Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things...

Should the norms of honor cultures be classified as a variety of morality? In this paper, we address this question by considering various empirical bases on which norms can be taxonomically organised. This question is of interest both as an exercise in philosophy of social science, and for its...

Self-ownership has fallen out of favor as a core moral and political concept. I argue that this is because the most popular conception of self-ownership, what I call the property conception, is typically linked to a libertarian (of the left or right) political program. Seeing self-ownership and...

We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis, whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out- groups to draw inferences about the nature...

Debates between realists and idealists in contemporary political theory have been confused by a tendency to conflate several distinct methodological theses. This paper distinguishes between four dimensions of realism and shows how a novel reading of Hume’s politics can help us make sense of...

Equality is at the heart of liberal, democratic political theory. Despite this, there is considerable disagreement about how we should understand equality in the context of liberal politics. Several different conceptions of equality (e.g., equality of opportunity, equality of welfare outcomes,...

Experimental philosophy, as practiced by political philosophers, has tended to use experimental methods to gain leverage on traditional normative and political questions. Typically, these methods are the same ones used in cognitive and social psychology, which is to say non-incentivized,...