Publications
Beyond the Voting Debate - Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy (forthcoming)
Bearing Witness: The Duty of Non-Indifference and the Case for Reading the News — Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2022)
Reciprocity Without Compliance — Philosophy and Public Affairs 48, no. 4 (2020)
Markets, Interpersonal Practices, and Signal Distortion — with Barry Maguire, Philosopher’s Imprint, Volume 19, No. 14 (2019)
Beyond Profile and Politics: Reciprocity and the Role of For-Profit Business — Journal of Business Ethics 159 pp 239-251 (2019)
A Conceptual Disaster Zone Indeed: The Incoherence of the State and the Need for State Action Doctrine(s) — Maryland Law Review, Volume 75, Issue 1 (2015)
Currently under review
Working Papers
The Meaning of Markets — draft chapter
Loneliness as Subject of Justice — draft article
Enough About Marriage Already: A New Framework for Public Policy Scholarship — draft article
The Uneasy Status of Statism — draft article
Beyond the Voting Debate
Forthcoming, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy
Many political philosophers contend that citizens have a moral obligation to vote. Those who do not ignore important values, are wrongfully complicit in injustice, and undermine the foundations of democracy. Others argue that given the insignificance of individual ballots, voting is too costly to be rational, much less obligatory. In this article, I develop an alternative account of civic ethics that avoids the unattractive features of both these positions. Citizens, I argue, do not have a duty to vote. But this is not because voting is morally insignificant. Instead, it is because the act is non-unique. Rather than having a duty to go to the polls, citizens instead have a responsibility to do their share of civic work— a class of actions that includes but is not limited to voting. Many can satisfy this duty without casting a ballot. However, those who take this option do not float free of obligation; they must satisfy it in other forms. Our mistake, I show, has been treating voting as a distinct morally significant act rather than as one component of a complex joint project to which citizens bear responsibility.
Bearing Witness: The Case for Reading the News
Ignorance of current events is ordinarily treated as a moral failing. In this article, I argue that much of this ire is misplaced. The disengaged are no less positioned to do good or dispense beneficence, no more arrogant or complicit than those glued to the headlines. Nonetheless, I contend that citizens do have moral reason to remain informed – they ought not be indifferent to others. This, I show, provides a standing reason to pay attention to distant strangers: by bearing witness, we avoid indifference. It follows that we should reconsider our media diet and our critiques of the disengaged.
Reciprocity Without Compliance
Philosophy and Public Affairs 48, no. 4 (September 2020)
Link to Philosophy and Public Affairs
Fred owns an auto dealership. He is kind to children, bakes brownies for neighbors, and feeds stray cats. He also does not pay his taxes. Fred lives in a well-functioning democracy that respects human rights. His refusal is not an act of protest. He simply wants the money.
One of the most common explanations for why Fred’s behavior is wrong is that disobedience violates duties of reciprocity. As H.L.A. Hart writes,“when a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission from those who have benefited by their submission.” Fred gains from others’ tax payments but does not submit in turn.
Much about this argument is controversial—whether merely receiving benefits obligates, whether citizens actually benefit from the law, whether reciprocity is applicable to citizenship, whether it extends to all citizens. However, my interest lies downstream of these standard debates. I am concerned with what follows if we accept that citizens have duties of reciprocity to those who comply.
Traditionally, this conclusion is treated as sufficient to show that citizens are obligated to obey. Mirroring Hart, advocates of the classic fair play account contend that since obeying the law is burdensome and generates significant benefits, the residents of reasonably just states are bound to obey in turn. However in recent years a number of scholars—most notably Loren Lomasky, Geoffrey Brennan, and Jason Brennan—have advanced an argument that calls this claim into question. Working primarily in debates about voting, they accept that beneficial civic acts generate duties of reciprocity but deny that reciprocity requires citizens participate in kind. “Citizens,” they contend, “can have exceptional civic virtue despite disengagement with politics. Most ways to exercise civic virtue in contemporary liberal democracies do not involve politics, or evenactivities on the periphery of politics, such as community-based volunteering or military service.” Instead, they argue, reciprocity simply asks that citizens contribute equivalently to the common good.
The implication of this commensurate contribution approach is clear. If citizens can repay others’ votes without voting, there is every reason to think that they can reciprocate others’ obedience to the law without com- plying. Jiafeng Zhu has recently suggested precisely this. “The duty of fairness,” he argues, “is incapable of preempting the citizen’s liberty to reciprocate fairly in ways other than obeying the law.” Advocates of this approach contend that citizens can satisfy their reciprocal obligations in any number of ways including simply owning and operating for-profit companies.
My aim in this article is to develop a better account of civic reciprocity. As I will show, both the classic fair play and commensurate contribution accounts misunderstand the nature of the duty. While the former is too rigid in its sense of what constitutes a fair response, the latter’s focus on actions that increase the common good inappropriately ignores the differ- ential burdens that citizens face in advancing public goods. Instead, I argue that reciprocity requires that each citizen undertake her share of a special class of actions I call civic works—a class more expansive than pro- ponents of fair play acknowledge, but more limited than advocates of commensurate contribution recognize. As we will see, the civic works approach provides a better framework by which to evaluate our fellow citizens—one that gives marginalized and impoverished citizens the moral credit that they deserve.
Beyond Profit and Politics: Reciprocity and the Role of For‑Profit Business
Journal of Business Ethics 159 pp 239-251 (2019)
Link to Journal of Business Ethics
Standard accounts of reciprocal citizenship hold that citizens have a duty to participate in politics. Against this, several business ethicists and philosophers have recently argued that people can satisfy their obligations of civic reciprocity nonpolitically, by owning, managing, or working in for-profit businesses. In this article, I reject both the standard and the market accounts of reciprocal citizenship. Against the market view, I show that the ordinary work of profit maximization cannot take the place of traditional political activity. Yet contra the standard political account, I show that a special class of the actions we perform in our work as employers and employees in for-profit companies can fulfill our obligations of reciprocity. Business ethicists must therefore develop a more nuanced account of the relationship between for-profit business endeavors and the debts we owe fellow citizens who undertake burdensome political work to our benefit.
Markets, Interpersonal Practices, and Signal Distortion
With Barry Maguire, Philosopher’s Imprint, Volume 19, No. 14 (April 2019)
Semiotic objections to market exchange of a good or service maintain that such exchanges signal an inappropriate attitude to the good or to associated individuals, and that this provides a weighty reason against having or participating in such markets. This style of argument has recently come under withering attack from Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (2015a, 2015b). They point out that the significance of any market exchange is explained by a contingent semiotic norm. Given the tremendous value that could be realised by markets in, for instance, bone marrow, or kidneys, deferring to such norms across the board would have very significant opportunity costs. In the absence of any rationale for these norms, they should be ignored completely. We provide one important rationale. Unlike many semiotic objections to markets, we provide a broadly consequentialist semiotic argument. We argue that a range of behaviours play important signalling roles in interpersonal social practices; in particular, in practices involving caring, esteem, and testimony. Markets in these behaviours would distort these signals. Moreover, many of the productive advantages yielded by markets rely in turn on positive market norms that also inhibit the signalling behaviours associated with these nonmarket behaviours. We conclude that there will inevitably be trade-offs between the distributive advantages of new markets and these interpersonal social practices.
A Conceptual Disaster Zone Indeed: The Incoherence of the State and the Need for State Action Doctrine(s)
Maryland Law Review, Volume 75, Issue 1 (2015)
The state action doctrine is famously a disaster zone. In this Paper, I will argue that the doctrine’s problems have an unexpected source: there is no such thing as the state. In saying this, I mean nothing spookily metaphysical. Police exist, legislators exist, courts exist, laws exist, and so on. But the concept of the state is itself incoherent. Our core intuitions about what it is to be a state are in conflict. The appropriate response might seem to be that defended by several recent authors: give up on the doctrine altogether. I however, maintain the opposite: recognizing this incoherence allows us to rescue the doctrine.
Upon reflection, our interest in the state reveals itself as an interest in several different clusters of features, each of which prove independently coherent and morally significant. This suggests a new way of understanding the doctrine that can overcome existing criticisms. Rather than attempting to save the state action doctrine, we need to develop a pluralistic set of state action doctrines, clarifying when we have reason to attend to each of these traits.
The Romantic Lie in the Brain: Collective Agency, Moral Responsibility, and the State
Prominent political philosophers have recently argued that nation-states can be held morally accountable because they qualify as group agents (List, 2014; Pettit, 2015; Tuomela, 1991.) Much of the ensuing debate has focused on the existence of collective agency or its consequences for individual responsibility. Critics deny that groups of people possess the self-awareness, motivation, or biological material to qualify as agents. (Miller, 2002; Ronnegard, 2013; Sepinwall, 2015.) Others question what such claims tell us about the answerability of discrete actors such as citizens in democratic states (Lawford-Smith, 2019; Stilz, 2011). Overlooked in these discussions is the fact that claims about national responsibility contain not only a theory of group agency, but also a theory of states – of what such entities are and what they are like. It is merely assumed that if groups can be held accountable then nation-states bear moral responsibility. My aim here is to challenge this presumption. Political institutions, I argue, predictably lack the unity and control that accounts of group agency contend moral accountability requires.
This tells us something important about the moral landscape. But even more significant is the reason why this misalignment between theory and reality has been overlooked. As I show, contemporary political philosophers take themselves to be able to “reason together without having to argue about what domestic states are actually like.” (Blake, 2012, 122). This, I argue, is an error. As Aristotle wrote, “he who would inquire into the nature and various kinds of government must first of all determine, ‘what is a state?” (Aristotle, Jowett, 1905, 100).
Fair Play as Reciprocity
Fair-play is classically treated as a distinct moral principle distinguished from more general concerns like fairness, consent, or gratitude by its cooperative scheme and rules conditions, that is, by the fact that the duty is said to arise only when a group of people coordinate their activities to produce particular goods and be satisfied only when a beneficiary undertakes her practice-designated role. In this essay, I reject both these features. Fair-play, I argue, is best understood as one instance of a general principle of reciprocity that governs both interpersonal and collective interactions and grants no special moral weight to the rules of a participatory scheme. This approach, I show, provides a more parsimonious and grounded account of our duties—but calls into question long-standing claims about citizens’ obligation to vote, pay taxes, or undertake other civic acts.
Impartiality and Fair Play Revisited
Picture the following:
Park: As a runner, Miguel benefits from the expansive neighborhood watch that keeps his local park safe for nighttime jogs. Yet, his neighbors complain, he never takes a turn on patrol.
Something seems troubling about Miguel’s behavior. Yet it is hard to say what he is doing wrong. He did not ask anyone to act to his benefit. He never agreed to any park-walking plan. Given the number of people involved in the watch (imagine it is a town with thousands of volunteers at the ready) he is not meaningfully adding to anyone’s burden.
A common explanation is that Miguel violates duties of fair play by refusing to participate in a scheme from which he has benefited. Such free-riding, many argue, is unfair. As John Rawls writes, “when a number of persons engage in a mutually advantageous cooperative venture according to rules, and thus restrict their liberty in ways necessary to yield advantages for all, those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right to a similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their submission.” Put more precisely:
When a person has:
(1) accepted (or received)
(2) the benefits
(3) of a reasonably just and fair
(4) cooperative practice
(5) that requires a sacrifice from participants
(6) that person is bound to do their part as defined by the rules of that practice.
Much about this claim is controversial: does the mere receipt of benefits really trigger obligations? Does this hold if beneficiaries do not acquiesce? Must the relevant benefits track objective or subjective good? But my interest lies in a further puzzle, one that arises once we accept that something in this vein explains the wrongness of Miguel’s actions.
Consider another scenario:
Snow: Neda hates shoveling snow. One morning after a big storm she wakes up to learn that enterprising elves have cleaned her sidewalk and driveway for her. She is delighted. She is less delighted when they drop off their (reasonably priced) bill.
Many scholars treat park and snow as different in kind. While the former is said to involve wrongful free-riding, the latter is viewed as a predatory demand. Consequently, while Miguel is said to have a duty to join in, Neda is thought to do nothing wrong if she refuses to pay the bill.
The problem is that the two scenarios look remarkably similar. In both situations a group of people provide an unrequested benefit and take their doing so to trigger an obligation for beneficiaries to repay in a manner specified by their benefactors. My goal in this essay is to make sense of these competing intuitions by developing an account of what differentiates predatory demands from practices that properly generate duties of fair-play. In fact, I will argue, cases like snow and park are even more similar than theories of fair play have acknowledged. Nonetheless, we can distinguish the two by properly situating fair-play in the broader moral landscape. Doing so better grounds the duty and more precisely illuminates its scope—but it requires profoundly reimagining what fair-play asks of us in a way that calls into question long-standing assumptions about civic ethics.
The Meaning of Markets (draft chapter)
The classic complaint about markets is that they encourage harmful or unvirtuous behavior or characteristics, violate rights, distribute goods in the wrong way, or are exploitative. This is what people typically have in mind when they complain that child labor should be banned, or that sex shouldn’t be available for purchase, or that the sale of blood diamonds fuels bloody wars.
A quite different concern is that trade in particular goods or services carries the wrong meaning. In such cases, the purported problem is expressive. Market exchanges, the worry goes, communicate an improper attitude towards marketed goods, or to associated individuals, commodities, or practices. As Marx writes of a market system, “all that is holy is profaned...”1 This wrongful expression is argued by many to generate a weighty reason against participating in or having markets in particular goods. Consider Michael Sandel’s claim that placing bets on the death of other persons expresses a “dehumanizing attitude,” or that the sale of children would “express…the wrong way of valuing them,” even if the children were not mistreated. Or take Jacob Sparks’ concern that, “when we allow the buying and selling of certain goods, we are expressing inappropriate attitudes…towards the closely related goods that can’t be bought or sold.” Similar claims have been advanced by Elizabeth Anderson, Debra Satz, Peter Singer, Margaret Radin, and others. In each case, the issue is with what market trades impart.
Loneliness as a subject of justice (draft)
“Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.” So declared Pauline Phillips, who dispensed steely advice to Americans for decades under the pen name Abigail Van Buren. It is easy to see Phillip’s point. The significance of her claim is apparent to anybody who has ever moved, experienced the loss of significant relationships, or simply found themselves with little in the way of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
Classical theories of distributive justice offer little to those who experience such poverty. While classic Rawlsian approaches worry a great deal about those who lack wealth, income, or social standing, they say nothing at all about social connectedness. The implication is that loneliness is not a concern of justice. The few who have traditionally sought to expand accounts of justice to include relationships have focused on the need for care in moments of unusual dependency, or on the structure of labor within the family unit. The merely forlorn, it seems, have no claim.
Recent work—most notably by Elizabeth Brake and Chiara Cordelli- have sought to rectify this error. On their view caring relationships, or at least the goods distinctively available through these relationships, qualify as Rawlsian primary goods and thus as appropriate subjects of state concern. Justice demands we promote these relationships, grant them status recognition, and provide benefits to participants.
My aim in this article is to reject both of these views. While the lonely have claims we ought to address, caring relationships are not the unique loci of political values such that states are justified in promoting them. Indeed, doing so risks perpetuating the very injustices proponents of care seek to alleviate.
Enough About Marriage Already: A New Framework for Public Policy Scholarship
Should states recognize same-sex marriage? Polygamous marriage? Should marriage be incentivized? Should it be given tax benefits or penalties? For the past decade scholars across the political spectrum have disagreed about the answer to questions like these, but they have agreed about one thing: determining what form marriage should take is an important question that deserves to be the focus of serious scholarly and public attention. In this paper, I argue that this presumption is a dangerous mistake. In focusing on what they should do about marriage, scholars, policy experts and elected officials have been asking the wrong question. By doing so, they risk perpetuating the very injustices they seek to resolve. These findings are significant for two reasons. First, they tell us something important about the about the policies states should pursue and scholars should investigate. Even more fundamentally, they tell us something important about legal scholars should approach their efforts to guide public policy.
To demonstrate this, I focus in the paper on one of the most sophisticated recent works of scholarship on marriage, Elizabeth Brake's defense of a novel policy she calls minimal marriage. Though her work is rigorous, I demonstrate that Brake reaches conclusions inconsistent with the values that motivate her policy conclusions. Rather than promoting a just distribution of the values she sees caring relationships embodying, marriage promotion, even in the revised form Brake defends, does harm to the most vulnerable - the very people she aims to protect. To solve the problems she describes, I show, Brake would do better to focus on housing policy, mobility policy, and a range of other concerns.
Of greatest interest is the reason why Brake's argument went array. It did so, I show, because Brake adopted what I call the tethered approach, beginning her investigation by focusing on a particular real world policy concern, marriage policy. Framing her research in this manner shaped Brake's perceptions in ways that left her predictably vulnerable to cognitive error. To avoid these errors, I suggest an alternative methodological framework, what I call the open approach. Rather than beginning with a tangible policy concern, this method starts with an initial focus on abstract theorizing, asking “what are the nature of the values a that public policies should support?†Rather than immediately moving to consider a particular good, this method then seeks to describe abstractly what must be done in order to respond appropriately to the relevant values. It is only in the third step that researchers become more concrete, using empirical tools ro investigate what policies possess the characteristics the earlier steps abstractly described. As in all policy work, the aim is ultimately to provide concrete actionable guidance, but a scholar who employs the open approach does not try to get there by beginning with a concrete policy concern in mind. On this approach, the determination of what constitutes a relevant concrete policy concern is itself part of the subject of investigation. Like all ways of framing our thinking, the open approach influences our perceptions. However, unlike the tethered approach, I show that employing an open method focuses scholars' attention in a way that helps them reach accurate conclusions. By employing this approach, policy scholars will be better equipped to provide policymakers with much needed guidance.
The Uneasy Status of Statism
In recent years, discussions of justice have taken a turn for the global. Liberal political philosophy has been racked by debates about the scope of distributive duties, with statists arguing that principles of distributive justice are relevant only in the domestic context, and cosmopolitans contending that they apply without regard for borders. In contrast, the domestic realm has seemed a site of relative detante. For all their differences, statists and cosmopolitans alike share the conviction that lawmakers have obligations of socioeconomic justice to the citizens they govern. In this paper, I dispute this narrative. The apparent harmony of domestic justice, I show, is an illusion made possible by a confused vision of the regulatory process. When we consider how governance actually happens, theories of domestic justice prove every bit as controversial as discussions of global justice.
To demonstrate this, I focus on one prominent view thought to have statist implications, the coercion theory, whose advocates contend that the fact that the state is uniquely coercive in the realm of private law- most specifically property- gives rise to distinct distributive obligations. This view, I show, can overcome the criticisms of cosmopolitan opponents. But it falters from an unexpected direction- the domestic context. As I show, the coercion theory can survive cosmopolitan critics only because both proponents and opponents of the view accept a confused vision of the regulatory state, one that ignores the disarticulated fashion in which policy is made and enforced. When the coercion principle is applied to a more realistic account of the regulatory process, the view entails a surprising conclusion: principles of distributive justice apply to neither the international nor the domestic realm. Proponents can avoid this conclusion only by revising the view in a way that leaves them vulnerable to the criticisms they have leveled against cosmopolitans.
This approach, I argue, underscores the need for legal scholars to develop a new model of the state. Doing so, I contend calls into question many implicit assumptions that underlie elements of legal doctrine. Aspects of business and administrative law, for example, are predicated upon the notion that private actors like corporations and standard setting organizations occupy a distinctly different role than traditional state actors. As I show, their shared normative vulnerability to special distributive demands suggests this is not the case.