Working Papers

Aristotle and the Correct Constitution

Everyone knows that, for Aristotle, "correct" constitutions, unlike their "deviant" counterparts, aim at the common advantage.  But interpreters routinely mistake, or ignore, the conceptual distinctiveness of characterizations of aim or purpose, a distinctiveness that Aristotle himself highlights.  This paper brings out the special nature of Aristotle's thought on constitutional correctness, by emphasizing its intentional and therefore intensional aspect:  a regime's correctness hangs on its rulers' practical self-understanding.  The favored reading works to unite Books III and V of the Politics in an unfamiliar way, and it also unifies the idea of constitutional correctness with Aristotle's treatment of virtue's requirements from the Ethics.  The paper ends by suggesting an attractive but radical way of conceiving of Aristotle's view as a kind of "virtue politics."

Rational Action and Explanatory Consequentialism

It is common in political science to assume a quasi-Humean picture of rational action.  On this picture, an action is rational if and only if it is such as to be caused by a "rationalizing" set of mental states:  the agent's desire for some optimal outcome and her belief that this outcome will be optimally secured by the relevant action.  In short, a rational action is to be explained by an agent's considerations about its consequences.  But this picture operates with a contestable assumption about how best to describe the putative outcomes that agents consider; it takes conceived outcomes as agent-neutral or action-independent:  as familiar sorts of states of affairs that do not include actions themselves.  Rather, actions are allegedly explained by mental states whose description does not require further reference to action; instead, mental states' contents are just standard propositional contents.  But recent work in the philosophy of action in the Anscombean tradition has challenged the attractions of the picture, since an agent's thought about intentional action cannot be reduced into such standard contents.  This paper brings out this Anscombean challenge, so as to put into view a distinctive conception of political agency.  It ends by applying this conception to two topics of concern to political theory:  the so-called "paradox of voting"; and the question of consequentialism in normative theory.

Durkheim, Social Facts, and Collective Action

In Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim plainly emphasizes his view that social life is best described as the realm to which "philosophical idealism" applies most strictly.  But Durkheim's readers roundly ignore the full force of this startling avowal of some form of social constructionism; they have usually discounted Durkheim's idealism, in favor of the slogan that Durkheim must be some kind of behaviorist or crude positivist.  This paper articulates Durkheim's form of social constructionism, and goes some way to defend that view against deflationary accounts.  Articulation and defense draw on current treatments in the philosophy of action and work on self-knowledge; these lines are also extended into problems of collective action and collective identity.  Finally, application is made to collective identity as a matter of political agency.

Democratic Responsibility and the Doctrine of Double Effect

The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) picks out a famous but deeply controversial view in philosophical and applied ethics.  Roughly, the DDE claims that the moral permissibility of an action hangs on the intentions with which its agent acts.  This paper rehearses and analyzes arguments against the DDE, but it extends the discussion in two ways.  First, it defends a version of the DDE by articulating the action-theoretic background against which the view is best understood; once this background from the philosophy of action is more firmly in focus, the DDE's commitments will be made more plausible.  In short, I here argue that critics of the DDE rely on disputable theses about what actions are and therefore about the entities to which the concept of moral permissibility is supposed to apply.  Second, the paper also argues that, even if the DDE is ultimately implausible as a position in philosophical and applied ethics, it is more attractive and plausible in a different domain:  that part of political morality that is concerned with the obligations that apply to political officials and even common citizens in a democratic regime.  In such a domain, the intentions with which agents act can affect the moral status of their actions, even if, as a general principle in moral theory, the DDE is false.

Scanlon, Intention, and Double Effect

Many people, including its defenders, take the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) to rely on the view that certain features of an agent's intention may render her action, understood neutrally, as morally impermissible.  I present an alternative form of the doctrine - a form defended over the years by Joseph Boyle, John Finnis, and Germain Grisez - that does not enjoy the imputed reliance.  If this alternative is plausible, then it may be the case that many debates over the plausibility of the DDE have been poorly framed; for the DDE will then concern, not otherwise neutral actions, but an agent's piece of practical reasoning.  I end by contrasting this version of the DDE with another form of the general position, both of which can be seen to avoid the problematic reliance.

Was Aristotle a Perfectionist?

Is Aristotle's eudaimonism best understood along welfarist lines?  The paper argues against such an understanding, and it challenges Nussbaum's perfectionist interpretation of Aristotle's Politics.

Aristotle, Egoism, and Rational Choice

A critique of those readings of Aristotle that take his ethical thought to be a form of rational egoism, this paper also sketches Aristotle's conception of prohairetic action.

Luck and Its Limits:  The Case of New Orleans

A critical examination and application of luck-egalitarian theories of distributive justice to the question of New Orleanians injured by Hurricane Katrina.  (Co-written with Michael Redmann.)

How to Value Religious Practices

We can value religious practices in many ways.  One way is to grant special weight to the fact that some action is performed under a religious aspect, i.e., for religious reasons.  But doing this may be imperiled by a common understanding of the relationship between value and reasons for action, since religious reasons may fail to count as good reasons, which are what make actions valuable.  We can avoid this danger by allowing for the idea that, while religious reasons may fail to count as good reasons for action, the fact that some action is performed for religious reasons may still enjoy a special value-making status, since our reasons to value a practice are not exhausted by our reasons to engage in that practice.  This value-making status may be secured by reasons to respect a practice, even if we have no reasons to engage in it.

(Last updated August 28, 2014)