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 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).       







Courses and Syllabi:

Fall 2010	International Law and Justice Advanced Philosophy of Law Liberty and Distributive Justice
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  Law and Philosophy, Vol. 29: 2 (March, 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.  

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.