem of revolution appears to be stymied by the intuition that we have strong moral arguments ruling out revolution in almost every case. I aim to show that we should abandon this intuition. I will argue that standard arguments against revolution are not strong enough to warrant the relative inattention the question of the justifiabili…Read more