Anthony R. Reeves 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.  My most recent work has focused on developing a theory of judicial practical reason - I am interested in understanding how judges ought to approach adjudication in the context of morally imperfect states.  This is part of a concern I have with the decision-making of officials in valuable, but morally compromised, legal institutions.  More generally, I am interested in how law can generate moral reasons for action, i.e., the sense in and circumstances under which it actually has authority.  I am also interested in the nature of legal normativity, distributive justice, democratic theory, political obligation, civil disobedience, public reason, international law, the moral foundations of tort law, and normative ethics.  








Recent Courses and Syllabi:

Fall 2011	Law, Authority, and Practical Reason (Graduate) Advanced Philosophy of Law
Spring 2011	International Law and Justice Elementary Logic Philosophy of Law
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

Some Completed Papers:

The Moral Authority of International Law  (forthcoming, APA Newsletter in Philosophy of Law).

Judicial Practical Reason: Judges in Morally Imperfect Legal Orders  Law and Philosophy, Vol. 30: 3 (May, 2011).

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.  

Strict Liability as a Framework for Environmental Injury: Three Moral Arguments  [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.

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.