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Philosophy and medical WelfareRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 179 (4): 627-627. 1989.
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Impartiality in Political PhilosophyIn Impartiality in moral and political philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2002.Impartialist political philosophy must show how and why the priority of impartial justice can be reconciled with a belief in the permanence of pluralism. Although the argument from epistemological abstinence explains the permanence of pluralism, it cannot explain why justice should have motivational priority. It delivers only, and at most, a modus vivendi defence of toleration. The way to attain a defence that is more than a modus vivendi is to ground political impartialism in moral impartialism…Read more
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The Priority of Impartial MoralityIn Impartiality in moral and political philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2002.In moral philosophy, the requirement of impartiality gives rise to the normative question, which is a question about why we should give priority to, and be motivated by, impartial concerns which conflict with the concerns we have for particular people or causes. In this chapter, discussion concentrates on those who already see the force of the requirements of impartial morality, but are sometimes tempted to ignore its demands. I suggest that, for such people, impartialism can command motivationa…Read more
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Impartiality and CongruenceIn Impartiality in moral and political philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2002.Argues that a form of impartialism that is grounded in the partial concerns we have for others can be shown to be congruent with the good of the agent, and that such congruence does not imply commitment to a specific comprehensive conception of the good. If correct, this argument has important consequences for liberalism at the political level. It suggests that the defence of stability, which Rawls advocates in A Theory of Justice need not depend upon commitment to a comprehensive, and Kantian, …Read more
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Getting Morality Off the GroundIn Impartiality in moral and political philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2002.This chapter asks whether and why impartial morality can be commended to those who do not antecedently feel its force. Can the care and concern we feel for particular others provide a reason for adopting impartial moral philosophy? I argue that, unlike commitment to equality, concern for particular others is sufficiently widespread to provide a foundation for impartial morality that does not presuppose any particular comprehensive conception of the good and which, for that reason, is compatible …Read more
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1ImpartialityIn John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig & Anne Phillips (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, Oxford University Press. 2006.This article explores the conception of impartiality in contemporary political theory. It explains the though impartiality is widely accepted to reflect a commitment to equality, the scope of that commitment has yet to be worked out. It argues for an interpretation of impartiality as primarily a requirement on the moral and legal rules of society and shows that impartiality is best made manifest through the concept of agreement.
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2Mill's the Subjection of Women: Critical Essays (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.The articles collected in this critical edition represent a variety of interpretations both of the kind of feminism Mill represents and of the specific arguments he offers in The Subjection of Women including their lexical ordering and relative merit. Each selection is preceded by a brief and useful summary of the author's position intended to assist introductory students
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5Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking with comments by R. M. Hare Edited by Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, viii + 307 pp., £30.00 (review)Philosophy 64 (248): 269-271. 1989.
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2Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (California and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), pp.254. ISBN 0-520-08046-7. £18.50 (review)Polis 13 (1-2): 104-118. 1994.
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17Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking with comments by R. M. Hare Edited by Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, viii + 307 pp., £30.00 (review)Philosophy 64 (248): 269-. 1989.
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9Human Morality By Samuel Scheffler Oxford University Press 1992 145 pp., £9.50 paper (review)Philosophy 69 (270): 509-. 1994.
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31The Serpent and the DovePhilosophy 63 (245). 1988.In his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Raymond Chandler describes the world of the American detective story as ‘a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jai…Read more
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146John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and MarriageUtilitas 6 (2): 287. 1994.This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely…Read more
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10Democratic Dirty HandsIn Karl Marker, Annette Schmitt & Jürgen Sirsch (eds.), Demokratie und Entscheidung. Beiträge zur Analytischen Politischen Theorie, Springer. pp. 169-179. 2018.There is widespread agreement that politics calls for dirty hands in general, and for secrecy and duplicity in particular. The claim is, of course, most famously made by Machiavelli in The Prince, but it is also to be found in Book 3 of Plato’s Republic. However, in arguing that politics calls for duplicity, neither Plato nor Machiavelli was writing about democratic societies, and we might therefore wonder whether, in democratic societies, the problem of dirty hands should be differently underst…Read more
Heslington, York, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |