• Entitlement and Free Time
    Law Ethics and Philosophy 5. 2018.
  •  7
    Entitlement and Free Time
    Law, Ethics, and Philosophy 5 91-104. 2017.
    In this paper, I use the framework developed by Julie Rose in Free Time to offer an initial analysis of another under-theorized resource that liberal egalitarian states might owe their citizens: that is, the sense of moral of entitlement to make use of their basic liberties. First, I suggest that this sense of moral entitlement, like free time, might be necessary for the effective use of those basic liberties. Next, I suggest that this sense of moral entitlement (again, like free time) might be …Read more
  •  15
    Weddings and Counter-Stereotypic Couples
    Social Theory and Practice 47 (4): 789-807. 2021.
    In this article, I argue that opposite-sex couples planning weddings have a duty to make their choices in ways that undermine the harmful norms that lead to most women taking their husband’s last names when they marry, and most weddings being extremely expensive. This duty, however, is not a duty to significantly reduce the prevalence of those norms, since doing so is generally not in the power of individual couples. Rather, it is a duty to provide observing couples around them with new live opt…Read more
  •  63
    (When) Do Victims Have Duties to Resist Oppression?
    Social Theory and Practice 46 (2): 391-416. 2020.
    In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty …Read more
  •  46
    How politically liberal should the capabilities approach want to be?
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 18 (3): 282-304. 2019.
    In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabiliti...
  •  97
    Must Adaptive Preferences Be Prudentially Bad for Us
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (4): 412-429. 2017.
    In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develo…Read more
  •  4
    Political philosophers working on ideal and non-ideal theory sometimes seem to be stuck in a bind: while ideal theory risks being too ideal to be useful in the real world, non-ideal theory risks being so non-ideal that it stops far short of justice. In this paper, I highlight a third – and equally unappealing – possibility: that non-ideal theory, precisely because of its obvious engagement with real-world problems, might fail to recognize the unacceptable ways in which it is itself problematical…Read more
  •  124
    Adaptive preferences: merging political accounts and well-being accounts
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (2): 179-196. 2015.
    Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to streng…Read more
  •  99
    The perfectionism of Nussbaum's adaptive preferences
    Journal of Global Ethics 10 (2): 183-198. 2014.
    Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism …Read more
  •  142
    Educating for Autonomy: Liberalism and Autonomy in the Capabilities Approach
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3): 443-455. 2014.
    Martha Nussbaum grounds her version of the capabilities approach in political liberalism. In this paper, we argue that the capabilities approach, insofar as it genuinely values the things that persons can actually do and be, must be grounded in a hybrid account of liberalism: in order to show respect for adults, its justification must be political; in order to show respect for children, however, its implementation must include a commitment to comprehensive autonomy, one that ensures that childre…Read more
  •  183
    Conceptualizing Adaptive Preferences Respectfully: An Indirectly Substantive Account
    Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (2): 206-226. 2015.
    While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on t…Read more
  •  38
    In this thesis I argue that the tradition of political philosophy which follows in John Rawls's footsteps is obligated to concern itself not only with the realizability, but also with the realization, of justice. Although Rawls himself expresses a commitment only to the former of these, I argue that the roles which he assigns to political philosophy require him to take on the further commitment to realization. This is because these roles are meant to influence not only political philosophers, bu…Read more
  •  22
    Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 2, Page 323-329, July 2012
  •  92
    In this paper I show the short-comings of autonomy-based justifications for exemptions from paternalism and appeal to the value of settling to defend an alternative well-being-based justification. My well-being-based justification, unlike autonomy-based justifications, can 1) explain why adults but not children are exempt from paternalism; 2) show which kinds of paternalism are justified for children; 3) explain the value of the capacity of autonomy; 4) offer a plausible relationship between aut…Read more
  •  37
    Progressive Politics: Liberalism, Humanism, and Feminism in Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach
    South African Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 234-245. 2009.
    A purely theoretical analysis of Martha Nussbaum’s basis of the capabilities approach in feminist (rather than more broadly liberal humanist) justice yields a philosophical project that may appear inconsistent, if not incoherent. However, I suggest in this paper that when the reader considers the project’s very concrete aims, there surfaces an intelligible reason for the apparent incongruities between her feminist and liberal commitments. Since even a capabilities approach rooted in feminist jus…Read more