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Against Maximizing Act-Consequentialism
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)
Maximizing act consequentialism holds that actions are morally permissible if and only if they maximize the value of consequences—if and only if, that is, no alternative action in the given choice situation has more valuable ...
Who are the least advantaged?
(Clarendon Press, 2007)
The difference principle, introduced by Rawls (1971, 1993), is generally interpreted as leximin, but this is not how he intended it. Rawls explicitly states that the difference principle requires that aggregate benefits ...
Five Questions on Political Philosophy
(Automatic Press, 2006)
Peter Vallentyne answers five questions posed by the editor of the text on the nature of political philosophy.
On Original Appropriation
(Ashgate, 2007)
Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves. Lockean libertarianism further holds that agents have the moral power to acquire private property in external things as long as a Lockean Proviso—requiring ...
Justice in General: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2003)
This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses the following three (only loosely ...
Distribution of What?: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2003)
This is the fourth volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume and the second part of Volume 5: Social ...
Social Contract and the Currency of Justice: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2003)
This is the fifth volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses two issues: (1) contractarian ...
Of Mice and Men: Equality and Animals
(Springer Verlag, 2005)
Can material egalitarianism (requiring, for example, the significant promotion of fortune) include animals in domain of the equality requirement? The problem can be illustrated as follows: If equality of wellbeing is what ...
On the Possibility of Paretian Egalitarianism
(Journal of Philosophy, 2005)
We here address the question of how, for a theory of justice, a concern for the promotion of equality can be combined with a concern for making people as well off as possible. Leximin, which requires making the worst off ...
Why Left-Libertarianism Isn't Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in left-libertarianism, which holds (roughly) that agents fully own themselves and that natural resources (land, minerals, air, etc.) belong to everyone in some ...
Capabilities vs. Opportunities for Well-being
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have argued that justice is concerned, at least in part, with the distribution of capabilities (opportunities to function). Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, and John Roemer have argued that ...
Memory and Epistemic Conservatism
(2007)
We are all conservatives, at least when it comes to belief retention. We are forgetful, of course, but we typically do not abandon our beliefs unless we have special reasons to do so. Whichever view one takes of the ...
On Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology
(2007)
We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic—that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic ...
Truth, Meaning, and Circularity
(Springer Verlag, 2008)
It is often argued that the combination of deflationism about truth and the truth-conditional theory of meaning is impossible for reasons of circularity. I distinguish, and reject, two strains of circularity argument.
Arguments ...
Equality, Efficiency, and the Priority of the Worse Off
(Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Egalitarian theories of justice hold that equality should be promoted. Typically, perfect equality will not be achievable, and it will be necessary to determine which of various unequal distributions is the most equal. All ...
Natural rights and two conceptions of promising
(Chicago-Kent College of Law, 2006)
Does one have an obligation to keep one's promises? I answer this question by distinguishing between two broad conceptions of promising. On the normativized conception of promising, a promise is made when an agent validly ...
Hurley on Justice and Responsibility
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)
In Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, Susan Hurley defends a reason-responsive account of responsibility, argues that appeals to responsibility cannot provide a justification or non-trivial specification of brute luck egalitarian ...
Initiating Coordination
(Philosophy of Science, 2007)
How do rational agents coordinate in a single-stage, noncooperative game? Common knowledge of the payoff matrix and of each player's utility maximization among his
strategies does not suffice. This paper argues that utility ...
Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better
(Cambridge University Press, 2004)
We address the question of how finitely additive moral value theories (such as utilitarianism) should rank worlds when there are an infinite number of locations of value (people, times, etc.). In a recent contribution, ...
Person-Affecting Paretian Egalitarianism with Variable Population Size
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007)
Where there is a fixed population (i.e., who exists does not depend on what choice an agent makes), the deontic version of anonymous Paretian egalitarianism holds that an option is just if and only if (1) it is anonymously ...