Research Abstract

I work primarily on social and political philosophy.  I also have an interest in meta-ethics, aesthetics, and continental philosophy.  My most recent book is Reasonable Disagreement: A Theory of Political Morality (Cambridge, 2009).  It explores the idea that many issues of political morality contain a core of reasonable disagreement, where this means that the members of a polity, reasoning competently with the available concepts and within the framework of their experiences, can come to different conclusions about how political cooperation morally ought to be organized.  The theory understands issues of political morality primarily as issues of fairness, so the disagreements ultimately concern what would be fair.  The argument draws on a meta-ethical view that I call moral nominalism, which explains how moral judgments that disagree can nevertheless be competently reasoned.  Moral nominalism has the consequence that political morality has a history.  The conclusions that the people of the past could have reached, reasoning competently, are different from those people can reach now.  This means that the requirements of political morality were different in the past.  The history of political morality in a given polity is the history of the evolution of what I call the “zone of reasonable disagreement.” My current work is focused in developing in greater detail the theory of moral nominalism and the account of reasoning about fairness that it implies. 

Selected Bibliography

BOOKS

• Reasonable Disagreement: A Theory of Political Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management (Princeton University Press, 1994)

ARTICLES

• "Nondomination and Normativity," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2007.
• "Pettit on Collectivizing Reason," Social Theory and Practice, July 2005.
• "Shared Agency and Rational Cooperation," Nous, June 2005.
• "The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy," Philosophy and Public Affairs, January 2005.
• "Why There is No Issue Between Habermas and Rawls," The Journal of Philosophy, March 2002.
• "The Paradox of Deontology," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Fall 1991.
• "Managerial Authority," Ethics, 1989.
• "Morality and the Invisible Hand," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1981.

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