Seena Eftekhari

Rawls has been criticized by political philosophers from more right-leaning perspectives. John Tomasi and Jessica Flanigan, for example, have argued that the logic internal to his high liberalism requires expanding the list of basic rights. Flanigan argues that nearly any freedom should be basic. Her argument has significant implications for the viability of high liberalism and its commitment to many aspects of the common good. I offer several novel responses on behalf of high liberalism. I argue that the most effective response to her argument will require that high liberals abandon the commitment to the lexical priority of liberty. As a consequence, the common good will end up playing a more prominent role within the high liberal paradigm.

There is little agreement among moral and political philosophers when it comes to determining what it is that makes adaptive preferences problematic. The large number of competing explanations offered by philosophers illustrates the absence of any consensus. The most prominent versions of these explanations have recently come under attack by Dale Dorsey, who argues that adaptive preferences are a red herring: the problematic nature of adaptive preferences is not explained by the fact of adaptation but by an appeal to some other normative consideration. In this article I offer an account of adaptive preferences that both accommodates the thought that only some of our adaptive preferences are problematic and responds to the skeptical challenge pressed by Dorsey. I argue that some adaptive preferences are prima facie irrational as they exhibit a peculiar error in reasoning where individuals change the semantic content of the reasons underpinning the new preference.

Aristotle notoriously excludes free women and both male and female artisans and slaves from citizenship in the polis on the basis of an identifiable difference in nature: all of these groups, unlike free males, possess and exhibit some delinquency in their capacity for reason. Commentators have typically interpreted Aristotle’s comments on the nature of free women by suggesting that free women by nature have heightened or increased propensities towards incontinent behavior. If this is indeed the only difference between the natures of free men and free women, then it remains difficult to see why the appropriate modes of education in addition to the practice of habit would fail to ameliorate this deficiency in free women. My intention is to argue that Aristotle does think of the difference in the capacity for reason between free men and free women as a difference of kind—namely, women lack the capacity to develop practical reason—and as a result, justifiably, at least within the suppositions of his own position, excludes free women from citizenship.