I am a Professor of Law & Philosophy at Cornell Law School and the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.
I received a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, where my committee consisted of Gideon Rosen, Michael Smith, Sarah McGrath, and Philip Pettit. Before that, I was at Yale Law School, where I earned a JD, and prior to that I completed an Mphil in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. My BA, which was also at Princeton, was in economics and applied mathematics. You can view my CV here.
Research summary:
I have two principal lines of research: one on questions in legal philosophy, and the other on questions at the intersection of epistemology and ethics. These two lines of research are unified by my interest in the nature and significance of norms and normativity.
In the philosophy of law, my work examines and explains: (1) the impact of moral norms on legal norms, (2) the treatment of moral norms as a form of a priori law within historical legal practice, (3) the persistence of disagreement within legal systems about the determinants of law, and (4) the evaluation of legal norms in kind-relative terms (as legal norms
). My explanation of these consequential aspects of legal practice leverages an original account of law as an artifact with an essentially normative function, and a comparison between law and other value-driven
artifacts, such as artworks. I have published several articles on these topics, and a volume titled Contemporary Non-Positivism consolidating my arguments is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Apart from jurisprudence, I have written on the philosophy of contract law, on convention-dependent normative questions, on how judges should reason about moral questions, and on the scope of judicial obligations to follow the law, among other topics.
In ethics and epistemology, I argue that perceptual experience of objects and qualities delivers a distinctive form of non-propositional knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance,
and I defend on its basis an account of the objectivity of ethics. I argue that empathic and other-regarding agents have something resembling acquaintance knowledge of the suffering of others. Morally indifferent agents lack such knowledge and, as a result, their choices reflect a less objective perspective on the world. Moreover, I argue that since acquaintance knowledge of others’ suffering is hard to bear, other-regarding empathic agents demonstrate an important epistemic virtue: intellectual courage. See here, here, and here. Although these themes have been the focus of my recent work, I have also written on: the ethical implications of broadly expressivist accounts of moral thought and talk; how best to understand the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative; ground-theoretic attempts to distinguish quasi-realism from full-blooded realism about moral truth; and other topics in meta-normative theory.
I co-organize (with Matt Duncan) the Cornell Workshop on Mind and Value.
Book volume:
- Contemporary Non-Positivism. (Cambridge Elements Series in the Philosophy of Law) Cambridge University Press (2025)
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This text defends and clarifies the thesis that the legality of a system of rules depends on its moral features. Positivists who deny this dependence struggle to explain: (1) the traditional classification of moral norms as a form of a priori law; (2) judicial reliance on moral norms in legal discovery; (3) persistent theoretical disagreement about intra-systemic, law-determining facts; (4) why radically arbitrary or immoral schemes of social organization represent borderline cases of law; and (5) why law, like other artifacts, can be evaluated in a kind-relative sense (“as law”). Meanwhile, traditional versions of non-positivism overstate the dependence going further than the desiderata warrant. A moderate theory is formulated: law is an artifact whose existence depends on adequately performing an essentially normative function. The theory’s justification lies in its explanatory power: a comparison with other “value-driven” artifacts, such as artworks, proves vital for understanding legal language, reasoning, and practice.
Journal articles:
- Knowledge by Acquaintance and Impartial Virtue Philosophical Studies (Forthcoming)
show/hide abstract - Law, the Rule of Law, and Goodness-Fixing Kinds In Brownlee, K., Enoch, D., and Marmor, A., (eds.) Engaging Raz: Themes in Normative Philosophy. Oxford University Press (Forthcoming, 2025)
show/hide abstract - I Feel Your Pain: Acquaintance & the Limits of Empathy (with Matt Duncan) In Kriegel, U., (ed.) Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 4 Oxford University Press (2024)
show/hide abstract - Legal Positivim and the Moral Origins of Legal Systems Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence (2023) 36:37-64
show/hide abstract - The Uncertain Foundations of Public Law Theory (with Jud Mathews) Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy (2022) 31:389-450
show/hide abstract - Reasonable Moral Doubt New York University Law Review (2022) 97:1373-1425
show/hide abstract - Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Value Synthese (2021) 199(5-6): 14035-14062
show/hide abstract - The Philosophy of Contract Law (with Daniel Markovits) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021)
show/hide abstract - There Are No Easy Counterexamples to Legal Anti-positivism Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (2020) 17(1)
show/hide abstract - Supervenience, Repeatability, & Expressivism Noȗs (2020) 54(3):578–599
show/hide abstract - Legal Obligation and its Limits Law & Philosophy (2019) 38(2):109–147
show/hide abstract - On Ground as a Guide to Realism. Ratio (2018) 31(2):165-178 .
show/hide abstract - Legal vs. Factual Normative Questions. Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy (2018) 38.
show/hide abstract - The Limits of Law in the Evaluation of Mitigating Evidence (with Erin Miller) American Journal of Criminal law (2018) 45:167–201.
show/hide abstract - What Unconditional Credence in Individual Desert Claims Does Retributivism Require? Illinois Law Review Onl. (2018) 138.
show/hide abstract - How to Be Impartial as a Subjectivist. Philosophical Studies (2016) 173:757–779.
show/hide abstract - Why Motives Matter. Yale Law Journal (2014) 123:1070–1116
show/hide abstract - How Folk Beliefs about Free Will Influence Sentencing. New Criminal Law Review (2013) 16:449–493.
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Russell (1911/12) argued that perceptual experience grounds a species of non-propositional knowledge, “knowledge by acquaintance,” and in recent years, this account of knowledge has been gaining traction. I defend on its basis a connection between moral and epistemic failure. I argue, first, that insufficient concern for the suffering of others can be explained in terms of an agent’s lack of acquaintance knowledge of another’s suffering, and second, that empathy improves our epistemic situation. Empathic distress approximates acquaintance with another’s suffering, and empathic agents who are motivated to help rather than disengage exhibit an important epistemic virtue: a variety of intellectual courage. A key upshot is that an independently motivated account of the structure and significance of perceptual experience is shown to provide theoretical scaffolding for understanding a famously elusive idea in ethics—namely, that the failure to help others stems from a kind of ignorance of their situation.
We can evaluate laws as better or worse relative to different normative standards. One might lament the fact that a law violates human rights or, in a different register, marvel at its ease of application. A question in legal philosophy is whether some standards for evaluating laws are fixed by—or grounded in—the very nature of law. I take Raz’s (1977, 2019) discussion of the distinctively legal virtues, those that fall under the rubric of the “Rule of Law” such as clarity, generality, and non-retroactivity, as my starting point for exploring a very general puzzle about the relationship between law’s essence and its virtue.
The kind of empathy that is communicated through expressions like “I feel your pain” or “I share your sadness” is important, but peculiar. For it seems to require something perplexing and elusive: sharing another’s experience. It’s not clear how this is possible. We each experience the world from our own point of view, which no one else occupies. It’s also unclear exactly why it is so important that we share others' pains. If you are in pain, then why should it matter, and be a good thing, that I am also in the same pain? Our goal in this paper is to address these questions. Specifically, our goal is to clarify how empathy, in the regimented sense of sharing another’s pain, is possible and why it is important. Central to our account is the concept of being acquainted with—that is, directly aware of—pain. When I feel my own pain, and am acquainted with it, I want the pain to stop, and I’m moved—sometimes compelled—to stop it. My acquaintance with the pain is what reveals that it is no good, to be gotten rid of, and to be avoided in the future. Acquaintance also appears to be implicated in our understanding of, and motivation to relieve, others’ pains. When I say “I feel your pain” I express an awareness of your pain, a direct appreciation of its noxious qualities, and, as with my own pain, an understanding of why it ought to be eased. Explaining how empathy is both possible and important therefore involves clarifying the nature of acquaintance: its limits, epistemic role, and motivational significance. What our analysis reveals is that agents have both epistemic and moral reasons to share other people’s pain because pain-sharing is the source of a species of character-building knowledge that we have no other way of accessing except through direct acquaintance with pain.
Legal positivists maintain that the legality of a rule is fundamentally determined by social facts. Yet for much of legal history, ordinary officials used legal terminology in ways that seem inconsistent with positivism. Judges regularly cited, analyzed, and predicated their decisions on the ‘laws of justice’ which they claimed had universal legal import. This practice, though well-documented by historians, has received surprisingly little philosophical attention; I argue that it invites explanation from positivists. After taxonomizing the positivist’s explanatory options, I suggest that the most viable option appeals to conceptual change: classical Romans, early modern Europeans, founding-era Americans were not using ‘law’ (or ‘lex’ or ‘jus’) to refer to the subject matter of contemporary legal philosophy. But the strategy is costly. It renders positivism’s truth surprisingly parochial. And it supplies new reasons for doubting positivist accounts of contemporary practices, including the treatment of moral principles in modern adjudication.
Recently, public law scholarship has taken a “jurisprudential turn.” Scholars have argued for controversial public law conclusions—concerning how to interpret the Constitution, the powers of administrative agencies, and the responsibilities of judges—based on assumptions about the fundamental grounds of legal validity. Some use this jurisprudential move to denounce opposing views as not merely mistaken, but denying or defying the law, thus raising the stakes in public law disputes. A surprising feature of this development in public law theory is that those who lean on jurisprudential assumptions either dismiss as irrelevant or pass over in silence persistent disagreement in general jurisprudence about the nature of law.
We argue that tracing our public law convictions to contested assumptions about law’s nature should make us less (not more) confident in the rightness of our conclusions and the wrongness of the opposing side. Our case for “confidence-lowering” begins with a close examination of sophisticated examples of the jurisprudential turn, including arguments for broadly originalist conclusions. After highlighting the unargued-for assumptions about the nature of law on which these works rely, we develop a general challenge for this mode of advocacy based on the epistemology of “peer disagreement.” Our challenge invokes intellectual reasons for withholding judgment on questions that inspire persistent disagreement among good-faith reasoners. The upshot is that controversial claims about public law should be approached with ambivalence on all sides, and an awareness of the reasons for ambivalence has the potential to alter the tenor of public law debates.
Sentencing outcomes turn on moral and evaluative determinations. For example, a finding of “irreparable corruption” is generally a precondition for juvenile life without parole. A finding that the “aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors” determines whether a defendant receives the death penalty. Should such moral determinations that expose defendants to extraordinary penalties be subject to a standard of proof? A broad range of federal and state courts have purported to decide this issue “in the abstract and without reference to our sentencing case law,” as the Supreme Court recently put it. Kansas v. Carr, 577 U.S. 108, 119 (2016). According to these courts, “it would mean nothing” to ask whether the defendant “deserves mercy beyond a reasonable doubt” or “more-likely-than-not deserves it” because moral questions are not “factual.” Instead, moral determinations are highly subjective “value calls” to which concepts of doubt and certainty do not intelligibly apply.
Implicit in these rulings is a controversial view of the nature of moral judgment that warrants close examination. This Article makes three main contributions. First, it clarifies the view of morality that courts seem intuitively drawn to, based on a framework borrowed from moral philosophy. Second, it compares the judiciary’s metaethics to the general public’s, parlaying the results of this comparison into an argument for greater neutrality from the courts on the objectivity of moral questions. Third, it develops a case, based on an original and suitably neutral account of moral doubt, for applying a standard of proof to at least some moral questions in the penalty phase. A standard of proof would simultaneously improve the sentencer’s deliberations and the legitimacy of the legal system. For the “reasonableness” of doubt depends on context; and moral questions—"are you certain the defendant deserves death?”—make salient the practical stakes relative to which a person should be deciding what to believe about ordinary empirical matters. On the resulting view, reasonable doubt in the final moral analysis is not just intelligible, but essential for correcting a bias in the structure of the bifurcated criminal trial that systematically disadvantages defendants: the tendency for de-contextualized “factual findings” in the guilt phase to control outcomes at sentencing.
Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of ‘Edenic’ counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (cf. Chalmers 2006). It explains the elusiveness of knowledge gained through new acquaintances. It coheres with the knowledge-like functional role of acquaintance in the special context of evaluative beliefs and evaluative reasoning, where the objects of acquaintance serve as evidence and inferential basis. And, finally, taking acquaintance to be knowledge is theoretically fruitful: it helps vindicate claims about the relationship between knowledge and concern for others we already find intuitive or outright accept. After developing a novel case for the epistemic claim, I respond to two familiar objections against it: namely, (1) that there are no pre-propositional, pre-conceptual cases of perceptual experience that remain epistemically relevant (Sellars 1968, McDowell 2008); and (2) that the category of knowledge appears gerrymandered once we add ‘object’ knowledge to the epistemological mix (Farkas 2019).
The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract law conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical study. The philosophy of contract includes two broad sets of projects. One set, the focus of the first part of this entry, targets the basic structure and normative justification of the law of contracts. The aim is to subsume a salient body of contract law rules under general principles in order to clarify contract law’s conceptual categories, distinguish it from other areas of law, and specify criteria relevant to its normative appraisal. This kind of philosophical work presupposes detailed knowledge of the law in existing legal regimes, and the entry begins by outlining the common law of contracts. A second set of projects draws on resources from the philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy to address debates within contract law. Questions about the nature of meaning and interpretation, intentionality, freedom in contract, and distributive justice drive contemporary legal debates concerning contract formation, interpretation, and enforcement. Philosophical work on these topics has attracted significant commentary which serves as the focus of the second part of this entry.
Legal anti-positivism is widely believed to be a general theory of law that generates far too many false negatives. If anti-positivism is true, certain rules bearing all the hallmarks of legality are not in fact legal. This impression, fostered by both positivists and anti-positivists, stems from an overly narrow conception of the kinds of moral facts that ground legal facts: roughly, facts about what is morally optimific—morally best or morally justified or morally obligatory given our social practices. A less restrictive view of the kinds of moral properties that ground legality results in a form of anti-positivism that can accommodate any legal rule consistent with positivism, including the alleged counterexamples. I articulate an ‘inclusive’ form of anti-positivism that is not just invulnerable to extensional challenge from the positivist. It is the only account that withstands extensional objections, while incorporating, on purely conceptual grounds, a large part of the content of morality into law.
Expressivists traditionally explain normative supervenience by saying it is a conceptual truth. I argue against this tradition in two steps. First, I show the modal claim that stands in need of explanation has been stated imprecisely. Classic arguments in metaethics for normative supervenience and those that rely on it as a premise presuppose a constraint on the supervenience base that is rarely (if ever) made explicit: the repeatability of the non-normative properties on which the normative supervenes. Non-normative properties are repeatable when it is possible for numerically distinct individuals to share them. Second, I show if the modal truth that stands in need of explanation entails that there are individuals exactly alike in repeatable non-normative respects that cannot normatively differ, then standard expressivist accounts of normative supervenience as a conceptual truth are unsuccessful. Expressivist metasemantics for normative terms, together with constitutive facts about the non-cognitive attitudes essentially involved in normative thought, strongly suggest that repeatable supervenience could not be a conceptual truth. I argue, finally, that although repeatable supervenience bears the marks of a conceptual truth, expressivists should be content to treat it as an ordinary normative truth, and to explain it the same way they explain other normative truths.
Judges do not always have a legal obligation to follow the law. This result follows from ecumenical assumptions about the nature of law and legal obligation.
I argue that a property can be real and fundamental without needing to be invoked in grounding explanations of true nonbasic propositions involving it. Among other things, this entails that Kit Fine's ground-theoretic criterion for realism, which has been influential in metaethics, must be rejected.
I argue that the distinction between convention-dependent normative quesitons and convention-independent ones explains the differential classification of norms in contracts and torts as legal or factual under the common law
We argue that judicial evaluation of the weight of mitigating evidence at capital sentencing based on precedential reasoning or legal rules violates the Constitution. The Constitution demands moral not legal consideration of mitigating evidence. We clarify the difference between these two modes of consideration.
Punishing a person based on low unconditional credence in their deservingness to be punished is consistent with retributivist deontological principles. Negative retributivism absolutely prohibits the intentional or knowing infliction of undeserved harm on individuals identified as undeserving, not the intentional or knowing infliction of risks of undeserved harm on individuals. Meanwhile, the knowing infliction of undeserved harm on some unidentified individuals generates not overriding reasons against punishment, but pro tanto reasons against punishment that are to be weighed against other non-overriding reasons for punishment like crime prevention. The upshot is that uncertainty regarding any identified person’s deservingness to be punished does not entail that punishment is generally impermissible if negative retributivism is true. One might be misled into thinking that impossibly high levels of unconditional credence in individual desert claims is morally required by failing to distinguish our actual criminal law practices, which are extremely harsh and unjustifiable, from criminal law as it ought to be.
The metaethical subjectivist claims there is nothing more to a moral disagreement than a conflict in the desires of the parties involved. Recently, David Enoch has argued that metaethical subjectivism has unacceptable ethical implications. If the subjectivist is right about moral disagreement, then it follows, according to Enoch, that we cannot stand our ground in moral disagreements without violating the demands of impartiality. For being impartial, we’re told, involves being willing to compromise in conflicts that are merely due to competing desires–the parties to such conflicts should decide what to do on the basis of a coin flip. I suggest that Enoch is mistaken in his conception of what it means to be impartial. Once impartiality is properly construed, standing one’s ground in desire-based conflicts, whether or not moral values are at stake in the conflict, is consistent with being impartial. I defend a view on which impartiality can be understood in terms of features of our desiring attitudes. An agent acts impartially in desire-based conflicts whenever she is motivated by a final (i.e. non-instrumental) desire that aims at promoting the wellbeing of persons in a way that is insensitive to the identities of persons and their morally arbitrary features like their gender or skin color. Based on the account, I explain where Enoch’s discussion of the argument goes wrong, as well as why responses to the argument from Enoch’s critics have so far missed the mark.
Legal rules and regulations are routinely rationalized by appeal to the incentives they create. This Note examines an important but misunderstood fact about incentives–namely, that they often "crowd out" the natural motivations that citizens have to engage in socially valued behavior, such as a sense of civic duty, a commitment to personal growth, and charity towards others. The “crowding out effect” of incentives has traditionally been viewed as problematic because of cases where it renders incentives counter-productive–when fear of legal sanction or desire for financial reward substitutes for other forms of motivation in agents, this often leads to less of the socially valued behavior regulators sought to incentivize. In contrast, I explore whether the effect of legal incentives on our motivational psychology might be inherently regrettable in some cases, quite apart from the effect on behavioral outcomes. I show that a reframing of the crowding out effect that takes seriously the inherent value that resides in our "higher motives" generates insights into a variety of legal phenomena, including doctrinal rules in intellectual property, contracts, and torts; and a neglected theory for legal reformation, one that bears on the choice between rule- and standard-based legal directives and on the strategic use of the law to improve the way citizens conceptualize their obligations to each other.
Do results in neuroscience and psychology that portray our choices as predetermined threaten to undermine the assumptions about free will that drive criminal law? This Article answers in the affirmative and explains why a revision in the law’s assumptions is morally desirable. Problematic assumptions about free will have a role to play in criminal law not because they underlie substantive legal doctrine or retributive theory, but because everyday actors in the sentencing process are authorized to make irreducibly moral determinations outside of the ordinary doctrinal framework. Jurors, judges, and legislators are each required, at key points in the sentencing process, to make moral judgments that cannot be reached without reference to the person’s own understanding of free will. As a result, sentencing actors give legal effect to widely-held folk beliefs about free will, beliefs that the evidence suggests are scientifically suspect and morally distorting. The relevant beliefs make adjudicators less likely to attend to the underlying causes of crime, such as social deprivation; a tendency that biases adjudicators against relevant arguments for mitigation in sentencing. Modern science could have an important corrective effect in this context.
Reviews & essays:
- Standards of Proof, Statistical Evidence, and the Stakes. JOTWELL (2023).
show/hide abstract - Disagreement about Law & Morality: Empirical Results and The Meta-Problem of Jurisprudence. JOTWELL (2022).
show/hide abstract - Review of Natural Law & the Nature of Law, by Jonathan Crowe. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2020).
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Comments on Sarah Moss's "Knowledge and Legal Proof"
Commentary on Flanagan & Hannikainen's "The Folk Concept of Law" and on the results of Bourget and Chalmer's PhilPapers survey.
Commentary on Crowe's metaethics & his theory of law as a goodness-fixing kind.
Work in progress (titles suppressed for blind review):
- A paper on expressivism (working draft; available upon request)
- A paper on moral objectivity (working draft; available upon request)
- A paper on the ethics of risk (working draft; available upon request)
- A paper on metaethics and the law (working draft)
Teaching:
- LAW 6641 Legal Ethics (Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Spring 2024)
show/hide course description - LAW 5041 Contracts (Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2022)
show/hide course description - LAW 7736 Seminar on the History of Legal Systems (Spring 2024)
show/hide course description - PHIL 6410 Expressivism (Spring 2023)
show/hide course description - PHIL 6410 Moral Objectivity (Spring 2022)
show/hide course description - PHIL 6430/LAW 7782 Authority, Coercion and the Rule of Law (w/ Andrei Marmor) (Spring 2024)
show/hide course description - PHIL 6425/LAW 7743 Idealization (Spring 2025)
show/hide course description - PHIL 6411 Philosophy of Law (w/ Andrei Marmor) (Fall 2018)
show/hide course description - PHIL 7402 Recent Work in Legal Philosophy (w/ Andrei Marmor) (Fall 2019)
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We will study the law governing lawyers as derived from bar association promulgated ethics rules, enacted statutes, and common law. Discussion of the law will be organized around general lawyerly duties—duties of competence, loyalty, confidentiality, honesty, and others—owed to distinct individuals: clients, affected non-clients, as well as the legal system as a whole. Additionally, we shall examine the law governing lawyers against the background of a moral puzzle at the heart of legal ethics: the puzzle of unjust advocacy (Huemer 2016). In general, there is a strong duty to avoid knowingly causing severe harm to others. Lawyers, whether involved in criminal defense, prosecution, corporate advising, and so on, seem to reliably and knowingly cause such harm. What, if anything, morally justifies lawyers behaving in this way? We’ll consider whether and to what extent the law governing lawyers itself constitutes a response to the problem of unjust advocacy.
The assigned text for this class is Ayres & Klass, Studies in Contract Law (9th Edition). We will rely on excerpts from various other classic and contemporary works reflecting philosophical, historical, and economic approaches to contract law.
We shall read classic legal texts and explore several questions. What features do ancient and modern legal systems share? What features of past legal systems seem alien relative to contemporary legal practice and culture? The overriding goal is to understand how our conception of law and legal systems has evolved over time, especially in the western legal tradition.
Meta-normative expressivists maintain that the function of normative assertions isn’t to describe the normative properties of objects, persons, or states of affairs; rather, it is to express the speaker’s non-cognitive attitudes. The view is usually motivated as part of a larger package of philosophical commitments, including naturalism and minimalism about truth. This graduate seminar will explore recent work on meta-normative expressivism, specifically work on challenges based on the Frege-Geach problem, moral uncertainty, minimalism about truth, normative explanation, and related topics. Additionally, we shall compare expressivist proposals in other domains of discourse, including expressivism about the language of probability, credence, modality, and avowals.
To what extent is moral thought and talk objective? When we think about what we morally ought to do, do we hope to discover facts that would answer the question? Or is there nothing more to moralizing than projecting our own idiosyncratic preferences on to reality? These questions are somewhat obscure, and we will spend much of the seminar trying to give a precise characterization (or several) of what objectivity in ethics amounts to and why it might matter to moral practice. Along the way, we shall evaluate recent efforts at securing ethics from such putative threats as error theory (all moral claims are false), relativism (the truth of moral claims is dependent on community conventions), and expressivism (the function of moral claims is not to describe the world, but to make explicit the speaker’s non-cognitive attitudes). A question in the background of our discussions that we shall revisit throughout the semester is whether we can vindicate morality without getting mired in disputes about moral metaphysics—concerning the place of moral properties in a naturalistic world, problems of access, and so on.
This advanced seminar explores concepts central to political and legal philosophy, and is divided into three parts. The first part raises questions concerning the nature of authority. What does it take for an agent to have theoretical or practical authority? What are the roles and responsibilities of authorities? To what extent do legal institutions and actors claim such authority, and are such claims ever warranted? The second part explores the nature of coercion: What makes an inducement coercive? Is coercion ever justified? To what extent does the law coerce its subjects? The third and final part of the seminar explores the ideal of the Rule of Law. What are the ingredients of this legal ideal? What makes the ideal distinctively legal? To what extent does the answer to such questions relate to law’s claims to authority and justified coercion? Discussion will be guided by classical as well as recent works on these topics
This advanced seminar examines idealizations in ethics and epistemology, with an eye to understanding idealization more generally. In ethics, the concept of an “ideal agent” or “ideal reasoner” plays an important role in accounts of the functions of moral concepts, the grounds of moral truth, and the content of morality. In epistemology, idealization plays a similar role. What perfectly rational, cognitively idealized, computationally unlimited believers would believe informs theories of epistemic normativity and of how we ought to conduct our doxastic lives. Some general questions can be raised about idealization and its role in meta-normative theory. What determines the standards for being ideal? How do we figure out what ideal agents would do or believe? Why do the beliefs, actions, and dispositions of ideal agents have normative significance for ordinary non-ideal agents? Is there a connection between being epistemically ideal and morally ideal? Why should we care about being ideal? We shall explore these and other questions in the seminar and consider how our answers inform our understanding of normative idealization elsewhere (e.g., in law, politics, economics, and aesthetics).
First half of the course is devoted to analytic jurisprudence, covering Austin, Hart, Kelsen, and Dworkin. Second half of the course covers topics in philosophy of torts, legal epistemology, philosophy of contracts, and the morality of economic approaches to law. Invited speakers: Aditi Bagchi (Fordham), Johann Frick (Princeton), and Daniel Viehoff (NYU).
Anticipated topics include legal epistemology, negligence, discrimination, the ethics of taxation, ideology and injustice, and the responsibitites of officials in the face of unjust law. Invited speakers: David Enoch (Hebrew U), Sophia Moreau (U of Toronto), Kristi Olson (Bowdoin C), Sally Haslanger (MIT), Gideon Rosen (Princeton), and Jonathan Quong (USC).