Despite the increasing amount of literature on the legal and political questions triggered by a commitment to liberty of conscience, an explanation of the normative significance of conscience remains elusive. We argue that the few attempts to address this fail to capture the reasons people have to respect the consciences of others. We offer an alternative account that utilizes the resources of the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy to explain why conscience matters.

Philosophers attracted to the republican ideal of freedom as nondomination sometimes offer the thought that a state concerned to promote this ideal would be more committed to economic justice than a liberal state pursuing freedom as noninterference. The republican commitment to economic justice is more demanding and its provisions are more substantial. These philosophers overstate republican redistributive commitments. The state need only provide a basic set of capabilities in order to achieve the republican goal, and concerns about domination in society (...) better support a sufficiency aim in redistributive policy. (shrink)

John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle-ground position in the twentieth century Anglo-American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist-expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds in establishing the middle-ground position Hare intended. However, I argue that prescriptive realism can be strengthened in an interesting way.

ABSTRACT John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle‐ground position in the twentieth century Anglo‐American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist‐expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds in establishing the middle‐ground position Hare intended. However, I argue that prescriptive realism can be strengthened in an interesting way.

Linda Zagzebski’s recent account of the role of emotion in the structure of moral judgments aims to reconcile the role of affect in these judgments with moral cognitivism. The account is implausible because it is based on a problematic analysis of what it is to express a moral attitude and because it makes making a moral judgment unduly difficult. I suggest a way to reconcile Zagzebski’s intuitions about moral judgments that does not encounter these two problems.

ABSTRACT John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle‐ground position in the twentieth century Anglo‐American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist‐expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds in establishing the middle‐ground position Hare intended. However, I argue that prescriptive realism can be strengthened in an interesting way.

A good Christian can be a good liberal, and perhaps should be, because liberalism is the political theory most consistent with the biblical mandate concerning the role of the state and its officers. The argument for this is made in terms that any good Christian should find acceptable, and then two policy implications are briefly discussed.

I suggest a strategy for defending the Divine Command Theory of morality against the familiar “anything goes” objection. The objection is that this theory of morality has counter-intuitive moral implications. I argue that the objection fails to notice the difference between a first-order expression of a moral proposition and a second-order metaethical account of what justifies moral standards. The objection treats the theory as if it were the former, when it is actually the latter.

The paper investigates different ways to understand the claim that non-cognitivist theories of morality are incoherent. According to the claim, this is so because, on one theory of truth, non-cognitivists are not able to deny objective truth to moral judgments without taking a substantive normative position. I argue that emotivism is not self-defeating in this way. The charge of incoherence actually only amounts to a claim that emotivism is incompatible with deflationary truth, but this claim is based upon a mistake. (...) It relies upon a problematic understanding of both emotivism and the deflationary theory of truth. (shrink)

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should they. In the second part I argue that even if the Lockean arguments fail, committed biblical Christians should think that God has (...) authorized the state only to fill the same general role that political liberals have identified for it. (shrink)

Gerald Dworkin’s overlooked defense of legal moralism attempts to undermine the traditional liberal case for a principled distinction between behavior that is immoral and criminal and behavior that is immoral but not criminal. According to Dworkin, his argument for legal moralism “depends upon a plausible idea of what making moral judgments involves.” The idea Dworkin has in mind here is a metaethical principle that many have connected to morality/reasons internalism. I agree with Dworkin that this is a plausible principle, but (...) I argue that some of the best reasons for accepting it actually work against his enforcement thesis. I propose a principled distinction between the immoral-and-criminal and the immoral-but-not-criminal, and argue that a principle at least very much like it must be correct if the metaethical principle Dworkin avows is correct. (shrink)

While most Christians have come to accept that there should be no attempt on the part of the state to coerce strict matters of conscience, many actively support the state coercively interfering with certain modes of conduct that violate God’s moral law. The development of this stance occurred during the seventeenth century English toleration debates. Then, tolerationists argued that there should be toleration for dissenting Protestant denominations, and eventually for Catholics, heretics, and atheists, too. But very few strict biblical Christians, (...) even today, endorse extending legal toleration, for example, to homosexual conduct or same-sex marriage. Two strategies, attributable to Locke, fail to support this asymmetry between religious error and the characteristic types of ‘Christian immorality’. I draw on arguments from the toleration debates to show that the boundaries of legal toleration should be extended to include these violations of divine moral law, and that strict biblical Christians should agree. (shrink)

The distinction between negative and positive liberty is familiar to political philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as noninterference. The positive variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently there has been an attempt on the part of a growing number of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars to recapture a third concept of political liberty uncovered from within the rich tradition of civic republicanism. Republican political liberty is freedom as nondomination. I argue that features that distinguish it from noninterference and self-mastery (...) highlight the theoretical and practical advantages of liberty as nondomination. It is, among these candidates, best-suited to serve as the guiding principle for the State's basic institutions and rules. The principle says that the State should secure nondomination among its citizens. (shrink)

What reactions are legitimate when someone is pursuing an experiment in living that has, in your considered view, gone awry? This essay discusses how the way Mill expressed his concern over the cultivation of individuality places some stress on the harm principle and on the permissibility of making the sort of judgments about another person that seem fairly natural to make when someone is pursuing an experiment in living that has gone considerably awry. It is surprisingly difficult, but I argue (...) not impossible, to provide a representation of Mill’s view about such cases in a way that accommodates everything that Mill seems to commit himself to: the harm principle; antipathy towards conformism; and the permissibility of making some very negative appraisals of certain modes of living. (shrink)

Foundations of Economic Personalism is a series of three book-length monographs, each closely examining a significant dimension of the Center for Economic Personalism's unique synthesis of Christian personalism and free-economic market theory. In the aftermath of the momentous geo-political and economic changes of the late 1980s, a small group of Christian social ethicists began to converse with free-market economists over the morality of market activity. This interdisciplinary exchange eventually led to the founding of a new academic subdiscipline under the rubric (...) of economic personalism. These scholars attempt to integrate economic theory, history, and methodology with Christian personalism's stress upon human dignity, humane social structures, and social justice. This volume presents the methodological and theoretical foundations for economic personalism through a detailed investigation of human action from two different, yet complementary perspectives: from the personalist perspective of Karol Wojtyla in the Acting Person , and the free-market perspective of Ludwig von Mises in Human Action . By comparing and contrasting the viewpoints of Wojtyla and Mises, the authors develop a comprehensive praxeology capable of analyzing human action from moral and economic perspectives. Beyond Self-Interest illustrates how a unified praxeology could encourage more sustained analysis of the moral dimensions of economic activity while simultaneously softening the utilitarian prejudice of contemporary economic analysis. (shrink)

The central classical liberal insight is that private property appears both to protect personal liberty and to promote general productivity. By way of philosophically clarifying this insight, Escape from Leviathan (EfL) posits the extreme classical liberal, or libertarian, Compatibility Thesis: there is no long-term, systemic, practical conflict among economic rationality, interpersonal liberty, human welfare, and private-property anarchy (i.e., four plausible and relevant theories of these that are presupposed, or entailed, by libertarianism and consonant social science). The review (Liberty, November 2002) (...) holds that this extreme version is probably false and suggests that perhaps even EfL’s author would agree. He (still) does not, although he remains open to argument. But what anyone happens to believe at any particular moment is a piece of fleeting biography that is irrelevant to the truth of the thesis or the soundness of the arguments in EfL. (shrink)

Contra critical rationalism, the response begins by referring to “the variety of internalist and externalist versions of foundationalism” (Liberty, December 2002). But it makes no attempt to explain or defend any of them. Hence, no further criticism is due here. The response then argues that, “The critical rationalist method seems to suggest that Lester’s extreme compatibility thesis is probably false” because—quoting Escape from Leviathan (EfL)—“bold universal theories might be false, and probably are” and yet “he doesn’t think the thesis is (...) probably false”. And so this is, by implication, an inconsistent belief. But the Compatibility Thesis (CT) is not one of the “bold universal theories” of science. The review and the response appear, at times, to assume that the CT is a bold universal theory about the perfect compatibility of applying the relevant conceptions, or theories, of rationality, liberty, welfare, and anarchy. Then, at other times, they assert that it is not bold at all but merely about definitions designed to be compatible. In fact, the CT asserts both that there are no theoretical incompatibilities among relevant and plausible versions of the theories, and that there are no actual long-term, systemic, and practical conflicts among applying them. That is still a bold theory (perhaps even most libertarians would disagree with it), but it’s not a universal thesis of perfect compatibility. And if it were good practice to reject a theory just because of its boldness, then all scientific theories would be immediately rejected without even trying to produce a falsification. In any case, as stated in the reply to the review, anyone’s mere beliefs are irrelevant to the truth of objective theories and the soundness of objective arguments. (shrink)

Harry Chalmers argues that monogamy involves restricting one’s partner’s access to goods in a morally troubling way that is analogous to an agreement between partners to have no additional friends. Chalmers finds the traditional defenses of monogamy wanting, since they would also justify a friendship-restricting agreement. I show why three traditional defenses of monogamy hold up quite well and why they don’t, for the most part, also justify friendship-restricting agreements. In many cases, monogamy can be justified on grounds of practicality, (...) specialness, or jealousy. (shrink)

I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind of sacrifice: God can (...) never make tradeoffs that diminish God’s overall greatness, even when those diminishments are relatively small (like forgetting a particular proposition) and the (altruistic) rewards of making the tradeoff substantial. I argue that God’s inability to make such tradeoffs is not a trivial cost for traditional perfect-being theologians who also believe that God is in loving relationships with creatures. Along the way, I explore the prospects for a less traditional form of perfect being theology, perfect being kenoticism, and different models for divine forgetting. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

For the first time, this book brings Kierkegaard into a dialogue with various postmodern forms of Christianity, on topics like revelation and the Bible, the atonement and moralism, and the church as an apologetic of witness.

The incredible achievements of modern scientific theories lead most of us to embrace scientific realism: the view that our best theories offer us at least roughly accurate descriptions of otherwise inaccessible parts of the world like genes, atoms, and the big bang. In Exceeding Our Grasp, Stanford argues that careful attention to the history of scientific investigation invites a challenge to this view that is not well represented in contemporary debates about the nature of the scientific enterprise. The historical record (...) of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself. Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

Don't pray for war -- Is democracy worth it? -- Taking speech seriously -- In recognition of limits -- The limits of politics.

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect (...) to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth traces the historical development of the ethics of authenticity in relation to the rise of social freedom and individualism. Traversing the German Idealists, Habermas, Foucault, and MacIntyre, Shuttleworth proposes a socio-existential account of ethical authenticity, using Taylor and Sartre. Moving beyond virtue ethics, discourse ethics and Foucauldian notions of self-care, The History and Ethics of Authenticity constructs a practical ethics of authenticity which makes use of contemporary reference points, including the rise of social media, capitalist (...) branding, and competing appeals to identity, resulting in a presentation of the ethics of authenticity as an achievable ethical ideal. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Hegel's Absolute must be understood to be transcendent in the sense of being both immanent within the world and exceeding it. This account of transcendence invariably turns on Hegel's inheritance of the Christian tradition and, in particular, the metaphysics espoused through Christian Platonism. To support my argument I will examine the methodological immanentism of Hegel's phenomenology to show that such immanentism, while demanded by any phenomenology, is not necessarily imported into his metaphysics. I will (...) then examine Hegel's Logic to show that the dialectic which his thought relies upon compels the finite subject to recognise that all finite things, including themselves, are grounded within the Absolute Idea. I will then examine whether we must understand the Absolute Idea as immanent or whether there is room to conceive of it as transcendent. I conclude the essay by showing that the sense of transcendence as found within Nicene Christianity provides an understanding of transcendence that is not only compatible with Hegel's thought but actually allows us to make better sense of his system than the immanentist interpretation of it. (shrink)