• David Hume and the Empiricist Theory of Law
    In Schwarz, McNeil & Bonnel (eds.), Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing. pp. 33-44. 1990.
  •  19
    A Humean Theory of Distributive Justice for a New Century
    The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 41 266-272
    This paper suggests a strategy for constructing a contemporary Humean theory of distributive justice which would serve to ground what I call an entrepreneurial welfare state. It is argued that blending David Hume's insights about the origins and purposes of justice with Ronald Dworkin's insurance-based reasoning supporting his equality of resources model of distributive justice will yield a state which, as a matter of justice, encourages its members to engage in entrepreneurial activities and wh…Read more
  •  10
    Commentary on Aikin
    with Rebecca Macintosh
  •  37
    Plato’s Moral Psychology
    The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 3 302-308. 1998.
    I argue that Plato's psychological theories are motivated by concerns he had about moral theory. In particular, Plato rejects the modern account of rationality as the maximization of subjectively evaluated self-interest because, had he adopted such an account, his theory of justice would be subject to criticisms which he holds are fatal to the contractarian theory of justice. While formulating a theory to remain within ethical constraints sometimes violates the canons of scientific theorizing, P…Read more
  •  48
    Humean Minds and Moral Theory
    Philosophy Research Archives 14 229-236. 1988.
    Grant that Hume is a contractarian. Justice then arises from more basic features of humans and their circumstances. Among these more basic features from which justice arises Hume includes (in addition to self-interest narrowly construed) the widely held passions of benevolence and sympathy. But it is mysterious why he included them in his contractarian theory for the derivation of justice does not need them, and may even be weaker with them included. This paper suggests that Hume’s philosophy of…Read more
  •  32
    Are Being and Unity the Genera of All Things?
    Modern Schoolman 61 (1): 49-52. 1983.
    Aristotle's account of the fact that neither being nor unity can be defined has more to do with the genus/species model of definition he used than any major metaphysical point.
  •  17
    This paper suggests a way of thinking about the legal reasoning done by conscientious judges working in a legal system during periods when those judges believed that their Supreme Court was malfunctioning. Seeing a legal system as a shared cooperative activity allows us to best understand how legal decision-making can remain consistent when it contains elements at the highest level which are believed not to be functioning properly.
  •  32
    Problems with contractarianism
    Journal of Social Philosophy 16 (3): 48-59. 1985.
  •  29
    This paper surveys the various leading options as a metric for measuring the level of development in a society. It is then argued that the appropriate metric will be value-laden in a (fairly) rich sense. One metric is then shown to have substantial advantages in this regard.
  •  55
    Consider the following problem. A multinational corporation is expanding its operations to a developing country. The developing country in question is now a democracy or is in the process of becoming one, it has a (fairly) independent and corruption-free judiciary (or is in the process of establishing one), its human rights record, while not perfect, is improving, and its bureaucracy and police are not now terribly corrupt. But not too long ago, none of these things were true. A few years back, …Read more
  •  635
    Intolerance and the Zero Tolerance Fallacy
    In Gabrijela Kišiček (ed.), What Do We Know About the World?, Centre For Research On Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric. pp. 132-144. 2013.
    When an activity is unwanted, administrators often adopt a zero tolerance policy towards that activity. The background assumption is that, by adopting a zero tolerance policy, one is doing everything that one can to reduce or eliminate the activity in question. Yet which policy best serves to reduce an unwanted behavior is always an empirical question. Thus, those who adopt a zero tolerance policy towards some behavior without first investigating and finding that they are in a set of circumstanc…Read more
  • Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 6 (4): 169-171. 1986.
  •  186
    Many of the problems we face can usefully be modeled as prisoners’ dilemmas. All the standard game-theoretic solutions to prisoners’ dilemmas lead, in the real world, to assurance games. But too often some aspects of our social interaction are as much obscured by, as illuminated by, game theory. Removing some of the epistemic constraints often accepted by game theorists will enable us to distinguish between productive and destructive prisoners’ dilemmas. Doing so is an important step in understa…Read more
  •  10
    Liberal Egalitarianism
    Philosophy Research Archives 10 67-115. 1984.
    This paper provides a systematic statement of Ronald Dworkin’s political (as opposed to legal) philosophy. Dworkin’s defence of democratic institutions constrained by civil rights is shown to be linked to his defence of the economic market constrained by economic welfare rights. The theory is defended against attacks from H.L.A. Hart and L. Haworth. The possibility that the theory can be given a Kantian grounding is explored.
  •  15
    This paper looks to Bernard Suits’s analysis of games and game playing for at least a partial answer to the question in its title. It applies Suits’s analysis to Sudoku, a popular logic puzzle, and to Ana-lytical Reasoning, a question type in standardized assessments. The purpose is both to test Suits’s analysis in a novel domain and to give educators and test developers useful insight into the relationship between logic exercises and games.
  •  56
    Plato and the Social Contract
    Philosophy Research Archives 12 67-77. 1986.
    This paper argues that Plato’s version of the contractarian theory of justice is superior to all other statements of that theory. The conditions any adequate theory of justice must meet are outlined and it is shown how contractarian theories attempt to meet these conditions. The great contractarian theories---those of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Rawls, and Gauthier---are shown not to provide an adequate account of the nature of justice. The source of these failures is identified and, finally, it is…Read more
  •  466
    The zero tolerance fallacy occurs when someone advocates or adopts a zero tolerance policy towards some activity or behaviour without seeing if there is evidence to support the view that such a policy is the best or most cost-effective way of preventing or reducing the unwanted behaviour. This paper explores the idea that, instead of thinking about what the zero tolerance fallacy is, argumentation theorists should try to characterize what features good arguments for zero tolerance policies must …Read more
  •  47
    While much of James O. YoungÂ’s Art and Knowledge is devoted to showing how works of art might be of cognitive value, we will focus on a prior claim, defended in the first chapter of Art and Knowledge, that “art” ought to be defined such that only works with cognitive value count as artworks. We begin by noting that it is not very clear—despite the considerable attention Young devotes to the matter—just what it is for an artwork to have cognitive value. If by this claim he means only that w…Read more
  •  18
    Rights and Needs
    Dialogue 26 (1): 55. 1987.