Travis Joseph Rodgers

Gordon Barnes accuses Robert Nozick and Eric Mack of neglecting, in two ways, the practical, empirical questions relevant to justice in the real world.1 He thinks these omissions show that the argument behind the Wilt Chamberlain example—which Nozick famously made in his seminal Anarchy, State, and Utopia—fails. As a result, he suggests that libertarians should concede that this argument fails. In this article, we show that Barnes’s key arguments hinge on misunderstandings of, or failures to notice, key aspects of the entitlement theory that undergirds Nozick’s and Mack’s work. Once the theory is properly understood, Barnes’s challenges fail to undermine the Chamberlain example, in particular, and the entitlement theory, in general.

Do humans lack character? Or if they possess it, is it very different from what most people think it is? While it has long been held that character plays an indispensible role in moral theory, recent work from social psychologists suggests that there is no such thing as character, at least as humans have traditionally thought of it. Some have argued that programs of moral education couched in terms of global traits (like honesty) are to be jettisoned in favor of those couched in terms of local traits (like honesty-with-family). I take responding to these challenges to be the focus of my research. I argue that the empirical work actually reveals differences in character, not a lack of character. I then offer an account of moral improvement that respects the empirical data but remains faithful to the traditional account of character. My goals are to rescue the importance of character to ethics, to develop the beginnings of an empirically-informed program of moral education, and finally to explore the limits of our responsibility for our character in light of the psychological research. Just as one might begin on a path toward a healthier diet by a combination of brute resolve (setting one's will) and skilled resistance (setting up obstacles to satisfying pernicious desires), and empirical work can recommend the ways best to combat such desires, so can empirical work supplement a moral theory in order to produce a program of moral improvement. Thanks to the wealth of empirical work on these matters, our resources are considerable, but so is our culpability should we not try

Matt Zwolinski argues that libertarians “should see the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)—a guarantee that all members will receive income regardless of why they need it—as an essential part of an ideally just libertarian system.” He regards the satisfaction of a Lockean proviso—a stipulation that individuals may not be rendered relevantly worse off by the uses and appropriations of private property—as a necessary condition for a private property system’s being just. BIG is to be justified precisely because it prevents proviso violations. We deem Zwolinski’s argument a “Direct Proviso-Based Argument” for BIG. We argue that because this sort of argument for the BIG is in tension with other principles libertarians within the Lockean tradition hold dear, specifically prohibitions on seizing legitimately held property and forcing individuals to labor, the Direct Proviso-Based Argument fails.

Most discussions of John Doris’s situationism center on what can be called descriptive situationism, the claim that our folk usage of global personality and character traits in describing and predicting human behavior is empirically unsupported. Philosophers have not yet paid much attention to another central claim of situationism, which says that given that local traits are empirically supported, we can more successfully act in line with our moral values if, in our deliberation about what to do, we focus on our situation instead of on our moral character. Call this prescriptive situationism. In this paper, we will point toward a previously unrecognized tension between these two situationist theses and explore some ways for the situationist to address it.