For corrective justice, liability is the consequence of the parties' being correlatively situated as the doer and sufferer of an injustice, and the remedy is seen as undoing that injustice to the extent possible. Combining consideration of legal doctrine and private law theory, this article applies the framework of corrective justice to gain-based damages for torts. Within this framework, restitutionary damages ought to be available only insofar as they correspond to a constituent element in the injustice that the defendant has (...) done to the plaintiff. The radical proposal that allows restitutionary damages for any wrongful gain is unsatisfactory because it fails to link the damages that the plaintiff receives to the normative quality of the defendant's wrong. In contrast, dealings in another's property give rise to such damages because the idea of property includes within the owner's entitlement the potential gainsfrom the property's use or alienation. Restitutionary damages should not be seen as serving a deterrent or punitive function; such a function cannot account for why the plaintiff, of all people, is entitled to the defendant's gain. Properly understood, even situations where the plaintiff's wilfulness or calculation increases the damage award fit within the framework of corrective justice. The corrective justice approach thus repudiates the notion that restitutionary damages are occasions for the promotion of social purposes extrinsic to the juridical relationship between the parties. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Project of Formalism The Nature of Justification The Structures of Justification The Ground of Justification The Immanent Intelligibility of Law Conclusion References.

This chapter contains sections titled: Transfer of Value The Transfer Elements of Liability Unjustness Correctively Unjust Enrichment References.

This paper explores how the widely acknowledged conception of tort law as corrective justice is to be applied to the law of negligence. Corrective justice is an ordering of transactions between two parties which restores them to an antecedent equality. It is thus incompatible with the comprehensive aggregation of utilitarianism, and it stands in easy harmony with Kantian moral notions. This conception of negligence law excludes both maximizing theories, such as Holmes' and Posner's, and Fried's risk pool, which combines Kantianism (...) with distributive rather than corrective justice.Central to the Kantian approach is the impermissibility of self-preference. The two types of self-preference, self-preference in conception and self-preference in action can respectively account for the objective standard and the Learned Hand test, which are the two most characteristic features of negligence and which are generally (and wrongly) considered to be inescapably aggregative. This corrective justice conception of the negligence standard can then be compared to Epstein's corrective justice conception of strict liability, and arguments can be offered in favour of the superiority of the former. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, corrective justice has established itself as central to serious academic discussion of the normative dimension of tort liability. This article describes the consensus about corrective justice that is presently emerging, as is evident from work of the author and from recent work of other tort theorists. The framework for discussing this emerging consensus is what the article calls "the juridical conception of corrective justice." The juridical conception seeks to explicate the most general ideas implicit in (...) liability as a normative practice in which the plaintiff makes a claim against the defendant. Under the juridical conception, corrective justice is the synthesis of two complementary abstractions: correlativity and personality. Correlativity articulates at the most general level the relationship between the interacting parties as doer and sufferer of the same injustice. Personality, i.e., the idea of purposiveness regardless of one's particular purposes, similarly articulates at the most general level the conception of the interacting parties that is presupposed in a regime of rights and their correlative duties. The leitmotif of the emerging consensus is the idea of correlativity, which is now effectively accepted by all of the theorists mentioned, even by those who initially rejected it. Personality, on the other hand, has gained less support, because of the apprehension that it implies that rational agency, as elaborated by Kant or Hegel, is a philosophical truth from which tort theory can be derived. This reason for dismissing personality is insufficient. Corrective justice comes into view not by being derived from a notion of rational agency but by reflection on the most general ideas implicit in liability as a normative practice. Personality is merely the abstraction that represents the parties as the bearers of rights and their correlative duties. Like correlativity, it owes its status within corrective justice to its being implicit in the law's doctrines and institutions. Consequently, whether the Kantian or Hegelian notion of rational agency is plausible is a philosophical question that lies beyond tort theory and that does not affect the place of personality within a corrective justice approach to liability. Moreover, if correlativity and personality are indeed complementary, acceptance of the former should lead to acceptance of the latter. Such acceptance would provide the theorists who now reject it with a concept that would be serviceable for their own formulations. In any case, the consensus about the highly structured notion of correlativity indicates that the main lines of the corrective justice approach to tort law are now firmly established. Although refinements inevitably remain to be made, radical revisions are unlikely to result from further reworking the standard material of corrective justice tort theory. Scholarly attention should instead turn to the examination of the place of corrective justice within the legal order as a whole and to the expansion of the corrective justice analysis from tort law to other bases of liability. (shrink)

The philosolphy of strict finitism is a research programme containing developmental theory and mathematics as its main branches. The first branch is concerned with the ontogenetic and historicaldevelopment of various concepts of infinity. The frame work is Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology. Based upon these develop mental studies, the mathematical branch introduces a new concept of infinity into mathematics. Cantor propagated the actual infinite, Brouwer and the constructivists the potential infinite. Still more radical is strict finitism, favoring the natural infinite, i.e. (...) the phenomena of the unsurveyable, unfeasible, unreachable. There exist by this time strict finitistic reconstructions for arithmetic, geometry, calculus, and even for infinitistic set theory. (shrink)

From Character to Color was written to explore Critical Race Theory from logical, moral, and educational standpoints, as these relate to history, people and racial groups.

Teachers and teenage students are becoming involved in inappropriate sexual relationships, often leading to devastation and arrest. Teacher-Student Relationships: Crossing into the Emotional, Physical, and Sexual Realms addresses the reasons these relationships develop, considers the roles of modern technology in the development, and offers solutions from within the profession.

. In Aristotle's account, corrective and distributive justice are not particular substantive ideals, but are rather the formal patterns that inhere in interactions and in the legal arrangements that regulate them. Corrective and distributive justice are the structures of ordering internal to transactions and distributions, respectively. The Aristotelian. forms of justice thus constitute the rationality immanent to the relation ships of mutually external beings. This article stresses Aristotle's formalism, contrasting it to modem instrumental conceptions of legal rationality, and defending it (...) against Kelsen's allegations of emptiness. The article concludes with the suggestion that corrective justice, as the conceptual pattern that makes private law what it is, can be considered the formal and final cause of private law. (shrink)

Ownership combines the owner's right to exclude others from the owned object and the owner's liberty to use that object. This article addresses the relationship between using and excluding, by presenting Grotius's and Kant's classic accounts of ownership. Grotius's approach treats use and exclusivity as separate notions, with the latter evolving out of the former. For Kant, in contrast, use and exclusivity are integrated aspects of ownership as a right within a regime of equal reciprocal freedom. This article offers a (...) Kantian critique of Grotius's account of the original right to use, and then presents Kant's notion of usability as the basis for his integration of use and exclusivity. (shrink)

Plato's Crito is not a treatise on obedience to the law, but a dialogue whose interpretation is not determined by its surface meaning. The initial dream is not mere ornamentation; rather it points to the range of possibilities in Socrates' situation. The speeches of the Laws, with which the dialogue closes, are not intended to be philosophically cogent, since they are inconsistent with the principles laid out in the preceding conversation between Socrates and Crito. The arguments of the Laws are (...) rather directed towards Crito, Socrates' decent and unphilosophic friend. (shrink)

This is the Introduction to the symposium on A. John Simmons, Boundaries of Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The Symposium contains articles by David Miller, Cara Nine, and Anna Stilz, and a response by the author.

By utilizing the concept of quantum decoherence, augmented by the novel theory of quantum Darwinism, to understand the transition from the quantum to the classical worlds, the scaling up of the concept of quantum entanglement2018 to the biological level offers a fascinating metaphor for the presence of the creative spirit in nature and the “flesh” of Incarnation. This in turn provides helpful theological metaphors for articulating divine presence at the level of life in theistic evolution, partially addressing the issue of (...) evolutionary theodicy by supporting the concept of deep Incarnation. The point of understanding the Incarnation as deeply entangled enfleshment is that it brings the suffering of creation into the life of the Redeemer as well as the Creator, facilitating redemption and hope through the divine life. (shrink)

Whereas epistemology is the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and commitments made by those who engage in these debates. This entry will focus on a selection of these assumptions and commitments, including whether there are objective epistemic facts; and how to characterize the subject matter and the methodology of epistemology.

The contributors consider the idea of Christian philosophy in light of current debates in such areas as philosophy of religion, moral theory, epistemology, and metaphysics in order to show that these important historical questions continue to press upon us today.

The theological turn in French phenomenology has been of great interest to scholars working in contemporary continental thought, but according to J. Aaron Simmons, not enough has been done to bring these debates into conversation with more mainstream philosophy. Building on the work of Kierkegaard, Levinas, Marion, and Derrida, among others, Simmons suggests how continental philosophy of religion can intersect with political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and theories of knowledge. By productively engaging philosophical "God-talk," Simmons proposes a robust (...) model of postmodern religious belief and ethical existence. (shrink)

Collected critical essays analyzing Kierkegaard’s work in regards to theology and social-moral thought. Kierkegaard’s God and the Good Life focuses on faith and love, two central topics in Kierkegaard’s writings, to grapple with complex questions at the intersection of religion and ethics. Here, leading scholars reflect on Kierkegaard’s understanding of God, the religious life, and what it means to exist ethically. The contributors then shift to psychology, hope, knowledge, and the emotions as they offer critical and constructive readings for contemporary (...) philosophical debates in the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and epistemology. Together, they show how Kierkegaard continues to be an important resource for understandings of religious existence, public discourse, social life, and how to live virtuously. “All in all, the editors of this volume have put together a thoughtful and sometimes provocative collection of essays by a number of Kierkegaard scholars and philosophers for the reader’s consideration.... The volume undoubtedly makes a contribution to contemporary philosophical debates in the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and epistemology, especially with regard to the importance of faith and love for leading a good and meaningful human life.” —International Journal for Philosophy of Religion “Invites the reader to think anew about what Kierkegaard was saying and what we can learn from him in the context of our time, particularly what it means to become a Christian in terms of the moral task of love and living a life worthy of a human being.” —Sylvia Walsh, translator of Kierkegaard’s Discourses at the Communion on Fridays. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 49-75 [Access article in PDF] Sensible Ends:Latent Teleology in Descartes' Account of Sensation Alison Simmons One of Descartes' hallmark contributions to natural philosophy is his denunciation of teleology. It is puzzling, then, to find him arguing in Meditation VI that human beings have sensations in order to preserve the union of mind and body (AT VII 83). 1 This appears (...) to be just the sort of teleological explanation that he proscribes. Descartes' Anglo-American commentators have had little to say about the teleological overtones of his claims about sensation. His French commentators acknowledge these overtones, but seem largely untroubled by them. 2 It is worth pausing to be troubled, for a closer analysis reveals that Descartes' famous proscription against teleology is not as simple as it is generally thought to be. In the first half of this essay, I argue that Descartes advocates a genuinely teleological conception of the senses. My aim is not to charge Descartes with employing illicit teleology, but to argue that there is a place for teleology even in his revisionist natural philosophy. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay, I argue that Descartes' assault on teleological explanation is [End Page 49] not a sweeping assault on finality, but a more directed attack on particular uses of ends in natural philosophy. Descartes' assault leaves standing a form of teleological explanation that proves crucial to his own treatment of sensation. 1. Descartes' Rejection of Teleological Explanation at a Glance A teleological explanation is one that purports to account for something in terms of its ends or its function relative to the ends of the system of which it is a part. Aristotle's physics provides many classic examples: plants produce leaves for the protection of their fruit; spiders spin webs in order to catch food; animals grow sharp front teeth and dull back teeth in order to facilitate biting and chewing respectively; eyes are for seeing. According to Aristotle, all natural phenomena are directed toward ends and no explanation is complete without a teleological component that specifies the end for the sake of which the phenomenon occurs. Indeed ends take explanatory priorityover other causes: "Both causes [the end and the matter] must be stated by the student of nature, but especially the end; for that is the cause of the matter, not vice versa." 3 And: [T]he causes concerned in natural generation are, as we see, more than one. There is the cause for the sake of which [the end], and the cause whence the beginning of motion comes [the efficient cause]. Now we must decide which of these two causes comes first, which second. Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call that for the sake of which. For this is the account of the thing, and the account forms the starting-point.4In other words, Aristotle argues that natural substances have the matter they do, have the parts or organs they do, are organized as they are and act as they do for the sake of their ends. To explain why things are as they are, the natural philosopher must therefore explain the ways in which they contribute to ends.Among the late scholastic Aristotelians familiar to Descartes there is considerable debate concerning the causal efficacy of ends. Genuine final causation, in which something is said to be acted on by an end, is limited to the intentional behavior of rational agents who consciously recognize their ends: only something that recognizes an end can be "moved" by one. Even here the sort of causation involved is peculiar: a rational agent is "moved" by an end insofar as the end induces a "metaphorical motion" toward (or desire for) the end in the agent's will. 5 While these scholastic Aristotelians resist attributing final causation [End Page 50] to non-rational creatures, they nevertheless persist in attributing ends to them. When Toletus, Rubio, the Coimbrans and Suarez take up the question whether nature acts propter finem, each answers it affirmatively: natural... (shrink)

Abstract Epistemic infinitism is certainly not a majority view in contemporary epistemology. While there are some examples of infinitism in the history of philosophy, more work needs to be done mining this history in order to provide a richer understanding of how infinitism might be formulated internal to different philosophical frameworks. Accordingly, we argue that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas can be read as operating according to an ?impure? model of epistemic infinitism. The infinite obligation inaugurated by the ?face to (...) face encounter? with the Other yields an approach to the ethics of belief that accords with infinitism. This reading of Levinas brings his ethical thought into dialogue with contemporary epistemology as well as provides an historical example of infinitism within the current debates. (shrink)

‘Rights and Territories: A Reply to Nine, Miller, and Stilz’ defends the Lockean theory of states’ territorial rights (as this theory was presented in Boundaries of Authority) against the critiques of Nine, Miller, and Stilz. In response to Nine’s concern that such a Lockean theory cannot justify the right of legitimate states to exclude aliens, it is argued that a consent-based theory like the Lockean one is flexible enough to justify a wide range of possible incidents of territorial rights – (...) importantly including, though not necessarily including, the sort of right to exclude aliens that is familiar from actual political practice. Miller’s criticisms are more wide-ranging. In response, the article argues that Lockean labor-based property rights are both stronger and more enduring than Miller suggests and that nationalism’s resources for dealing with concerns about rights-supersession and trapped minorities are importantly overstated by Miller. Against Stilz’s Kantian, ‘presentist’ account of states’ authority over persons and territories, it is argued that the rectification of past (historical) wrongs remains morally crucial even in the context of otherwise-just societies and that Stilz’s Kantian/rawlsian position unconvincingly privileges the rights to autonomy of territorially concentrated groups over those of dissenting individuals or wrongfully dispersed groups. (shrink)

In this essay, I provide an introduction to the so-called 'theological turn' in recent French, 'new' phenomenology. I begin by articulating the stakes of excluding God from phenomenology (as advocated by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger) and then move on to a brief consideration of why Dominique Janicaud contends that, by inquiring into the 'inapparent', new phenomenology is no longer phenomenological. I then consider the general trajectories of this recent movement and argue that there are five main themes that unite (...) the work of such varied thinkers as Levinas, Derrida, Marion, Henry, Chrétien, Lacoste, and Ricœur. I conclude by outlining points of overlap between new phenomenology and contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and suggest that the two stand as important resources for each other. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the philosophy of religion, ethics, and personal political philosophy have been deeply marked by the influence of two philosophers who are often thought to be in opposition to each other, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas. Devoted expressly to the relationship between Levinas and Kierkegaard, this volume sets forth a more rigorous comparison and sustained engagement between them. Established and newer scholars representing varied philosophical traditions bring these two thinkers into dialogue in 12 sparkling essays. They consider similarities (...) and differences in how each elaborated a unique philosophy of religion, and they present themes such as time, obligation, love, politics, God, transcendence, and subjectivity. This conversation between neighbors is certain to inspire further inquiry and ignite philosophical debate. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

In this essay I consider the possible impact of thinking phenomenologically about faith in a postmodern/post-secular age. Following Merold Westphal’s encouragement that philosophy of religion should be more ‘personal’, I offer a phenomenological reflection on my own experience of the difficulties and complexities that accompany being a postmodern phenomenologist and a Pentecostal Christian. Working through the possible conflicts that can arise when these two identities are brought together, I propose an account of Kierkegaardian postmodernism that resolves the conflict without, thereby, (...) eliminating the existential and theological difficulties that accompany religious existence in a postmodern/post-secular world. Ultimately, then, I show that personal engagement with religious existence is not excluded by postmodern phenomenology, but is in fact crucial for an appropriately postmodern/post-secular approach to phenomenological philosophy of religion itself. I conclude by proposing a possible account of God that reflects both phenomenological rigor and existential awareness. (shrink)

Welcome to the family -- The sources of new phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger -- How to be a phenomenological heretic: the origins and development of new phenomenology -- Phenomenology and onto-theology -- Phenomenology and theology reconsidered -- New phenomenology on the existence and nature of God -- The call, prayer, and Christian philosophy -- Proposals for new phenomenology and analytic philosophy of religion -- Normativity: ethics, politics, and society -- Possible futures for new phenomenology.

Though academic debate over gender-inclusive God-talk seems to have fizzled, the issue is a pressing one within many Christiandenominations today—both within and outside the Church—and for that reason deserves to be briefly revisited. Accordingly, althoughin this essay we approach the issue as professional philosophers, our focus is on the life of the Church—more specifically, those no doubt sizable segments of the Church for which a personal God and Satan exist and evangelism matters. Running an elimination argument, we contend that if (...) a certain sort of feminist concern about traditional God-talk is well-directed, the best response is to speak of not only God but also Satan in both masculine and feminine terms. And in closing, we address the possible worry that this response to the God-talk problem would not be Christian enough. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a reading of Fear and Trembling that responds to critiques of Kierkegaardian ethics as being, as Brand Blanshard claims, “morally nihilistic,” as Emmanuel Levinas contends, ethically violent, and, as Alasdair MacIntyre charges, simply irrational. I argue that by focusing on Isaac's singularity as the very condition for Abraham's “ordeal,” the book presents a story about responsible subjectivity. Rather than standing in competition with the relation to God, the relation to other people is, thus, inscribed into (...) this very relation. Fear and Trembling, I contend, advocates a bidirectional responsibility that is constitutive of subjectivity itself and, as such, actually resonates with certain aspects of Levinasian ethics. I conclude by suggesting that Abraham's ordeal is not due to the conflict between a nonreligious duty and the duty to God, but instead reflects a tension that is internal to the life of faith itself. (shrink)

Building on research regarding the influence of national identity salience on attitudes towards international institutions and the impact of nationalism on foreign policy preferences, in a case study of America, I explore the role of chauvinistic nationalism to understand its impact on attitudes towards international jurisdiction of punishment for alleged human rights violations by members of the American military. Using binomial regression of survey responses from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I find that respondents with higher levels of chauvinistic (...) nationalist sentiment also have higher levels of opposition to the jurisdiction of international legal institutions to prosecute members of a nation’s military. This study is the first of its kind to offer a systematic and multivariate explanation for public opinion towards the jurisdiction of international human rights institutions over a nation’s armed forces using national survey data. (shrink)