Social Theory and Practice
An International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Philosophy

Social Theory and Practice publishes discussions of theoretical and applied questions in social, political, legal, economic, educational, and moral philosophy, including critical studies of classical and contemporary social philosophers. We feature original philosophical work and review essays by authors from all relevant disciplines, including the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Published by the Florida State University Department of Philosophy four times a year.

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  Vol. 24, no. 1 (Spring 1998)
 
Author Title
Alex John London Virtue and Consequences: Hobbes on the Value of the Moral
Virtues
Jonathan Waskan De Facto Legitimacy and Popular Will
Kai Draper Self-Defense, Collective Obligation, and Noncombatant Liability
Andrew Brien Mercy Within Legal Justice
Angela Bolte Do Wedding Dresses Come in Lavender? The Prospects and
Implications of Same-Sex Marriage
Paul Schollmeier Aristotle and Aristotelians (Review Essay)

  Vol. 24, no. 2 (Summer 1998)
 
Author Title
A. John Simmons "Denisons" and "Aliens": Locke's Problem of Political Consent
David Phillips Contractualism and Moral Status
Paul Smith Incentives and Justice: G.A. Cohen's Egalitarian Critique of Rawls
David Benatar Corporal Punishment
Pauline Kleingeld Just Love? Marriage and the Question of Justice
Jane Freimiller Unnatural Discourse (Review Essay)
Chris J. Cuomo Feminist Ethics and Connection Amidst Evil (Review Essay)

  Vol. 24, no. 3 (Fall 1998)
 
Author Title
David M. Adams The Problem of the Incomplete Attempt
Chris Naticchia Human Rights, Liberalism, and Rawls's Law of Peoples
Albert W. Dzur Value Pluralism versus Political Liberalism?
Ruth Sample Libertarian Rights and Welfare Rights
Roger Paden Democracy and Distribution
Jonathan Allen Decency and the Struggle for Recognition (Review Essay)

  Vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1999)
 
Author Title
James P. Sterba Reconciling Public Reason and Religious Values
Claudia Mills "Passing": The Ethics of Pretending to Be What You Are Not 
Francis J. Beckwith The "No One Deserves His or Her Talents" Argument for Affirmative Action 
Richard L. Lippke  Making Offenders Pay--For the Costs of Their Punishment 
Christopher Kilby  Aid and Sovereignty 
Michael Milde Unreasonable Foundations: David Gauthier on Property Rights,
Rationality, and the Social Contract 
Mark D. Gedney Reason and Community: The Nature and Role of Reason in Politics (Review essay) 

Vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1999)
 
Author Title
Peter Wilkin Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics: An Essential Difference?
Andrew Hetherington The Real Distinction Between Threats and Offers 
Louise Collins Emotional Adultery: Cybersex and Commitment 
Ron Mallon  Political Liberalism, Cultural Membership, and the Family 
Andrew Valls  The Libertarian Case for Affirmative Action 
Marianne Janack Struggling for Common Ground: Identity Politics and the Challenge to Feminist Politics (Review Essay)  

Vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1999)
 
Author Title
Tara Smith Justice as a Personal Virtue
Sarah Stroud The Aim of Affirmative Action
Jiwei Ci Justice, Freedom, and the Moral Bounds of Capitalism
Richard Westra A Japanese Contribution to the Critique of Rational Choice Marxism
Neil Levy Stepping Into the Present: MacIntyre's Modernism
Michael J. Cholbi Egoism and the Publicity of Reason: A Reply to Korsgaard
Rosemarie Tong Dealing With Difference Justly: Perspectives on Disability (Review Essay)

Vol. 26, no. 1 (Spring 2000)
 
Author Title
Daniel Attas Freedom and Self-Ownership
Thaddeus Metz Arbitrariness, Justice, and Respect
Phillip Montague The Myth of Parental Rights
Michael J. Meyer Liberal Civility and the Civility of Etiquette: Public Ideals and Personal Lives
Sin Yee Chan Paternalistic Wife? Paternalistic Stranger?
Paul C. Taylor Appiah's Uncompleted Argument: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race
Michael Gorr The Morality of Plea Bargaining
Torin Alter On Racist Symbols and Reparations (Review Essay)

Vol. 26, no. 2 (Summer 2000)
 
Author Title
Ruth Anna Putnam Neither a Beast Nor a God
Kevin M. Graham The Political Significance of Social Identity: A Critique of Rawls's Theory of Agency
Erin Kelly Habermas on Moral Justification
David Alm On the Reasonableness of Moral Judgments
Matthew Silverstein In Defense of Happiness: A Response to the Experience Machine
Robert Mayer Is There a Moral Right to Workplace Democracy?
Richard Arneson Economic Analysis Meets Distributive Justice (Review Essay)

Vol. 26, no. 3 (Fall 2000)
 
Author Title
David Waller The Paradox of Voluntary Motherhood
Lisa Tessman Moral Luck in the Politics of Personal Transformation
Pablo De Greiff Deliberative Democracy and Group Representation
Eric Moore Desert, Virtue, and Justice
David McCabe Michael Oakeshott and the Idea of Liberal Education
James P. Sterba From Liberty to Welfare: An Update
Nancy Potter Giving Uptake
David Kahane Pluralism, Deliberation, and Citizen Competence: Recent Developments in Democratic Theory (Review Essay)

Vol. 27, no. 1 (January 2001)
 
Author Title
Celeste M. Friend Trust and the Presumption of Translucency
Diane Jeske Special Relationships and the Problem of Political Obligations
Martin Harvey Deliberation and Natural Slavery
Fred D'Agostino Rituals of Impartiality
Jonathan S. Brown Genetic Manipulation in Humans as a Matter of Rawlsian Justice
Thomas May Rights of Conscience in Health Care
David B. Hershenov Abortions and Distortions: An Analysis of Morally Irrelevant Factors in
Thomson's Violinist Thought Experiment
Seth Crook The Ideal of Companionship (Review Essay)

Vol. 27, no. 2 (April 2001)
 
Author Title
John Christman Liberalism, Autonomy, and Self-Transformation
Brian Orend Walzer's General Theory of Justice
Jessica Kulynych No Playing in the Public Sphere: Democratic Theory and the Exclusion of Children
Messay Kebede Directing Ethnicity Toward Modernity
Ronald R. Sundstrom Being and Being Mixed Race
Jeff Jordan Why Friends Shouldn't Let Friends Be Eaten: An Argument
for Vegetarianism
Nicholas Dixon Boxing, Paternalism, and Legal Moralism

Vol. 27, no. 3 (July 2001)
 
Author Title
Sam Black Altruism and the Separateness of Persons
Derrick Darby Two Conceptions of Rights Possession
Yalonda Howze
and David Weberman
On Racial Kinship
Kathie Jenni The Moral Responsibilities of Intellectuals
Linda Radzik Collective Responsibility and Duties to Respond
Timothy Hinton The Perfectionist Liberalism of T.H. Green
Seamus Carey A New Vision for Justice (Review Essay)
Kevin Mattson Remember Liberalism? (Review Essay)

Vol. 27, no. 4 (October 2001)
Special Issue
Embodied Values: Philosophy and Disabilities
Guest Editors: Roger S. Gottlieb and Eva Feder Kittay
 
Author Title
Harry Brighouse Can Justice as Fairness Accommodate the Disabled?
Mark S. Stein Utilitarianism and the Disabled: Distribution of Life
Steven R. Smith Distorted Ideals: The 'Problem of Dependency' and the Mythology of Independent Living
Carolyn Ells Lessons About Autonomy from the Experience of Disability
Shelley Tremain On the Government of Disability
Maria Michela Marzano-Parisoli Disability, Wrongful-Life Lawsuits, and Human Difference: An Exercise in Ethical Perplexity
Paul J. Ford Paralysis Lost: Impacts of Virtual Worlds on Those with Paralysis

Vol. 28, no. 1 (January 2002)  
Author Title
Craig L. Carr Fairness and Political Obligation
Avery Kolers The Territorial State in Cosmopolitan Justice
Ruth E. Groenhout Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism
Neil Levy Self-Ownership: Defending Marx Against Cohen
Martino Traxler Fair Chore Division for Climate Change
Nathan Nobis Vegetarianism and Virtue: Does Consequentialism Demand Too Little?
Kenneth Einar Himma Desert, Entitlement, and Affirmative Action: A Response to Francis
Beckwith
Margaret Gilbert Collective Wrongdoing: Moral and Legal Responses (Review Essay)


Vol. 28, no. 2 (April 2002)
A Special Issue on T.M. Scanlon,
What We Owe to Each Other
Author Title
Richard W. Miller Moral Contractualism and Moral Sensitivity: Critique and
Reconstrual
Gary Watson Contractualism and the Boundaries of Morality:
Remarks on Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other
David Copp
and David Sobel
Desires, Motives, and Reasons: Scanlon's Rationalistic
Moral Psychology
Thaddeus Metz The Reasonable and the Moral
Alastair Norcross Contractualism and Aggregation
Richard J. Arneson The End of Welfare as We Know It? Scanlon Versus Welfarist Consequentialism
T.M. Scanlon Replies


Vol. 28, no. 3 (July 2002)
 
Author Title
Kristin A. Kelley Private Family, Private Individual: John Locke's Distinction Between Paternal and Political Power
Tommie Shelby Parasites, Pimps, and Capitalists: A Naturalistic Conception of Exploitation
Omid A. Paryrow Shabani Who's Afraid of Constitutional Patriotism? The Binding Source of Citizenship in Constitutional States
Eric Reitan The Moral Justification of Violence: Epistemic Considerations
Lisa H. Swartzman Feminist Analysis of Oppression and the Discourse of "Rights": A Response to Wendy Brown
B.C. Postow The Unity and Authority of Reason (Review Essay)
Monique Deveaux Political Morality and Culture: What Differences Do Differences Make? (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 28, no. 4 (October 2002)

Author Title
Simon Keller Expensive Tastes and Distributive Justice
Marc Ramsay Pluralism and Gray's "Liberal Syndrome"
David Zimmerman Taking Liberties: The Perils of "Moralizing" Freedom and Coercion in Social Theory and Practice
William R. Lund Perfectionism, Freedom, and Virtue: Sandel's "Formative Project"
P.A. Woodward Shue on Basic Rights
Stephen Scales Intergenerational Justice and Care in Parenting
Jeffrey Paris After Rawls (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 29, no. 1 (January 2003)



Author Title
Mark Alfino
and G. Randolph Mayes
Reconstructing the Right to Privacy
Carl Wellman A Legal Right to Physician-Assisted Suicide Defended
Kristján Kristjánsson Justice, Desert, and Virtue Revisited
Christopher Ciocchetti Wrongdoing and Relationships: An Expressive Justification of Punishment
Veikko Launis Solidarity, Genetic Discrimination, and Insurance: A Defense of Weak Genetic Exceptionalism
Peter Lindsay
and Christopher Heath Wellman
Lincoln on Secession
Jordy Rocheleau The Politics of Critical Theory: Discursive Proceduralism and Its Discontents (Review Essay)
Ronald R. Sundstrom Arrogance, Love, and Identity in the American Struggle with Race (Review Essay)


Vol. 29, no. 2 (April 2003)
Author Title
David Benatar The Second Sexism
Kenneth Clatterbaugh Benatar’s Alleged Second Sexism
James P. Sterba
The Wolf Again in Sheep’s Clothing
Carol Quinn
and Rosemarie Tong
The Consequences of Taking the Second Sexism Seriously
Tom Digby Male Trouble: Are Men Victims of Sexism?
David Benatar The Second Sexism, a Second Time
Michael Huemer Is There a Right to Own a Gun?
Linda Radzik Do Wrongdoers Have a Right to Make Amends?
Lisa J. McLeod The Wages of Sin: Glenn Loury’s The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Review Essay)


Vol. 29, no. 3 (July 2003)
 
Author Title
Keith Burgess-Jackson Deontological Egoism
Evan Tiffany Alienation and Internal Reasons for Action
H. Skott Brill The Future-Like-Ours Argument, Personal Identity, and the Twinning Dilemma
Jeffrey Flynn Habermas on Human Rights: Law, Morality, and Intercultural Dialogue
Richard L. Lippke Diminished Opportunities, Diminished Capacities: Social Deprivation and Punishment
Nick Smith Making Adorno’s Ethics and Politics Explicit (Review Essay)
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Environmental Maturity (Review Essay)


Vol. 29, no. 4 (October 2003)
 
Author Title
Kevin E. Dodson Kant’s Socialism: A Philosophical Reconstruction
Eugene Rice Solving Human Rights Conflicts by Dissolving Them: The Failure of the Dissolution Strategy
George Schedler Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?
Andrew Alexandra Political Pacifism
Martin van Hees
and Paul Anand
New Choices: Genomics, Freedom, and Morality
D.W. Haslett Murder and the Exception for Fair Competition
Michelle Renee Matisons Feminism and Multiculturalism: The Dialogue Continues (Review Essay)
Richard Schmitt Living With Evil (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 30, no. 1 (January 2004) 

Author Title
David Lefkowitz The Nature of Fairness and Political Obligation: A Response to Carr
Craig L. Carr Fairness and Political Obligation-Again: A Reply to Lefkowitz
Andrew F. Smith Closer But Still No Cigar: On the Inadequacy of Rawls's Reply to Okin's "Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender"
Ranjoo Seodu Herr A Third World Feminist Defense of Multiculturalism
Avery Plaw Why Monist Critiques Feed Value Pluralism: Ronald Dworkin's Critique of Isaiah Berlin
Kenneth Shockley Thinking Through Collectives: Graham and McMahon on the Influence of Membership on Practical Reason (Review Essay)


Vol. 30, no. 2 (April 2004)  
Author Title
Keith Horton International Aid: The Fair Shares Factor
Jeff Noonan Need Satisfaction and Group Conflict: Beyond a Rights-Based Approach
Brian Mello Recasting the Right to Self-Determination: Group Rights and Political Participation
Andrew W. Schwartz Minimal Rationality and Self-Transformation: Christman on Autonomy
Jeffrey C. Kirby Disability and Justice: A Pluralistic Account
Kathryn Norlock The Case for our Widespread Dependency (Review Essay)
John Sanbonmatsu The Jargon of Culture and the Banality of Political Theory (Review Essay)


Vol. 30, no. 3 (July 2004)  
Author Title
Tamar Meisels Targeting Terror
Phillip Montague Religious Reasons and Political Debate
Douglas Husak Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked?
Eric Wiland Trusting Advice and Weakness of Will
Andrew J. Cohen Defending Liberalism Against the Anomie Challenge
Yaacov Ben-Shemesh Religion and the Democratic Tradition (Review Essay)
Lucinda Peach What Goes Around Goes Around Again? (Review Essay)


Vol. 30, no. 4 (October 2004)  
Author Title
J. Joseph Miller Jus ad bellum and an Officer’s Moral Obligations: Invincible Ignorance, the Constitution, and Iraq
Jussi Suikkanen What We Owe to Many
Mark LeBar Ends
Kenneth Shockley The Conundrum of Collective Commitment
Shelley Wilcox Culture, National Identity, and Admission to Citizenship
Rob Lawlor Hooker’s Ideal Code and the Sacrifice Problem
Deborah Hawkins Tolerance and Freedom of Association: A Lockean State of Nature? (Review Essay)
Nick Smith When Selling Your Soul Isn’t Enough (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 31, no. 1 (January 2005)  

Author Title
Rosalind S. Simson Feminine Thinking
Brian Schaefer Human Rights: Problems with the Foundationless Approach
David W. Shoemaker Embryos, Souls, and the Fourth Dimension
John Santiago Personal Autonomy: What’s Content Got to Do With It?
Don Marquis Brill’s Objections to the Future of Value Argument
Nien-hê Hsieh Rawlsian Justice and Workplace Republicanism
Chad Lavin Who Responds to Global Poverty? (Review Essay)

Vol. 31, no. 2 (April 2005)
Special Issue on Religion and Politics
Guest Editors: Roger S. Gottlieb and John E. Kelsay
 

Author Title
Mark Jensen The Integralist Objection to Political Liberalism
K. Roberts Skerrett Political Liberalism and the Idea of Public Reason: A Response to Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition
Gila Stopler The Liberal Bind: The Conflict between Women’s Rights and Patriarchal Religion in the Liberal State
Juan Marco Vaggione Reactive Politicization and Religious Dissidence: The Political Mutations of the Religious
Mark Button Arendt, Rawls, and Public Reason
Steven Wall Perfectionism, Public Reason, and Religious Accommodation

 

Vol. 31, no. 3 (July 2005)  

Author Title
Lawrence Lengbeyer Humor, Context, and Divided Cognition
Simon Keller Freedom!
William Nelson Varieties of Rights: How They Work, How They Are Justified
Laurence Thomas Moral Equality and Natural Inferiority
Timothy Hall Abortion, the Right to Life, and Dependence
Christopher McMahon Pettit on Collectivizing Reason
Maureen Linker

When Worlds Collide: The Global Exportation of Anti-Enlightenment Scholarship (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 31, no. 4 (October 2005)  

Author Title
Robert S. Taylor Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism
Jason Brennan Choice and Excellence: A Defense of Millian Individualism
George Schedler Does Ethical Meat Eating Maximize Utility?
Jari I. Niemi Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Rationality: The Foundational Distinction between Communicative and Strategic Action
Aaron James Distributive Justice without Sovereign Rule: The Case of Trade
Greg Bognar The Concept of Quality of Life
Simon Kirchin

What is Intuitionism and Why be an Intuitionist? (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 32, no. 1 (January 2006)  

Author Title
David Lyons Rights and Recognition
Peter de Marneffe The Slipperiness of Neutrality
Danny Scoccia Neutrality, Skepticism, and the Fanatic
Chrisoula Andreou Getting On in a Varied World
Charles Starkey On the Category of Moral Perception
Rony Guldmann Determinism and Forbearance
Tony Smith Human Flourishing and the Concept of Capital (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 32, no. 2 (April 2006)  

Author Title
Carl Knight The Metaphysical Case for Luck Egalitarianism
Lucan Gregory

Ronald Dworkin, T.H. Green, and the Communal Theory of Political Obligation

David Ingram Antidiscrimination, Welfare, and Democracy: Toward a Discourse-Ethical Understanding of Disability Law
C.D. Meyers Why (Most) Rational People Must Disapprove of the Invasion of Iraq
Jessica Wolfendale Training Torturers: A Critique of the "Ticking Bomb" Argument
Raja Halwani Terrorism: Definition, Justification, and Applications (Review Essay)
Christian Miller Shafer-Landau and Moral Realism (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 32, no. 3 (July 2006)  

Author Title
Michael Davis Heavenly Philosophy: What Thomas Hobbes Said to Jean Hampton
Mika LaVaque-Manty Kant's Children
Michael J. Monahan Recognition Beyond Struggle: On a Liberatory Account of Hegelian Recognition
Eric Reitan Self-Defense and the Principle of Generic Consistency: Must Gewirth Be an Absolute Pacifist?
Violetta Igneski Perfect and Imperfect Duties to Aid
Jennifer S. Hawkins Justice and Placebo Controls
James Stacey Taylor Autonomy and Political Liberalism (Review Essay)


Vol. 32, no. 4 (October 2006)
Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism and the State
Edited by Victoria Costa and Joshua Gert

Author Title
Eamonn Callan Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism
Harry Brighouse Justifying Patriotism
Pauline Kleingeld Defending the Plurality of States: Cloots, Kant, and Rawls
Sarah Holtman On the Question of Orphans
Darrel Moellendorf Equal Respect and Global Egalitarianism
Jon Mandle Coercion, Legitimacy, and Equality
Margaret Moore Cosmopolitanism and Political Communities
Avery Kolers Subsidiarity, Secession, and Cosmopolitan Democracy
Mathias Risse What to Say About the State
Aaron James Equality in a Realistic Utopia
Simon Caney Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design: An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance

 

Vol. 33, no. 1 (January 2007)  

Author Title
John Christman Autonomy, History, and the Subject of Justice
Sam Duncan The Borders of Justice: Kant and Waldron on Political Obligation and Range Limitation
Gordon Davis
and Blain Neufeld
Political Liberalism, Civic Education, and Educational Choice
Katherin A. Rogers Retribution, Forgiveness, and the Character Creation Theory of Punishment
H.E. Baber Adaptive Preference
Peter S. Wenz Against Cruelty to Animals (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 33, no. 2 (April 2007)  

Author Title
Shlomi Segall In Solidarity with the Imprudent: A Defense of Luck Egalitarianism
Carmen Pavel Pluralism and the Moral Grounds of Liberal Theory
James W. Boettcher Respect, Recognition, and Public Reason
Ty Raterman On the Role of Preferences and Values in Public Decisions
Pablo Gilabert Contractualism and Poverty Relief
Leslie Pickering Francis and Anita Silvers

Liberalism and Individually Scripted Ideas of the Good: Meeting the Challenge of Dependent Agency

Waheed Hussain

The Ethical Dimension of Class Society (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 33, no. 3 (July 2007)  

Author Title
Steven DeCaroli A Capacity for Agreement: Hannah Arendt and the Critique of Judgment
Todd Hedrick Constitutionalization and Democratization: Habermas on Postnational Governance
Marina Oshana Autonomy and the Question of Authenticity
Richard Brook Deontology, Paradox, and Moral Evil
Bruce N. Waller Sincere Apology Without Moral Responsibility
Lori Watson

Pornography and Public Reason

Avery Plaw

Lukes's Three-Dimensional Model of Power Redux: Is it Still Compelling? (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 33, no. 4 (October 2007)
Special Issue on Virtue and Social Diversity
Edited by Victoria Costa and Joshua Gert

Author Title
Lawrence Blum Race, National Ideals, and Civic Virtue
Shelley Burtt Is Inclusion a Civic Virtue? Cosmopolitanism, Disability, and the Liberal State
Sophia Isako Wong The Moral Personhood of Individuals Labeled "Mentally Retarded": A Rawlsian Response to Nussbaum
Julia Driver Cosmopolitan Virtue
Simon Keller Are Patriotism and Universalism Compatible?
William A. Galston Pluralism and Civic Virtue
James Bernard Murphy From Aristotle to Hobbes: William Galston on Civic Virtue
Jeanine Grenberg Courageous Humility in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
Robert B. Louden "Firm as a Rock in Her Own Principles" (But Not Necessarily a Kantian)
Andrew Mason Public Justifiability, Deliberation, and Civic Virtue

 

Vol. 34, no. 1 (January 2008)  

Author Title
Antti Kauppinen Moral Internalism and the Brain
Ranjoo Seodu Herr Cultural Claims and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
Bart van Leeuwen Racist Variations of Bad Faith: A Critical Study of Lewis Gordon's Phenomenology of Racism
Joseph Millum How Do We Acquire Parental Responsibilities?
Suze G. Berkhout Buns in the Oven: Objectification, Surrogacy, and Women's Autonomy
Mark Schroeder How Does the Good Appear To Us? (Review Essay)
Sergio Tenenbaum

Appearing Good: A Reply to Schroeder

 

Vol. 34, no. 2 (April 2008)  

Author Title
Paul Formosa "All Politics Must Bend Its Knee Before Right": Kant on the Relation of Morals to Politics
Zoltan Miklosi Compliance with Just Institutions
Mark R. Reiff Terrorism, Retribution, and Collective Responsibility
Baukje Prins Sympathetic Distrust: Liberalism and the Sexual Autonomy of Women
Bernard G. Prusak Not Good Enough Parenting: What's Wrong with the Child's Right to an "Open Future"

 

Vol. 34, no. 3 (July 2008)
Social Justice: Ideal Theory, Nonideal Circumstances

Special Issue edited by Ingrid Robeyns and Adam Swift

Author Title
Zofia Stemplowska What's Ideal About Ideal Theory?
Ingrid Robeyns Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice
Adam Swift The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances
Mark Philp Political Theory and the Evaluation of Political Conduct
Pablo Gilabert Global Justice and Poverty Relief in Nonideal Circumstances
Anne Phillips Egalitarians and the Market: Dangerous Ideals
Katherine Eddy Against Ideal Rights

 

Vol. 34, no. 4 (October 2008)  

Author Title
Joseph Heath Political Egalitarianism
Guy Fletcher Mill, Moore, and Intrinsic Value

Martín Hevia and Ezequiel Spector

The Bizarre World of Historical Theories of Justice: Revisiting Nozick's Argument
Mikhail Valdman Exploitation and Injustice

Peter Stone

On Fair Lotteries
Jeremy R. Garrett Why the Old Sexual Morality of the New Natural Law Undermines Traditional Marriage
Noam J. Zohar Should the Naked Soldier Be Spared? (Review Essay)

 

Vol. 35, no. 1 (January 2009)
Special Issue: Self-Deception

Edited by Alfred Mele

Author Title
Eric Funkhouser Self-Deception and the Limits of Folk Psychology
Julie E. Kirsch Maladies of Fantasy and Depth
Mike W. Martin Happily Self-Deceived
Paul Noordhof The Essential Instability of Self-Deception
Dion Scott-Kakures Unsettling Questions: Cognitive Dissonance in Self-Deception
D.S. Neil Van Leeuwen Self-Deception Won't Make You Happy
   
NOTE:

This issue also contains book reviews that are not part of the Special Issue

 

Vol. 35, no. 2 (April 2009)

Author Title
Steven Weimer Externalist Autonomy and Availability of Alternatives
Nahshon Perez Cultural Requests and Cost Internalization: A Left-Liberal Proposal
Joshua Broady Preiss Why Brian Barry Should Be a Multiculturalist: Contractualism, Identity, and Impartiality
Scott Woodcock Disability, Diversity, and the Elimination of Human Kinds
Mark Walker The Case for Maternity Compensation
Laura Purdy At the Crossroads: Family and Society (Review Essay)
   

 

Vol. 35, no. 3 (July 2009)

Author Title
John J. Tilley Dismissive Replies to "Why Should I Be Moral?"
Jon Tresan Role-Based Interpretations of Moral Judgments: An Objectivist Account
Zachary Hoskins On Highest Authority: Do Religious Reasons Have a Place in Public Policy Debates?
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen Reaction Qualifications Revisited
Jeffrey Moriarty Rawls, Self-Respect, and the Opportunity for Meaningful Work
Chris Armstrong Defending the Duty of Assistance?
   

 

Vol. 35, no. 4 (October 2009)

Author Title
Samuel J. Kerstein Death, Dignity, and Respect
Emer O'Hagan Animals, Agency, and Obligation in Kantian Ethics
Robert S. Taylor Children as Projects and Persons: A Liberal Antinomy
Matt King The Problem with Negligence
Mark Tunick Privacy in Public Places: Do GPS and Video Surveillance Provide Plain Views?
David A. Reidy When Good Alone Isn't Enough: Examining Griffin's On Human Rights (Review Essay)
Nicholas G. Fotion Assessing Terrorism: Two Views (Review Essay)

Vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2010)

Helga Varden, "Lockean Freedom and the Proviso's Appeal to Scientific Knowledge," pp. 1-20.

I argue in this paper that Locke and contemporary Lockeans underestimate the problems involved in their frequent, implicit assumption that when we apply the proviso we use the latest scientific knowledge of natural resources, technology, and the economy’s operations. Problematic for these theories is that much of the pertinent knowledge used is obtained through particular persons’ labor. If the knowledge obtained through individuals’ labor must be made available to everyone and if particular persons’ new knowledge affects the proviso’s proper application, then some end up without freedom to pursue their own ends and some find their freedom subject to others’ arbitrary will.

Steve Daskal, "Libertarianism Left and Right, the Lockean Proviso, and the Reformed Welfare State," pp. 21-43.

This paper explores the implications of libertarianism for welfare policy. There are two central arguments. First, the paper argues that if one adopts a libertarian framework, it makes most sense to be a Lockean right-libertarian. Second, the paper argues that this form of libertarianism leads to the endorsement of a fairly extensive set of redistributive welfare programs. Specifically, the paper argues that Lockean right-libertarians are committed to endorsing welfare programs under which the receipt of benefits is conditional on meeting a work requirement, and also endorsing some form of publicly funded jobs of last resort for potential welfare recipients.

Yvonne Chiu, "Uniform Exceptions and Rights Violations," pp. 44-77.

Non-uniformed combat morally infringes on civilians’ fundamental right to immunity and exacts an impermissible form of unofficial conscription that is morally prohibited even if the civilians knowingly consent to it. It is often argued that revolutionary groups burdened by resource disparities relative to the state or who claim alternative sources of political legitimacy (such as national self-determination or the constitution of a political collective) are justified in using unconventional tactics such as non-uniformed combat. Neither those reasons nor the provision of public goods, however, are sufficient to justify such rights violations and this form of conscription, and it calls into question the suitability of current international legal protections for the non-uniformed.

Jules Holroyd, "Punishment and Justice," pp. 78-111.

Should the state punish its disadvantaged citizens who have committed crimes? Duff has recently argued that where disadvantage persists the state loses its authority to hold individuals to account and to punish for criminal wrongdoings. I here scrutinize Duff’s argument for the claim that social justice is a precondition for the legitimacy of state punishment. I sharpen an objection to Duff’s argument: with his framework, we seem unable to block the implausible conclusion that where disadvantage persists the state lacks the authority to punish any citizen for any crime. I then set out an alternative line of argument in support of the claim that social deprivation can threaten the states legitimate punitive authority. I argue that a penal system must incorporate certain proportionality principles, and that these principles cannot both be met where citizens suffer from deprivation.

Joseph Millum, "How Do We Acquire Parental Rights?" pp. 112-132.

In this paper I develop an account of how parental rights are acquired. According to this investment theory, parental rights are generated by the performance of parental work. Thus, those who successfully parent a child have the right to continue to do so, and to exclude others from so doing. The account derives from a more general principle of desert that applies outside the domain of parenthood. It also has some interesting implications for the attribution of moral parenthood. In particular, it implies that genetic relationships per se are irrelevant to parental rights and that it is possible to have more than two moral parents.

Erik Malmqvist and Kristin Zeiler, "Cultural Norms, the Phenomenology of Incorporation, and the Experience of Having a Child Born with Ambiguous Sex," pp. 133-156.

The influence of pervasive cultural norms on people’s actions constitutes a longstanding problem for autonomy theory. On the one hand, such norms often seem to elude the kind of reflection that autonomous agency requires. On the other hand, they are hardly entirely beyond the pale of autonomy: people do sometimes reflect critically on them and resist them. This paper draws on phenomenological accounts of embodiment in order to reconcile these observations. We suggest that pervasive cultural norms exert a strong and elusive, but occasionally resistible, influence because they are incorporated – they operate on the largely pre-reflective bodily level of human existence. As an illustration we discuss parental decisions about surgery for children born with unclear sex, decisions permeated by deeply entrenched norms about sexual difference and genital appearance.

 

Vol. 36, no. 2 (April 2010)

Lisa Rivera, "Worthy Lives," pp. 185-212.

Susan Wolf's paper "Meaning and Morality" draws our attention to the fact that Williams's objection to Kantian morality is primarily a concern about a possible conflict between morality and that which gives our lives meaning. I argue that the force of Williams's objection requires a more precise understanding of meaning as dependent on our intention to make our lives themselves worthwhile. It is not meaning simpliciter that makes Williams's objective persuasive but rather meaning as arising out of our positive evaluation of the value of our lives as a whole. This type of meaning has a normative element: it involves a person's deep-seated commitment to make her actions consistent with ends that confer worth on her life itself. The more significant conflict with morality lies in the conflict between the normative force of moral requirements and the normative force of the need to have a life that is itself worthwhile.

Brian McElwee, "The Appeal of Self-Ownership," pp. 213-232.

In this paper, I argue that the appeal of a principle of self-ownership is grounded in the specially intimate relationship that each of us has with our body. I argue that once we appreciate the source of the appeal of a claim of self-ownership, we can see how a differently shaped set of strong rights over our body can do justice to the considerations that ground this appeal, without committing us to the most controversial implications of a claim of self-ownership.

Daniel Engster, "The Place of Parenting within a Liberal Theory of Justice: The Private Parenting Model, Parental Licenses, or Public Parenting Support?" pp. 233-262.

Parenting has an ambiguous place within the liberal tradition. On the one hand, liberal theorists have traditionally portrayed it as a private activity. On the other hand, they have also acknowledged the need for some public regulation of parenting in order to protect children’s interests. Some theorists have suggested that this ambiguity within liberalism can be best resolved by implementing parental licensing plans that would limit childrearing opportunities strictly to individuals who could prove their psychological, moral, and financial competency to raise children well. In this article, I critique parental licensing schemes from a liberal perspective and argue that public parenting support, including paid parenting leaves, public childcare subsidies, and the like, is more consistent with liberal values and, in fact, a necessary component of any coherent liberal theory of justice.

Todd Calder, "Shared Responsibility, Global Structural Injustice, and Restitution," pp. 263-290.

This paper argues that even the most virtuous people living in affluent Western countries share responsibility for injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries. The argument of the paper draws on a moral principle that underlies the law of restitution: the principle of unjust enrichment. The paper argues that denizens of affluent Western countries have benefited unjustly from injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries and that they have a moral responsibility to pay back their unjust gains.

Nahshon Perez, "Why Tolerating Illiberal Groups is Often Incoherent: On Internal Minorities, Liberty,"Shared Understandings,"and Skepticism," pp. 291-314.

This article suggests that in cases in which illiberal groups face internal disagreement, plausible liberal arguments for toleration of such groups are hard to find. Since internal disagreement is widespread, this article proposes that arguments that attempt to justify toleration vis-à-vis illiberal groups are mostly incoherent views. I differentiate this argument from a different issue, namely, whether there is a justification for an external liberal agent to actively intervene in cases in which there exists a justification for lack of toleration.

Jonathan Quong, "Justice Beyond Equality" (Review Essay), pp. 315-340.

This essay reviews G.A. Cohen’s final major work, Rescuing Justice and Equality. In the book, Cohen challenges the Rawlsian account of the content and the concept of justice. This essay offers a summary of Cohen’s main arguments, and develops objections to several of those arguments, particularly Cohen’s claim that his proposed egalitarian ethos is not vulnerable to a well-known trilemma (liberty, equality, efficiency) that might be pressed against it. The essay’s final section offers critical reflections on the important differences between Cohen’s and Rawls’s views about the nature of justice, and suggests that Cohen’s view may not be helpful if we believe justice is a complex value that includes considerations other than distributive equality.

 

Vol. 36, no. 3 (July 2010)

Michael Bacon, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do: John Gray's Complicated Relationship with the Liberal Project," pp. 365-384.

This paper examines the issue that has taken center stage in the writings of John Gray, the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project and its implications for liberal political theory. The paper outlines Gray’s critique, showing that elements of his argument against what he calls “the liberal project” apply equally to his own value-pluralist position. It suggests that Gray equivocates between rejecting the Enlightenment liberal project and offering a value-pluralist version of that project because of a fear of moral relativism, a fear that, it is argued, is misplaced.

Stefan Rummens, "The Semantic Potential of Religious Arguments: A Deliberative Model of the Postsecular Public Sphere," pp. 385-408.

This paper introduces a distinction between three different kinds of religious arguments. On the basis of a deliberative model of democracy, it is argued that autonomy and identity arguments should be acceptable in public debate, whereas authority arguments should be rejected. This deliberative approach is clarified by comparing it with the exclusionist position of John Rawls on the one hand and the inclusionist position of Nicholas Wolterstorff on the other. The paper concludes with some general remarks about the relation between reason and religion that explain the sense in which a postsecular public sphere also remains a secular one.

Sonya Charles, "How Should Feminist Autonomy Theorists Respond to the Problem of Internalized Oppression?" pp. 409-428.

In “Autonomy and the Feminist Intuition,” Natalie Stoljar asks whether a procedural or a substantive approach to autonomy is best for addressing feminist concerns. In this paper, I build on Stoljar’s argument that feminists should adopt a strong substantive approach to autonomy. After briefly reviewing the problems with a purely procedural approach, I begin to articulate my own strong substantive theory by focusing specifically on the problem of internalized oppression. In the final section, I briefly address some of the concerns raised by procedural theorists who are leery of a substantive approach. 

Michael Huemer, "Is There a Right to Immigrate?" pp. 429-461.

Immigration restrictions violate the prima facie right of potential immigrants not to be subject to harmful coercion. This prima facie right is not neutralized or outweighed by the economic, fiscal, or cultural effects of immigration, nor by the state’s special duties to its own citizens, or to its poorest citizens. Nor does the state have a right to control citizenship conditions in the same way that private clubs may control their membership conditions.

Norvin Richards, "Lives No One Should Have To Live," pp. 463-477.

Prospective parents centainly ought to avoid creating a child whose life would be so terrible that no one should have to live it. However, those who sought to avoid it would risk making a serious moral error, if their reasoning did follow a certain pattern.The error would be failure to respect autonomy, which includes a claim to judge for oneself whether one's life is worth living. I explain how this applies to a decision about whether someone is to exist at all, and what difference it would make if prospective parents paid autonomy the respect it merits.

Danny Scoccia, "Physician-Assisted Suicide, Disability, and Paternalism," pp. 479-498.

Some disability rights (DR) advocates oppose physician-assisted suicide (PAS) laws like Oregon’s on the grounds that they reflect ableist prejudice: how else can their limit on PAS eligibility to the terminally ill be explained? The paper answers this DR objection. It concedes that the limit in question cannot be defended on soft paternalist grounds, and offers a hard paternalist defense of it. The DR objection makes two mistakes: it overlooks the possibility of a hard paternalist defense of the limit, and it confuses terminal illness, which is at best one type of disability, with disability itself.

Kok-Chor Tan, "Global Justice and Global Relations," (Review Essay), pp. 499-514.

In Globalizing Justice, Richard Miller offers a novel understanding of the grounds and scope of the demands of global justice. Miller argues that our duties to the global poor should be conceived relationally, that is, as deriving from the very complex and substantial relationships that we, members of rich countries, have with members of poor countries. In this review essay, I ask whether a relational approach to justice is necessary for the kinds of global duties Miller wishes to advance (that fall short of an egalitarian distributive duty). Indeed, so I argue, the global relations Miller describes go beyond grounding a duty to assist the needy, but are sufficient to generate more substantial global egalitarian obligations.

 

Vol. 36, no. 4 (October 2010)

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Scanlon on the Doctrine of Double Effect,” pp. 541-564.

In recent work, T.M. Scanlon has unsuccessfully challenged the doctrine of double effect (DDE). First, comparing actions reflecting faulty moral deliberations and involving merely foreseen harm with actions reflecting less faulty moral deliberations involving intended harm suggests that proponents of DDE do not confuse the critical and the deliberative uses of moral principles. Second, Scanlon submits that it is odd to say to a deliberating agent that the permissibility of the actions she ponders depends on the intention with which she will act. I argue that this can be explained without appeal to the claim that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility.

Carlo Filice, “Libertarian Autonomy and Intrinsic Motives,” pp. 565-592.

This paper suggests that libertarians should avail themselves of a system of natural and autonomy-friendly motivational foundations—intrinsic motives. A psyche equipped with intrinsic motives could allow for some degree of character-formation that is genuinely and robustly autonomous. Such autonomy would rest on motives that are one’s own in the most direct way: they are part of one’s natural make-up. A model with intrinsic motives can help libertarians in multiple ways: to deal with skeptics regarding the very idea of robust self-making; to explain the importance of autonomy (it helps explain how the agent can set her dominant life-goals on the basis of her own motives); to explain why an artificially induced, albeit rational, autonomy is less than genuine (it would not rely on the agent’s own motives).

Jason Raibley, “Well-Being and the Priority of Values,” pp. 593-620.

Leading versions of hedonism generate implausible results about the welfare value of very intense or unwanted pleasures, while recent versions of desire satisfactionism overvalue the fulfillment of desires associated with compulsions and addictions. Consequently, both these theories fail to satisfy a plausible condition of adequacy for theories of well-being proposed by L.W. Sumner: they do not make one’s well-being depend on one’s own cares or concerns. But Sumner’s own life-satisfaction theory cannot easily be extended to explain welfare over time, and it makes mistaken (autonomous, informed) self-assessment impossible. A new account of well-being based on the stable realization of personal values enjoys the advantages claimed for these subjective theories while avoiding these problems.

Christopher A. Callaway, “Religious Reasons in the Public Square: A Virtue-Ethical Response to the Exclusivist/Inclusivist Debate,” pp. 621-641.

This essay surveys some of the problems facing theories of public deliberation that are “exclusivist” insofar as they account for good participation in terms of a citizen’s refusal to use certain kinds of reasons. It then argues for a more promising alternative: one that focuses on citizens’ character rather than the content of their reasons. More specifically, it is possible to distinguish good participation from bad by considering the extent to which the citizen possesses and demonstrates the virtue of reasonableness. This virtue-based account avoids the problems facing exclusivism, while still providing a basis for evaluating civic participation.

Nathan Placencia, “Am I Who I Say I Am? Social Identities and Identification,” pp. 643-660.

This paper aims at further elucidating our understanding of social identities. It does so by focusing on a kind of subjective attachment people have to their social statuses, e.g., their race, ethnicity, gender, familial roles, and other social roles. Specifically, the kind of subjective attachment at issue is identification. Some philosophers have argued that we identify with our social statuses when we self-consciously adopt them as our own. This paper argues against this view and instead suggests that we identify with our social statuses when we care about them. Moreover, it theorizes care as a kind of emotional attunement to our social statuses that sometimes operates below the surface of self-reflective awareness.

Glen Pettigrove and Nigel Parsons, “Palestinian Political Forgiveness: Agency, Permissibility, and Prospects,” pp. 661-688.

It is often suggested that the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict will require forgiveness on the part of both Palestinians and Israelis. This paper looks at what such forgiveness might involve for one party to the conflict. It begins by offering an account of political forgiveness in which both collective actions and collective emotions play a significant role. It then explores whether there is a collective Palestinian agent capable of forgiving as well as whether it would be permissible for such an agent to forgive. It concludes with a discussion of key conditions that, if met, could facilitate Palestinian forgiveness.

Michael J. Monahan, “Liberalism and the Challenge of Race: Two Views” (Review Essay), pp. 689-704.

Derrick Darby’s Rights, Race, and Recognition and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice are two recent efforts to answer the challenges that race and racism pose to liberal theory. Darby draws upon civil rights and abolitionist discourse to advance an “externalist” account of political rights, while Sundstrom explores the strains placed upon liberalism by recent demographic trends. In this review essay, I provide a brief account of their overall arguments, and offer some further critical considerations.

 

Vol. 37, no. 1 (January 2011)

Fischer’s Way and Our Stories

Special Issue edited by Carolina Sartorio

Keith Lehrer, “Stories, Exemplars, and Freedom,” pp. 1-17.

Fischer has argued elegantly that the free actions of a person, the actions of self-expression, play a special role in the story of the person. They are the vehicles of content for the construction of that story. I argue that the experiences of those actions by a person are both representations in the story of a life, vehicles of content, and an exhibit of the content represented, the life itself. Experiences become exemplars that refer back to themselves becoming part of what the story is about. Autonomous choice of my story shows me and others what I am like.

Meghan Griffith, “Based on a True Story: Narrative and the Value of Acting Freely,” pp. 19-34.

In several essays, John Fischer motivates his guidance control view of moral responsibility by discussing the value of acting freely. What we value, he argues, is unhindered self-expression that derives its meaning from a narrative structure. In this paper, I claim that while Fischer may be correct that self-expression (understood in its narrative sense) is the value of acting freely, it is less clear that the kind of self-expression that we value sits comfortably with determinism. The meaning of one’s narrative may include the accuracy of one’s self-conception, an accuracy that may be substantially undermined by the truth of determinism.

Michael Nelson, “Default Compatibilism and Narrativity: Comments on John Martin Fischer’s Ways and Stories,” pp. 35-45.

I discuss two claims defended in Fischer’s recent work. The first is the default status of compatibilism. This is part of a conception of our agency and moral responsibility as being independent of the truth or the falsity of the thesis of determinism. I try to further bolster Fischer’s arguments in favor of this position. The second is Fischer’s defense of the narrative conception of moral responsibility, according to which the value of self-expression supports and explicates the value of being morally responsible. I argue that the cases and insights taken to support the idea that our lives have a distinctive kind of narrative value are best accounted for in other terms.

Ben Bradley, “Narrativity, Freedom, and Redeeming the Past,” pp. 47-62.

Many philosophers endorse the view that global or “narrative” features of a life at least partly determine its value.  For instance, a life in which the subject redeems her past failures and sacrifices with later successes is thought to be better, ceteris paribus, than one in which her later successes are unrelated to her previous failures.  In this paper I distinguish some views about narrative value, including Fischer’s views about the importance of free will for narrative value, and raise a number of problems for the idea of narrative value.

Peter A. Graham, “Fischer on Blameworthiness and ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’,” pp. 63-80.

I argue that Fischer’s attempts to undermine the “Ought” Implies “Can” principle (OIC) fail. I argue both against his construal of the natural motivation for OIC and against his argument for the falsity of OIC. I also consider some attempts to salvage Fischer’s arguments and argue that they can work only if the true moral theory is motive determinative--i.e., it is such that, necessarily, any action performed from a motive which renders one of the blame emotions appropriate is morally impermissible, no matter what other features it has. But, as motive-determinative moral theories are implausible, Fischer’s arguments are not salvageable.

Pamela Hieronymi, “Making a Difference,” pp. 81-94.

I suggest that Fischer concedes too much to the consequence argument when he grants that we may not make a difference. I provide a broad sketch of (my take on) the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists, while suggesting that some of the discussion may have confused the freedom required for moral responsibility with a very different notion of autonomy. I introduce that less usual notion of autonomy and suggest that those who are autonomous, in this sense, do make a difference.

Neal A. Tognazzini, “Owning Up to Luck,” pp. 95-112.

Although libertarians and compatibilists disagree about whether moral responsibility requires the falsity of determinism, they tend to agree that moral responsibility is at least compatible with the falsity of determinism. But there is a real worry about how that can be: after all, if my actions aren’t determined, then isn’t their occurrence just a matter of luck? In this paper, I offer a suggestion for how to understand and deal with this problem by appealing to the influential and powerful theory of moral responsibility developed by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza.

Frederik Kaufman, “Late Birth, Early Death, and the Problem of Lucretian Symmetry,” pp. 113-127.

Lucretius famously argued that if we think death is bad because it deprives us of time we could have had by living longer than we do, then when we are born must be bad too, since we could have been born earlier than we were, and so be deprived of that time as well. John Martin Fischer thinks Lucretius’s symmetry argument fails because we have a bias toward the future. I argue that Fischer’s approach does not answer Lucretius. In contrast to Fischer, I think that we can show an objective difference between the time before our birth and the time after our death, which means that we are justified in adopting different attitudes towards them. I revise a point made by Thomas Nagel that while we might live longer than we do, we cannot exist earlier than we did and remain the same people throughout.

Elizabeth Harman, “Fischer and Lamenting Nonexistence,” pp. 129-142.

Why do we wish to die later but do not wish to have been created earlier? There is no puzzle here. It is false that if we had been created earlier we would have lived longer lives. Why don’t we wish to have been created earlier but with our actual times of death? That wish simply is not mandated by the more general wish to have lived a longer life. Furthermore, one might prefer one’s actual life to the better, but considerably different, life one would have lived at an earlier time.

John Martin Fischer, “Replies,” pp. 143-181.

I am very grateful to the thoughtful and probing critical discussions by the nine authors who have discussed themes from my two collections, My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility, and Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will. In this essay I seek to respond to some of the points raised in these essays. I am unable to address all of the critiques, but I have certainly learned a great deal from these extremely insightful and generous papers, and I hope to address more of the issues in future work.

 

Vol. 37, no. 2 (April 2011)


Hugh Breakey, “Property, Persons, Boundaries: The Argument from Other-Ownership,” pp. 189-210.

Should one individual have, prior to any consent, property rights in another person? Libertarians answer that they should not--and that this commitment requires rejecting all positive duties. Liberals-egalitarians largely agree with the libertarian's answer to the question, but deny the corollary they draw from it, arguing that egalitarian regimes do not require other-ownership. Drawing on recent property theory, I argue that both sides are mistaken, and that a prohibition on other-ownership guides us towards a middling political position, both allowing and constraining our positive duties and liabilities to others.

Nicholas Vrousalis, “Libertarian Socialism: A Better Reconciliation between Equality and Self-Ownership,” pp. 211-226.

Socialists believe that equality, community, and economic democracy can only be achieved by a system of joint ownership in the means of production. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to their own person. Libertarians believe that individual liberty and autonomy are only coextensive with a set of stringent rights to the person and its powers. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to the external world. Bringing libertarianism and socialism together is therefore, in principle, possible. This paper takes this further step, by sketching a constituiton that reconciles individual autonomy with radical equality of condition. To those libertarians drawn to socialist values (such as the pioneers of nineteenth-century anarchism), the paper offers a reconciliation that is arguably more true to these values than left-libertarianism. To those socialists drawn to libertarian values, it offers an alternative to left-libertarianism that avoids the pitfalls of statism.

Suzy Killmister, “Group-Differentiated Rights and the Problem of Membership,” pp. 227-255.

Justifications of group-differentiated rights commonly overlook a crucial practical consideration: if rights are to be allocated on the basis of group membership, how should we determine which individuals belong to which group? Assuming that social identities are fixed and transparent runs the risk of creating further injustices, whilst acknowledging that social groups are porous and heterogeneous runs the risk of rendering group-differentiated rights impracticable. In this paper, I develop a schema for determining group membership that avoids both horns of this dilemma.

Göran Duus-Otterström, “Freedom of Will and the Value of Choice,” pp. 256-284.

Many argue that our reasons to value choice do not depend on our having libertarian free will.The paper argues against this view. One reason to value choice is that it is constitutive of a life of self-determination. If choices are determined, however, they can be predicted and brought about by others; and if choices are randomly indeterministic, they can be mimicked. In either case, the importance of choice to self-determination is challenged. Thus, it is only as long as our choices are free in a libertarian manner that the importance of choice as a means to self-determination makes full sense.

Paul Bou-Habib, “Distributive Justice, Dignity, and the Lifetime View,” pp. 285-310.

This paper provides a critical examination of the strongest defenses of the pure lifetime view, according to which justice requires taking only people's whole lives as relevant when assessing and establishing their distributive entitlements and obligations. The paper proposes that we reject a pure lifetime view and replace it with an alternative view, on which some time-specific considerations--that is to say, considerations about how people fare at specific points in time--have nonderivative weight in determining what our obligations are to them.

Bernard G. Prusak, “Breaking the Bond: Abortion and the Grounds of Parental Obligations,” pp. 311-332.

Contemporary philosophy offers two main accounts of how parental obligations are acquired: the causal and the voluntarist account. Elizabeth Brake's provocative paper "Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?" seeks to clear the way for the voluntarist account by focusing on the relevance of abortion rights to parental obligations. The present paper is concerned with rebutting Brake's argument that, if a woman does not acquire parental obligations to an unborn child just by having voluntarily acted in such a way that had the reasonably foreseeable consequence of bringing him or her into being, neither does a man acquire parental obligations to a child once he or she is born just by having voluntarily acted in the same way.

Peter Brian Barry, “Same-Sex Marriage and the Charge of Illiberality,” pp. 333-357.

However liberalism is best understood, liberals typically seek to defend a wide range of liberty. Some have argued that it is the recognition of same-sex marriage--not its prohibition--that conflicts with liberalism's commitments. I refer to the thesis that recognition of same-sex marriage is illiberal as "The Charge." As a sympathetic liberal, I take The Charge seriously enough to consider and ultimately reject it. Ultimately, I contend that The Charge is simply misguided and that arguments for it either fail to find support in some liberal principle or else find support from some illiberal principle.

 

Vol. 37, no. 3 (July 2011)


Christian F. Rostböll, “Kantian Autonomy and Political Liberalism,” pp. 341-364.

Political liberals argue that the classical conception of autonomy must be discarded because it is sectarian and metaphysical. This article rejects that a commitment to autonomy necessarily leads to sectarianism and questions the notion that respect for persons is separable from the commitment to autonomy. It defends a Kantian approach to autonomy, as belonging to the standpoint of practical reason, and argues that in this approach autonomy is a norm regulating how we should treat each other as opposed to a good to be promoted. This approach also avoids the metaphysical idea of autonomy as self-origination of binding principles.

Christian Schemmel, “Why Relational Egalitarians Should Care About Distributions,” pp. 365-390.

Relational views of equality put forward a social and political ideal of equality that aims at being a better interpretation of what social justice requires than the prevailing distributive conceptions of equality, especially luck egalitarian views. Yet it is unclear what social justice as relational equality demands in distributive terms; Elizabeth Anderson's view seems to vacate a large part of the terrain of distributive justice in favor of a minimalist, sufficiency view. Against that, this paper argues that relational equality, properly understood, requires setting stringent limits to distributive inequality, for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons. First, the relational egalitarian conception of society as a cooperative enterprise among equals gives rise to a presumption of equality in socially produced goods (and bads); inequalities in these goods have to be justified by justice-relevant reasons. Second, relational egalitarianism also delivers instrumental reasons to limit inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunities, because such inequalities may generate both opportunities for domination and inegalitarian status norms that threaten the social bases of self-respect of the worse off.

Sarah Clark Miller, “A Feminist Account of Global Responsibility,” pp. 391-412.

Contemporary philosophical discourse on global responsibility has sustained a nearly unwavering focus on justice. In response, I investigate an underrepresented element in global justice discussions: insights from feminist philosophy, and more specifically, from the ethics of care. I assess current theories of cosmopolitanism, criticizing the shortcomings of cosmopolitan justice from the perspective of cosmopolitan care. Through the concepts of dependence, vulnerability, and need, I develop a feminist global obligation--the global duty to care--and explore the distinctive vision it offers as the ground and content of a feminist theory of global responsibility.

Michael Neu, “Why There is No Such Thing as Just War Pacifism and Why Just War Theorists and Pacifists Can Talk Nonetheless,” pp. 413-433.

Can just war theory and pacifism be substantially reconciled in theory and practice? In this paper I argue that James Sterba is mistaken in thinking that they can. There is no such thing as just war pacifism. However, this does not mean that just war theorists and pacifists cannot have a reasonable conversation about the justifiability of war. They can have such a conversation if they overcome their exclusive concern with the question of action-guidingness, that is, the binary question of whether or not war can be morally justified. Justified wars are tragic.

Jason Hanna, “Paternalism and Impairment,” pp. 434-461.

Most opponents of paternalism agree that autonomy does not protect substantially impaired choices. Yet this common anti-paternalist view faces serious problems. First, I argue that it threatens to justify nearly all beneficial intervention, since all imprudent choices are impaired. Attempts to avoid this problem yield other implications that anti-paternalists would reject. Second, I argue that anti-paternalists have no convincing way of showing that impaired choices, such as those produced by emotional distress, are not protected by autonomy. In light of these problems, we should likely accept a hard paternalist view--one that permits intervention simply in virtue of the consequences.

Joshua D. Goldstein, “New Natural Law Theory and the Grounds of Marriage: Friendship and Self-Constitution,” pp. 461-482.

New natural lawyers--notably Grisez, Finnis, and George--have written much on civil marriage's moral boundaries and grounds, but with slight influence. The peripheral place of the new natural law theory (NNLT) results from the marital grounds they suggest and the exclusionary moral conclusions they draw from them. However, I argue a more authentic and attractive NNLT account of marriage is recoverable through overlooked resources within the theory itself: friendship and moral self-constitution. This reconstructed account allows us to identify the relation between marriage and human flourishing and the morality of same-sex marriage without making marriage infinitely plastic.

Anca Gheaus, “Arguments for Nonparental Care for Children,” pp. 483-509.

I review three existing arguments in favor of having some childcare done by nonparents and then I advance five arguments, most of them original, to the same conclusion. My arguments rely on the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. I discuss the importance of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children's structural vulnerability to their caregivers, of helping children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship, and of distributing the responsibility of care and the ensuing blame for bad care more widely. I conclude that nonparental childcare should be universal.

 

Vol. 37, no. 4 (October 2011)


Michael Cholbi, “The Moral Conversion of Rational Egoists,” pp. 533-556.

One principal challenge to the rationalist thesis that the demands of morality are requirements of rationality has been that posed by the "rational egoist." In attempting to answer's the egoist's challenge, some rationalists have supposed that an adequate reply must take the form of a deductive argument that "converts" the egoist by showing that her position is contradictory, arbitrary, or violates some precept that defines practical rationality as such. Here I argue (a) that such rationalist replies will fail to persuade the egoist to adopt a recognizably moral way of life; (b) that this failure can be traced to epistemic assumptions that underlie typical rationalist replies; (c) that egoist conversion can better be understood by rejecting these assumptions and seeing egoist conversion as akin to a paradigm shift in the sciences; and (d) that conceptualizing egoist conversion as a paradigm shift accords with empirical psychological evidence regarding the acquisition and modification of individuals' moral attitudes and beliefs.

Whitley Kaufman, “Understanding Honor: Beyond the Shame/Guilt Dichotomy,” pp. 557-573.

The concept of honor continues to be among the most widely misunderstood of human ideals. It has long been claimed that honor is an essentially external ideal, motivated by shame at one's appearance before others rather than an inward sense of guilt, the implication being that honor is a superficial moral ideal and one superseded by the higher ideal of the moral conscience. This account does not, however, stand up to scrutiny; honor is a genuinely "internal" value as much as virtue, and when properly understood cannot be understood as somehow more superficial or less morally advanced than the modern ideal of virtue.

Linda Radzik, “On Minding Your Own Business: Differentiating Accountability Relations within the Moral Community,” pp. 574-598.

When is one person entitled to sanction another for moral wrongdoing? When, instead, must one mind one's own business? Stephen Darwall argues that the legitimacy of social sanctioning is essential to the very concept of moral obligation. But, I will argue, Darwall's "second person" theory of accountability unfortunately implies that every person is entitled to sanction every wrongdoer for every misdeed. In this essay, I defend a set of principles for differentiating those who have the standing to sanction from those who do not.

Theresa Weynand Tobin, “The Relevance of Trust for Moral Justification,” pp. 599-628.

In this paper, I argue that relationships of trust are often necessary for moral justification. Even if a moral claim is likely to be true, it may not be adequately justified, and thus may not have normative force, unless those who are to accept the claim have good reason to believe that the one entering the claim is a trustworthy moral interlocutor. The complexity of moral knowledge coupled with differences among people in moral experience, capacities for moral perception, and reasoning abilities creates relations of epistemic dependence that make trust necessary in order to achieve adequate moral justification.

Shmuel Nili, “Our Problem of Global Justice,” pp. 629-653.

Global justice seems to be all about "us" treating "them," especially "their" problem of extreme poverty. This article argues that there is such a thing as our problem of global justice, and that it must be both temporally and logically prior to the problem of global justice. In order to establish this thesis, I seek to corroborate three main claims: that our elected governments are actively complicit in dictators' de facto armed robbery of their population's resources; that each democracy as a unitary agent has a duty, which holds independently of poverty questions, to stop profiting from this robbery by boycotting severely oppressive regimes; and that such "democratic disengagement" requires postponing an ideal theory of global justice to a later stage, since the implications of disengagement will be so unprecedented that philosophizing past them means jumping ahead of our time.

William R. Lund, “Reconsidering ‘Supreme Emergencies’: Michael Walzer and His Critics,” pp. 654-678.

Michael Walzer has argued that nations fighting a just war may be permitted indiscriminate attacks on enemy noncombatants if they are genuinely necessary to avoid an imminent and morally disastrous defeat. Critics often challenge this "supreme emergency" exemption from just war principles by arguing that it is inconsistent with his critiques of utilitarianism, realism, and sub-state terrorism. While morally troubling, I argue that Walzer's doctrine is both tightly cabined and consistent with his meta-ethical pluralism, his emphasis on the value of political community, and his doubts about abstract philosophy's ability to answer pressing political questions.

Rekha Nath, “Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right: A Critique of Virginia Held's Deontological Justification of Terrorism,” pp. 679-696.

Virginia Held argues that terrorism can be justified in some instances. But unlike standard, consequentialist justifications, hers is deontological. This paper critically examines her argument. It explores how the values of fairness, responsibility, and desert can serve to justify acts of terrorism. In doing so, two interpretations of her account are considered: a responsibility-insensitive and a responsibility-sensitive interpretation. On the first, her argument collapses into a consequentialist justification. On the second, it relies on an implausible conception of responsibility. Either way, her argument fails as a distinctly deontological defense of terrorism.

 


Vol. 38, no. 1 (January 2012)

Michael McGann, “Equal Treatment and Exemptions: Cultural Commitments and Expensive Tastes,” pp. 1-32.

While supporters argue that exemptions are needed to equalize opportunities, critics claim they are unwarranted in principle and discriminatory in practice: equal treatment requires only facial neutrality whereas exemptions treat citizens unequally insofar as individuals with idiosyncratic commitments similarly burdened by general rules are rarely given an exemption.The upshot of this critique is that the burdens of cultural and religious commitments ought to be treated as expensive tastes. I argue that religious and cultural commitments cannot be reduced to expensive tastes that can be revised in the face of resource expectations and that, for this reason, opportunities are not equal when minorities must choose between adherence to such commitments and availing of valuable opportunities, when members of more dominant communities need not. I also explain why treating religious and cultural commitments in this way does not entail the adoption of a primordial view of culture that puts these commitments beyond revision and choice.

Adam Kadlac, “Irreplaceability and Identity,” pp. 33-54.

There is a puzzle about how we might sensibly love someone as the particular person she is despite changes in that person’s characteristics that are sometimes radical. In light of this puzzle, I argue that our most intimate relationships are centered around historical relational properties that serve two important functions. On the one hand, they render individuals irreplaceable to us. On the other, they constitute individuals as the particular persons they are. If this account is plausible, then to love another because she is the person she is is not to love her because of her characteristics. Rather, it is to love her in light of a unique history that cannot be shared with anyone else and has made her who she is.

James Gledhill, “Rawls and Realism,” pp. 55-82.

Political realists like Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss reject political moralism, where ideal ethical theory comes first, then applied principles, and politics is reduced to a kind of applied ethics. While the models of political moralism that Williams criticizes are endorsed by G.A. Cohen and Ronald Dworkin respectively, I argue that this realist case against John Rawls cannot be sustained. In explicating and defending Rawls’s realistically utopian conception of ideal theory I defend a Kantian conception of theory where it is by abstracting from immediate realities that theory is fit to guide practice by providing a framework for political judgment.

Peeter Selg, “Justice and Liberal Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Reading of Rawls,” pp. 83-114.

The article sets out to initiate a dialogue between two normative conceptions of democratic society, overwhelmingly depicted as irreconcilable by the partisans of each position: the political liberalism of John Rawls and the radical democracy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The paper argues that both approaches share the same underlying ethos in envisioning society (called the “the ethos of contingency” in the paper) informing Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of radical democracy and hegemony, as well as Rawls's view of justice as fairness conceived in terms of reciprocity with its accompanying idea of public reason and reflective equilibrium.

Claudio López-Guerra, “Enfranchising Minors and the Mentally Impaired,” pp. 115-138.

This article advances three claims. The first is that the standard instrumentalist case for minimal age and sanity requirements for voting is weak and inconclusive in such a way that the evaluation of such requirements should be made exclusively on the basis of procedural fairness considerations. The second claim is that fairness requires the inclusion of all and only those persons who have the franchise capacity: the minimum necessary cognitive and moral powers to experience the benefits of enfranchisement. The third and final claim is that current age and sanity prerequisites for voting in most places fail to comply with the demands of fairness and ought to be revised.

Nicholas John Munn, “Reconciling the Criminal and Participatory Responsibilities of the Youth,” pp. 139-159.

This article examines the setting of the ages of criminal and participatory responsibility, noting that criminal responsibility is attributed significantly earlier than is participatory responsibility. I claim that the requirements for participatory responsibility are less onerous than those for criminal responsibility, and question the system that denies youth participatory responsibility. I suggest two methods of resolving this difficulty. First, lowering the voting age to enfranchise the capable youth who are currently excluded. Second, modeling criminal responsibility on the Australian doctrine of doli incapax, which gives provisional immunity from the prosecution to youth between ten and fourteen years of age.

 

Vol. 38, no. 2 (April 2012)

Gideon Elford, “Men Who Would Be Kings: Choice, Inequality, and Counterfactual Responsibility,” pp. 193-212.

The luck egalitarian view famously maintains that inequalities in individuals' circumstances are unfair, whereas inequalities traceable to individuals' own responsible choices are fair. There is, however, an important question about the inequality justifying power of responsible choice where choices are made in circumstances of existing unfair inequality. This paper considers a luck egalitarian answer to this question which holds that individuals are fairly held liable for disadvantages resulting from their choices unless that disadvantage would have been avoided under circumstances of fair equality. The paper argues that this counterfactual account faces multiple serious problems, rendering it a tool of only limited use for the luck egalitarian.

J.K. Miles, “A Perfectionist Defense of Free Speech,” pp. 213-230.

It is often said that if free speech means anything it means freedom for the thought we hate. This core idea is generally referred to as “viewpoint neutrality” and is consistent with the liberal intuition that governments should remain neutral with regard to conceptions of the good life. None of the traditional defenses of free speech seem to secure viewpoint neutrality, however. Instead, each justification leaves room to censor some viewpoints. Ironically my defense of viewpoint neutrality does not come from the liberal assumption that governments should remain neutral about the good life. I defend a version of the virtue argument for free speech that is explicitly perfectionist—-government does not have to remain neutral when promoting good lives for its citizens. Free speech is not just a means to promote virtue but is part and parcel of intellectual virtue—-a decidedly perfectionist value.

Andrew Jason Cohen, “Exchanges and Relationships: On Hard-Headed Economics Capturing the Soft Side of Life,” pp. 231-257.

Many social scientists think of exchange in terms far broader than philosophers. I defend the broader use of the term as well as the claim that meaningful human relationships are usefully understood as constituted by exchanges. I argue, though, that we must recognize that a great number of non-monetary and non-material goods are part of our daily lives and exchanges. Particularly important are emotional goods. I defend my view against the important objection that it demeans intimate relationships. As an addendum, I also defend it against claims that economics cannot study such exchanges.

Meena Krishnamurthy, “Reconceiving Rawls’s Arguments for Equal Political Liberty and Its Fair Value: On Our Higher-Order Interests,” pp. 258-278.

Few have discussed Rawls's arguments for the value of democracy. This is because his arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty should include democratic liberties, are incomplete. Rawls says little about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties. And, at times, what he does say is unconvincing. My aim is to complete and, where they fail, to reconceive Rawls's arguments and to show that a principle requiring equal political liberty and its fair value is an appropriate component of his theory of justice.

Jesper Ryberg, “Restitutionism: A Self-Defeating Theory of Criminal Justice,” pp. 279-301.

According to the restitutionist view on justice, criminals should compensate their victims for the losses they have suffered as the result of crime. The discussion amongst proponents and critics of restitutionism has, to a large extent, focused on the question as to whether the theory is capable of dealing with many of the complicated challenges that arise within a criminal justice system. However, in this paper it is suggested that the restitutionist theory of justice should be rejected from the very outset. Given an empirical assumption, referred to as the Third Parties Assumption, it is argued that the theory is practically self-defeating in the sense that it cannot be applied without violating its own prescriptions.

Alice MacLachlan, “Closet Doors and Stage Lights: On the Goods of Out,” pp. 302-332.

This paper makes an ethical and a conceptual case against any purported duty to come out of the closet. While there are recognizable goods associated with coming out, namely, leading an authentic life and resisting oppression, these goods generate a set of imperfect duties that are defeasible in a wide range of circumstances, and are only sometimes fulfilled by coming out. Second, practices of coming out depend on a ‘lump’ picture of sexuality and on an insufficiently subtle account of responsible disclosure. We value and promote the goods of out best when we leave the framework of the closet, and not merely the closet door, behind.

Vaughn Bryan Baltzly, “Same-Sex Marriage, Polygamy, and Disestablishment,” pp. 333-362.

The Progressive favors extending the legal institution of marriage so as to include same-sex unions along with heterosexual ones. The Traditionalist opposes such an extension, preferring to retain the legal institution of marriage in its present form. I argue that the Progressive ought to broaden her position, endorsing instead the Liberal case for extending the current institution so as to include polygamous unions as well—for any consideration favoring Progressivism over Traditionalism likewise favors Liberalism over Progressivism. Progressives inclined to resist Liberalism are invited to consider an alternative position: the Libertarian stance that favors instead the ‘disestablishment’ of marriage.

 

Vol. 38, no. 3 (July 2012)

Inder S. Marwah, “Bridging Nature and Freedom? Kant, Culture, and Cultivation,” pp. 385-406.

In recent years, Kant’s lesser-known works on anthropology, education, and history have received increasing scholarly attention, illuminating his views on human nature, moral psychology, and historical development. This paper contributes to this literature by exploring Kant's conceptualization of culture. While recent commentary has drawn on Kant's “impure ethics” to suggest that his anti-imperialism and cosmopolitanism reflect a concern for the preservation of different cultures, I argue that this misinterprets the nature and function of culture in Kant’s thought. Rather than regarding culture as a constitutive good, I argue that Kant understands culture as a transitory good, as a sphere of individual and collective cultivation drawing humanity towards its teleologically given end: the perfection of our rational capacities. This suggests that only certain kinds of culture--those that “prepare [humanity] for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to dominate”--are valuable for Kant. Given this, I argue that Kant’s view of culture in fact presents far greater problems than prospects for theorizing an anti-imperial and cosmopolitan politics.

Micah Lott, “Moral Virtue as Knowledge of Human Form,” pp. 407-431.

This essay defends Aristotelian naturalism against the objection that it is naïvely optimistic, and contrary to empirical research, to suppose that virtues like justice are naturally good while vices like injustice are naturally defective. This objection depends upon the mistaken belief that our knowledge of human goodness in action and choice must come from the natural sciences. In fact, our knowledge of goodness in human action and character depends upon a practical understanding that is possessed by someone not qua scientist but qua practically wise person. I spell out some key features of this knowledge of human form, including its relation to practical reasons and its similarity to the “know-how” of crafts-persons. My account of virtue as knowledge of human form sheds light on the Aristotelian thesis that humans live according to an understanding of their own form. My account also clarifies the kinship and the divergence between Aristotelian and Kantian ethics.

Kyle Swan, “Republican Equality,” pp. 432-454.

Philosophers attracted to the republican ideal of freedom as nondomination sometimes offer the thought that a state concerned to promote this ideal would be more committed to economic justice than a liberal state pursuing freedom as noninterference. The republican commitment to economic justice is more demanding and its provisions are more substantial. These philosophers overstate republican redistributive commitments. The state need only provide a basic set of capabilities in order to achieve the republican goal, and concerns about domination in society better support a sufficiency aim in redistributive policy.

Gavin Kerr, “Property-Owning Democracy and the Idea of Highest-Order Interests,” pp. 455-482.

This paper examines the distinction drawn by Rawls between the ideas of property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism, and assesses the strength of the support provided by justice as fairness for the implementation of the kinds of policies that distinguish property-owning democracy most sharply from welfare state capitalism. It is argued first that justice as fairness does not provide strong grounds for the implementation of policies designed to improve access to and broaden the distribution of nonhuman capital, arguably the most important institutional feature of property-owning democracy. It is then argued that the idea of “highest-order interests” provides the basis upon which a powerful case for the implementation of this key policy type may be constructed.

Zoltan Miklosi, “Against the Principle of All-Affected Interests,” pp. 483-503.

The paper examines the so-called principle of all-affected interests (PAAI), which holds that political decisions ought to be made in such a manner that all those whose interests are affected by them have appropriate opportunity to participate in them. In conjunction with factual observations regarding global economic interdependence, the PAAI is frequently proposed as the normative premise of arguments for global democracy. The paper argues that these arguments underspecify the supposed wrong of affectedness. It argues that the perceived wrongness of some situations of being affected without an opportunity to participate can be fully captured in terms of inequality rather than exclusion.

Glen Pettigrove and Nigel Parsons, “Shame: A Case Study in Collective Emotion,” pp. 504-530.

This paper outlines what we call a network model of collective emotions. Drawing upon this model, we explore the significance of collective emotions in the Palestine-Israel conflict. We highlight some of the ways in which collective shame, in particular, has contributed to the evolution of this conflict. And we consider some of the obstacles that shame and the pride-restoring narratives to which it gave birth pose to the conflict's resolution.

Jovana Davidovic, “The International Rule of Law and Killing in War,” pp. 531-552.

In this paper, I suggest that for some proposed solutions to global justice problems, incompatibility with the necessary features of international law is a reason to reject them. I illustrate this by discussing the problem raised by the case of unjust combatants, that is, combatants lacking a just cause for war. I argue that the principle of inequality of combatants, which suggests that we ought to prohibit those without a just cause for war from fighting, is not only a bad international legal principle, but also a bad principle of global justice.

 

Vol. 38, no. 4 (October 2012)

Richard Dean, “A Plausible Kantian Argument Against Moralism,” pp. 577-597.

There seems to be something wrong with passing moralistic judgments on others’ moral character. Immanuel Kant’s ethics provides insight into an underexplored way in which moralistic judgments are problematic, namely, that they are both a sign of fundamentally poor character in the moralistic person herself and an obstacle to that person’s own moral self-improvement. Kant’s positions on these issues provide a basically compelling argument against moralistic judgment of others, an argument that can be detached from the most controversial elements of Kantian ethics to stand as plausible and instructive in its own right.

Nathan Hanna, “It’s Only Natural: Legal Punishment and the Natural Right to Punish,” pp. 598-616.

Some philosophers defend legal punishment by appealing to a natural right to punish wrongdoers, a right people would have in a state of nature. Many of these philosophers argue that legal punishment can be justified by transferring this right to the state. I’ll argue that such a right may not be transferrable to the state because such a right may not survive the transition out of anarchy. A compelling reason for the natural right claim--that in a state of nature there are few if any viable nonpunitive enforcement options--isn’t obviously true in state contexts.

Alexander Brown, “Rawls, Buchanan, and the Legal Doctrine of Legitimate Expectations,” pp. 617-644.

The article responds to an overlooked objection put by Allen Buchanan to John Rawls’s theory of justice: that implementing the Difference Principle over time may require gross and frequent disruptions of people’s framing and execution of long-term plans. Having strengthened Buchanan’s objection to resolve significant weaknesses in his main counterexample, I argue that the best response to this objection draws on the concept of the rule of law, specifically, the legal doctrine of legitimate expectations, which can be found in English, French, and European Union administrative law. I also explore the suitability of incorporating this doctrine into Justice as Fairness given its absence in United States constitutional and administrative law. Finally, I turn to consider the question of what the government owes to agents in whom legitimate expectations are induced and then frustrated. Here I introduce the Precept of Administrative Liability.

Jessica Payson, “Individuals, Institutions, and Structures: Agents of Political Responsibilities in Cohen, Pogge, and Young,” pp. 645-662.

In this essay I argue that Iris Marion Young provides a substantially new model of responsibility that provides a way out of the standard debate regarding whether and the extent to which individuals have responsibilities for justice. This debate, best represented in an exchange of essays between G.A. Cohen and Thomas Pogge, hinges on the causal efficacy of the bearers of responsibility for justice. By distinguishing herself from both Cohen’s individualism and Pogge’s institutionalism, Young provides an enhanced way to conceptualize the responsibilities that individuals have towards justice in a nonideal world in which they have limited causal impact.

Graham Parsons, “The Incoherence of Walzer’s Just War Theory,” pp. 663-688.

In his Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer claims that his theory of just war is based on the rights of individuals to life and liberty. This is not the case. Walzer in fact bases his theory of jus ad bellum on the supreme rights of supra-individual political communities. According to his theory of jus ad bellum, the rights of political communities are of utmost importance, and individuals can be sacrificed for the sake of these communal rights. At the same time, Walzer bases his theory of jus in bello on the supreme rights of individuals to life and liberty. According to his theory of jus in bello, the rights of individuals are of utmost importance, and political communities can never permissibly violate them in war. Thus, Walzer’s theory of just war is based on two incompatible theories of justice. This explains why Walzer’s theory produces incoherent practical prescriptions in cases of supreme emergencies. Furthermore, it is impossible for Walzer to base his theory of jus ad bellum on the rights of individuals as he conceives them. The theory of jus ad bellum holds that soldiers are obligated to obey the commands of their political superiors. However, this obligation violates the rights of individuals in a number of respects. This is why Walzer does not base the theory of jus ad bellum on individual rights, and produces an incoherent theory.

Patrick Lenta, “Corporal Punishment of Children,” pp. 689-716.

In this paper I consider arguments advanced by supporters of corporal punishment and argue that they have failed to show that this practice is justified on either consequentialist or retributivist grounds. Not only are there alternative punishments that bring about as much (if not more) benefit at a lower cost, but corporal punishment poses a risk of psychological harm to children and violates children’s rights. I conclude that corporal punishment is morally impermissible and that it ought to be criminalized.

Brynn F. Welch, “A Theory of Filial Obligations,” pp. 717-737.

Despite the fact that many people face pressing questions about what they are morally required to do for their aging parents, surprisingly little has been said in the literature about filial obligations. After considering and rejecting two theories--Gratitude Theory and Special Goods Theory--this paper offers a novel, blended theory of filial obligations, called the Gratitude for Special Goods Theory. On this view, grown children often have extensive obligations to meet their parents’ needs, for doing so serves as an expression of gratitude for the parents’ past provision of goods to the child.

Jeffrey Reiman, “The Structure of Structural Injustice: Thoughts on Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice” (Review Essay), pp. 738-751.