I
specialize in philosophy of law, political philosophy, and
ethics. Currently, I am working on a theory of judicial
practical reason - which is to
say, I am interested in understanding
how judges ought to approach adjudication. This is part of a more
general concern I have with the decision-making of officials in
valuable, but morally compromised, institutions. I am
also interested in
distributive justice, democratic
theory, political obligation, civil disobedience, public reason,
the authority of international
law, international justice, normative ethics, and the nature of moral justification.
I
am currently teaching as visiting assistant professor at SUNY
Binghamton. Previously, I have lived in Cincinnnati,
Yonkers, Seeley
Lake,
Helena, Boston, Portland (OR), Pocatello, Billings, and Geraldine
(many of these places are in Montana, where I grew up).
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.
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.
Strict Liability as a Framework for Environmental Injury: A Moral Argument [with Prof. Jamie Kelly (Vassar)] Summary:
In most jurisdictions, tortious injury caused by
environmental degradation (an issue separate from responsibility for
environmental restoration) tends to be a matter of determining
culpability by the standard legal concepts used for assigning liability
in personal injury law. For example, one excuse that British
Petroleum has relied upon in an attempt to limit its liability for
injury claims that are the result of the Gulf oil spill is that it
was, to some extent, not forseeable, that their practices received
approval from the regulating government agency, and that they employed
standard industry safeguards. In our view, when it comes to
injury that is the result of environmental damage, these points ought
not be excusatory. We argue that, much like product liability,
strict liability is the correct legal framework for compensation for
such injury as it is morally inappropriate to assign the costs of those
harms to any other agent, whether or not those causally responsible for
the environmental damage acted with due care. This will also have
the social benefit of forcing industries to internalize the costs of
environmental injury and of encouraging environmentally responsible
industrial practices.
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 legitimacy.
The Authority of International Law Summary:
This paper concerns the practical signficance of international
law for persons and institutions. I take up the question: how should the existence of an international
legal norm regulating some activity affect an actor's decision-making about
that activity? I plan to take certain
features of my framework for judicial practical reason to develop an account of
what we might call 'international practical reason.'
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.