"Friendship and Practical Reason" The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship, Diane Jeske, ed. New York: Routledge, 2023
There is wide agreement that friendship is marked by deep and particularized care for each other. Often this care is understood as practical concern for the friend’s good. Caring for her as the kind of thing she is—as an agent—seems to be not exhausted, however, by a concern to benefit her, and so the reasons your friendship with her gives you will be more than just reasons to benefit her; indeed, some of these other reasons of friendship can conflict with and sometimes take priority over your reasons to benefit her. This chapter aims to trace these complications by mapping out some of the ways in which you, as someone who cares for your friend as an agent, ought to respond to her reasons—those she has on account of her own projects, aims, and relationships—and incorporate them into your own practical reasoning.
"But I've Got My Own Life to Live: Personal Pursuits and the Demands of Morality" Social Theory and Practice 48.2 (April 2022) 263-284 [philpapers] [pdf]
The dominant response to Peter Singer’s defense of an extremely demanding duty of aid argues that an affluent person’s duty of aid is limited by her moral entitlement to live her own life. This paper argues that this entitlement provides a basis not for limiting an affluent person’s duty of aid but rather for the claim that she too is wronged by a world marked by widespread desperate need; and the wrong she suffers is a distinctive one: the activation of a duty of aid so demanding that it dominates her life, crowding out her own valuable projects and involvements.
"Disagreement, Unilateral Judgment, and Kant's Argument for Rule by Law" Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20.3 (November 2021) 285-309 [philpapers] [pdf]
Kant argues that it is only as citizens of a properly constituted state that persons are able to respect one another’s innate right to freedom, for joint subjection to the authority of a state enables them to avoid what Kantians call “the problem of unilateralism”: when I interact with you in a state of nature according to my judgment of right in circumstances of disagreement between us, I implicitly claim that my judgment, and not yours, has authority over us simply because it is mine. But this argument seems vulnerable to a powerful objection: my reason for acting on my judgment of right is not that it is mine but rather that it is, as I believe, correct, and so there is no sense in which I am claiming special authority for that judgment. This paper defends the Kantian problem of unilateralism against this objection and, in so doing, illuminates the feature of the Kantian conception of right that accounts for why, no matter how good and right-loving they might be, persons in a state of nature about right are unable coherently to pursue the aim of acting rightly.
"Kant and the Problem of Unequal Enforcement of Law" Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20.2 (August 2021) 188-210 [philpapers] [pdf]
Kant infamously opposes not only revolution but also any resistance or disobedience by citizens that aims to compel states to reform themselves. This paper argues that, in fact, the Kantian account of the legitimate state has the resources for a distinctive justification of principled disobedience, including even violent or destructive disobedience, that applies to citizens of contemporary Western democracies. When a state fails to enforce the law equally, this lack of equal enforcement can deprive some citizens of the equal assurance of the security of their rights that, on the Kantian account, forms part of the basis of the state’s claim of legitimate authority in the first place. This failure will thus be a defect of legitimacy and, as a result, those citizens may engage not only in civil disobedience but also in uncivil disobedience, even violent or destructive disobedience, in order to compel the state to reform itself. In this context, such disobedience will count as furthering rather than undermining the project of governance by legitimate law.
"Vocations, Exploitation, and Professions in a Market Economy" Social Theory and Practice 44.3 (July 2018) 323-347 [philpapers] [pdf]
In a market economy, members of professions—or at least those for whom their profession is a vocation—are vulnerable to a distinctive kind of objectionable exploitation, namely the exploitation of their vocational commitment. That they are vulnerable in this way arises out of central features both of professions and of a market economy. And, for certain professions—the care professions—this exploitation is particularly objectionable, since, for these professions, the exploitation at issue is not only exploitation of the professional’s vocational commitment but also of her even more basic commitment to morality.
"A Good Friend Will Help You Move a Body: Friendship and the Problem of Moral Disagreement" The Philosophical Review 125.4 (October 2016) 473-507 [philpapers] [pdf]
On the shared-ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend’s valuable ends for her own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue them. This paper defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent sometimes requires allowing her judgment to decide what you are to do, even when you disagree with her judgment (and even when her judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as her close friend to defer to her judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible practical and moral agent can require that you assist her in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs.
See also: Ella Glover, "My Friend Is Cheating On Her Partner. What Should I Do?" Refinery29 [UK] (8 December 2022)
"The Principle of Fairness, Political Duties, and the Benefits Proviso Mistake" Journal of Moral Philosophy 13.3 (May 2016) 265-293 [philpapers] [pdf]
Recent debate in the literature on political obligation about the principle of fairness rests, I argue, on a mistake. Despite the widespread assumption to the contrary, a person can have a duty of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining some cooperative scheme even though that scheme does not represent a net benefit to her. That this is a mistake matters, I argue, for it allows for a resolution of the stalemate between those who argue that the mere receipt of some public good from a scheme can generate a duty of fairness and those who argue that only some voluntary action of consent or acceptance of the good can generate such a duty. I defend a version of the principle of fairness—‘Justified Reliance’—that holds that it is the person’s reliance on a scheme for the provision of some product or service that generates duties of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining the scheme. And, on this version, the principle of fairness is politically significant: regardless of whether the citizen has a duty to obey the law, she will still have important political duties of fairness generated by her reliance on the various public goods provided by those society-wide cooperative schemes sustained by the sacrifices of her fellow citizens. These duties, then, will be duties to bear her fair share of these sacrifices, and they will be owed not to the state but to her fellows.
"Normative Consent and Authority" Journal of Moral Philosophy 10.3 (May 2013) 255-275 [philpapers] [pdf]
In his recent book Democratic Authority, David Estlund defends a strikingly new account of political authority that makes use of a distinctive kind of hypothetical consent that he calls ‘normative consent’: a person can come to have a duty to obey another when it is the case that, were she given the chance to consent to the duty, she would have a duty to consent to it. In this paper, I argue that the account Estlund develops is, in a crucial respect, incoherent: the principle of normative consent he offers relies on a claim about a hypothetical situation, but the hypothetical situation at issue is one that, according to the principle itself, is morally impossible.