Anthony R. Reeves Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy Binghamton University (SUNY)

Office:  Library Tower 1204 Email:  areeves@binghamton.edu Curriculum Vitae (CV)

       
I specialize in philosophy of law, political philosophy, and ethical theory.  Currently, I am working on a theory of judicial practical reason - which is to say, I am interested in understanding how courts, in general, ought to approach adjudication.  However, I am also interested in distributive justice, democratic theory, political obligation, civil disobedience, public reason, the authority of international law, and the nature of moral justification (particularly the relevance of moral psychology for substantive moral conclusions).  I would like to be interested in more things, but time is finite.

I recently completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston University under David Lyons and am currently teaching as a visiting professor at SUNY Binghamton.  Last year, I taught as a visiting professor of philosophy at Xavier University (Cincinnati).  Prior to that, I lived in Yonkers (NY), Seeley Lake (MT), Helena (MT), Boston (MA), and Portland (OR).  




Courses and Syllabi:

Spring 2010	Elementary Logic Philosophy of Law Liberty and Distributive Justice
Fall 2009	Methods of Reasoning Liberty and Distributive Justice Advanced Philosophy of Law
Spring 2009	Theory of Knowledge Philosophy of Law
Fall 2008	Ethics as an Introduction to Philosophy John Stuart Mill

Some Completed Papers:

Do Judges Have an Obligation to Enforce the Law?:  Moral  Responsibility and Adjudication  (forthcoming in Law and Philosophy, 2010).

Civil Disobedience as Public Address:  the Limits and Scope of Forceful Appeal


Writing in Progress:
Listed below are additional papers I am working on.  The main lines of argument are put together, but are still in refinement stage.  

Political Legitimacy and Adjudication:  A Theory of Judicial Practical Reason
Summary:  Roughly, I argue that judges should construe law so as to maximize the likelihood that their decisions will meet substantive conditions of political legitimacy.  In other words, I take it that judges ought be concerned that their decisions don't demand what the state has no right to enforce.  I try to characterize in general terms what judicial reason would have to look like in order to minimize the likelihood of courts making such demands.  

Autonomy-Dependent Reasons and Democracy
Summary:  In this paper I address the issue of how democratic procedures can be a source of legitimacy.  I follow Joseph Raz in arguing that, under the right conditions, the exercise of autonomous choice can produce reasons peculiar to an individual.  For example, choosing a particular career makes certain kinds of activities valuable and certain outcomes count as achievements.  Democracy, I argue, is uniquely capable of registering reasons dependent on the exercise of individual autonomy.  My framework for considering this idea is Thomas Christiano's account of democratic authority.

Should Popular Moral Convictions Serve as 'Checks' on the Conclusions of Moral Philosophy?:  An Examination of the Role of Intuitions in Coherence Models of Justification
Summary:  George Klosko argues that once we accept a coherence model of moral justification (e.g. reflective equilibrium), we are committed to acknowledging that common moral intuitions are to serve as checks on the conclusions of moral philosophy.  If the conclusion of a moral argument is too far out of line with common intuitions, then we ought regard it with suspicion.  (In his view, philosophical anarchism suffers from this flaw.)  In this paper, I contend that this is false - a coherence model does not, by itself, imply that common moral intuitions ought to serve as straightforward checks on moral theory.  The paper does not defend reflective equilibrium against recent critics (e.g. Peter Singer), but simply argues that the justificatory model is consistent with surprising moral conclusions.    

Public Reason Beyond Justice:  On the Possibility of Morally-Saturated Public Discourse
Summary:  I regard the idea of public reason as an attractive one: the notion that we ought rely on considerations that could be endorsed by people of  a variety of moral, philosophical, and religious worldviews when using state power seems to capture an important aspect of political legitimacy.  Despite this, John Rawls' restriction of the content of public reason to the political conception of justice is problematic, so I argue.  Public reason, I contend, can legitimately include considerations offered from the context of what he calls comprehensive doctrines, or (to put it roughly) conceptions of what the world is like and what is valuable in life.  In the paper, I attempt to lay out a framework for a more permissive understanding of public reason that retains many of the attractive features of Rawls' notion.