In my 2009 book Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine, I argued that morality is objective in several distinct though overlapping senses, and I further maintained that questions about the objectivity of morality are substantive moral questions (albeit usually at high levels of abstraction). In the...

Consequentialist doctrines have often been criticized for their excessive demandingness, in that they require the thorough instrumentalization of each person's life as a vehicle for the production of good consequences. In turn, the proponents of such doctrines have often objected to what they...

In a recent full-length review of Matthew Kramer's In Defense of Legal Positivism, David Dyzenhaus has attacked legal positivists' accounts of adjudication and their views of the relationship between law and morality. The present essay defends legal positivism against his strictures, by arguing...

Among the complaints often voiced by philosophers who doubt the possibility or actuality of moral conflicts is that any such conflict would violate the “ought”-implies-“can” principle or would in some other respect be objectionably burdensome. The present essay seeks to rebut or defuse...

This paper, which has been written as a contribution to a festschrift for Wil Waluchow, concentrates on the area of legal philosophy in which his finest accomplishments have occurred: namely, the area of general jurisprudence. Indeed, it concentrates more specifically on Inclusive Legal...

Funding for the arts is quite frequently commended by certain political philosophers and political pundits (whom I shall call “edificatory perfectionists”) as a policy that can incline people to improve their ways of life by taking advantage of cultural opportunities. By contrast, this...

Funding for the arts is quite frequently commended by certain political philosophers and political pundits (whom I shall call “edificatory perfectionists”) as a policy that can incline people to improve their ways of life by taking advantage of cultural opportunities. By contrast, this...

This paper, written for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, ponders several understandings of conceptual analysis in the context of debates over distributive justice. The paper's first three main sections consider the concept/conception distinction in its multi-layered...

Ronald Dworkin has long criticized legal positivists for their efforts to distinguish between legal and non-legal standards of conduct that are incumbent on people. Recently, Dworkin has broached this criticism in his hostile account of the debates between Incorporationist Legal Positivists and...