In this essay, I distinguish two dimensions of responsibility: (i) responsibility for expressing the will (character, motives, and purposes) one has in action (voluntarily and without constraint) and (ii) responsibility for having the will one expresses in action. I argue that taking both of these dimensions into account is necessary to do full justice to our understanding of moral responsibility and our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible in moral and legal contexts. I further argue that the distinction between these dimensions of responsibility is importantly related to understanding age-old debates about the freedom of the will. For the first dimension of responsibility is historically related to the freedom of action—the power to freely express the will one already has in action. While the second dimension is historically related to the freedom of the will—the power to freely form or shape that will one may later express in action. And I argue that while the freedom of action so defined may be compatible with determinism, the freedom of will, and the deeper responsibility associated with it for forming one’s own will, which I call “ultimate responsibility,” are not compatible with a thoroughgoing determinism. In arguing throughout the essay for these claims and for the need to take into account both of these dimensions to do full justice to our understanding of moral responsibility, I consider ordinary practices of holding persons responsible in a variety of moral and legal contexts, discussing in the process H. L. A. Hart’s “fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing” criterion for assessing responsibility and blame in legal and criminal contexts, the relevance of recent experimental studies about folk intuitions concerning assessments of responsibility and blame, Harry Frankfurt’s critique of the “principle of alternative possibilities,” the distinction between “will-settled” and “will-setting” actions, and contemporary critiques of the very possibility and intelligibility of an ultimate responsibility for forming one’s own will that would be incompatible with determinism.

The “new institutionalist revolution” in social sciences has led to a repositioning of social norms to the forefront of the pre-analytic vision in institutional theory and to the consolidation of the contextual analysis approach. That has significant epistemological, methodological, and political philosophy implications. This essay follows the logic of these developments showing: (a) why they inherently lead to the feasibility problem, the key of applied theory, toward which both contemporary philosophy and institutional analysis converge from different venues; (b) how feasibility is a nexus of empirical, counterfactual, normative, and contextual elements, that is, something more complex than a mere matching between empirical reality and institutional design; (c) what are the governance implications of all of the above, with an emphasis on an alternative approach (distinctive enough to circumvent both the conservative averseness to intervene and progressive drastic interventionism) and in which the public choice process is seen mainly as endogenized, socialized, and institutionalized, as opposed to formalized, intellectualized, and externalized.

Early in the history of liberalism, its most important proponents were concerned with freedom of religion. As polities and individuals now accept a dizzying array of religions, this has receded to the background for most theorists. It nonetheless remains a concern. Freedom of speech is a similar concern and very much in the foreground for theorists looking at the current state of academia. In this essay, I argue that inappropriate limits to freedom of religion and inappropriate limits to freedom of speech—especially in the form of de-platforming on college campuses—both have, as one of their effects, what I call harms of silence. This means we ought not have those limits, so should seek to change them where they exist.

Ever since the constitutional revolution of the 1930s, constitutional law and theory have been dominated by questions of civil rights. The expansion of rights under the Warren Court constituted a deep-seated shift in judicial attitudes that has proved remarkably stable over time. Despite protests in some quarters that the Burger Court (1969–1986) and the current Rehnquist Court have undermined civil rights recognized during the Warren Court era (1953–1969), the fact is that the changes have been surprisingly marginal. Even precedents that were widely believed to be endangered species a decade ago – such as Miranda and Roe v. Wade – continue in force, although they have indeed been pruned back. Despite their importance, however, these high-profile cases do not go to the core of the Supreme Court's agenda. The core is epitomized by Brown v. Board of Education on the one hand, representing an aggressive and interventionist attitude toward government discrimination against discrete minorities, and footnote four of the Carotene Products case, on the other hand, representing an extraordinarily deference to the political process with respect to economic regulation. The Rehnquist Court's commitment to this core agenda is not dramatically different than that of its predecessors, at least not when the broad sweep of constitutional law is taken into account.

“Das Adam Smith Problem” is the name given by eighteenth-century German scholars to the question of how to reconcile the role of self-interest in the Wealth of Nations with Smith’s advocacy of sympathy in Theory of Moral Sentiments. As the discipline of economics developed, it focused on the interaction of selfish agents, pursuing their private interests. However, behavioral economists have rediscovered the existence and importance of multiple motivations, and a new Das Adam Smith Problem has arisen, of how to accommodate self-regarding and pro-social motivations in a single system. This question is particularly important because of evidence of motivation crowding, where paying people can backfire, with payments achieving the opposite effects of those intended. Psychologists have proposed a mechanism for the crowding out of “intrinsic motivations” for doing a task, when payment is used to incentivize effort. However, they argue that pro-social motivations are different from these intrinsic motivations, implying that crowding out of pro-social motivations requires a different mechanism. In this essay I present an answer to the new Das Adam Smith problem, proposing a mechanism that can underpin the crowding out of both pro-social and intrinsic motivations, whereby motivations are prompted by frames and motivation crowding is underpinned by the crowding out of frames. I explore some of the implications of this mechanism for research and policy.

Debates about libertarianism and redistribution often revolve around self-ownership. There are two main reasons for this: first, self-ownership is often featured in Lockean accounts of property that endow us with a claim to the resources that are up for redistribution. Second, self-ownership has sometimes been mustered as a way of resisting the additional labor that is said to be required by redistributive schemes. In this essay, I argue that these appeals to self-ownership are misguided. However, unlike most critics of these appeals, I don’t wish to claim that redistribution is therefore vindicated. On the contrary, my main goal is to show that there are alternatives to invoking self-ownership that are more effective and that better capture the core intuition behind libertarian objections to redistribution.

The world's aging populations face novel health challenges never experienced before in human history. The moral landscape thus needs to adapt to reflect this novel empirical reality. In this paper I take for granted one basic moral principle advanced by Peter Singer — a principle of preventing bad occurrences — and explore the implications that empirical considerations from demography, evolutionary biology, and biogerontology have for the way we conceive of fulfilling this principle at the operational level. After bringing to the fore a number of considerations that Singer ignores, such as the probability that nonintervention will result in harm and the likelihood that different kinds of extrinsic and intrinsic harms can be prevented, I argue that the aspiration to extend the human biological warranty period (by retarding the rate of aging) is a pressing moral imperative for the twenty-first century. In the final sections I briefly address some standard objections raised against life extension and conclude that, while there may be some legitimate concerns worth addressing, they are not compelling enough to provide a rational basis for forfeiting the potential health and economic benefits that could be realized by extending the biological warranty period.

In this essay I argue that contemporary accounts of virtue ought to incorporate methods ancient virtue ethicists used in addressing an audience whose members were interested in improving their behavior. Ancient examples of these methods, I argue, model how to represent practical rationality in ethical arguments. They show us that when we argue for virtue we ought to address common claims, refer to moral reasoning as a stepwise process, and focus on norms when making recommendations. Our own ethical arguments will be improved if we do these things. To the extent that these methods are incorporated into our contemporary accounts of virtue, we will make important points of contact with the account of practical rationality that forms the very basis of the view.

The question of ownership—property rights—is important in addressing many issues of public policy. But the attempt to subsume all questions of rights under what I describe as “the property paradigm” exerts a distorting influence on debates about a variety of complex moral issues. More specifically, I argue that the application of the property paradigm deformed discussion of the nature and basis of parental rights. The claim that parental rights are not best understood as property rights is now widely acknowledged. However, while the property paradigm exerts only vestigial influence on contemporary discussions of parental rights, it still exerts a significant distorting effect on discussions of reproductive rights. I argue that focusing on the question of the ownership of gametes, in particular of sperm, tends to warp the moral dialog concerning reproductive rights. Those sensitive moral debates are better framed in terms of individuals' legitimate interests than in terms of property.

This article examines the moral theory of the American Revolutionary and Founding periods by focusing on two key concepts of that doctrine: the moral laws and the moral rights of nature. In particular, the article will examine several important questions from the perspective of America’s Revolutionary generation: What are the moral laws and rights of nature? What is the difference between a law and a right of nature, and how are the laws and rights of nature related to each other? Are nature’s moral laws and rights descriptive, prescriptive, or both? What are the attributes and sanctions of nature’s laws and rights, and how are they promulgated? What is the source of nature’s laws and rights? And finally, how did America’s founding fathers use the laws and rights of nature to establish their political institutions? In order to answer these questions, the article focuses on the core text universally recognized as the symbol of America’s revolutionary mind and moral theory: the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration’s deepest philosophic meaning is herein illuminated by also examining the broader, extant literature of the period.

Philosophers have debated for millennia about whether moral requirements are always rational to follow. The background for these debates is often what I shall call “the self-interest model.” The guiding assumption here is that the basic demand of reason, to each person, is that one must, above all, advance one's self-interest. Alternatively, debate may be framed by a related, but significantly different, assumption: the idea that the basic rational requirement is to develop and pursue a set of personal ends in an informed, efficient, and coherent way, whether one's choice of ends is based on self-interested desires or not. For brevity I refer to this as “the coherence-and-efficiency model.” Advocates of both models tend to think that, while it is sufficiently clear in principle what the rational thing to do is, what remains in doubt is whether it is always rational to be moral. They typically assume that morality is concerned, entirely or primarily, with our relations to others, especially with obligations that appear to require some sacrifice or compromise with the pursuit of self-interest.

Richard Rorty is one of the principal architects of a new way of thinking about liberalism. He calls his way “liberal ironism”: it is a postmodern liberalism, without Enlightenment rationalism, without the hopeless and finally enervating aspiration to discover an a historical philosophical foundation (“natural rights”) for liberal principles and practices. The postmodern liberal ironist, unlike the classical liberal rationalist, “faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” says Rorty, including the characteristic liberal belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Such postmodern liberals frankly admit the apparently unhappy consequence of that essential “contingency,” that “there is no neutral, noncircular way to defend” liberal ways, no good argument to deploy against “Nazi and Marxist enemies of liberalism”; but no such argument is needed, says Rorty, since loyalty to one's own community is morality enough, even where that loyalty is without foundation. Here, I begin with a few words about Rorty's postmodern liberalism, as preface to a discussion of the effects of postmodern doctrines on liberal moral psychology.

Constitutional law in the United States is, for most practical purposes, the product of ‘judicial review’, the power of judges to disallow policy choices made by other officials or institutions of government, ostensibly because those choices are prohibited by the Constitution. This extraordinary and unprecedented power, America's dubious contribution to the science of government, has made American judges the most powerful in the world, not only legislators but super-legislators, legislators with virtually the last word. Because lawmaking power divorced from popular will is tyranny, most states have attempted to reconcile the lawmaking power of judges with representative self-government by subjecting all or some judges to some form of popular election. In all but four such states, judges, encouraged and supported by their fellow lawyers in the organized bar—would-be judges and beneficiaries of judicial power—have responded by adopting codes of judicial ethics that limit what candidates for election to judicial office are permitted to say. The effect is to undermine elections as a control on judicial power by limiting criticism of judicial activism, the misuse of judicial power.

Free speech has been treated as a preeminent constitutional right in the United States for more than half a century. The rights of property owners, on the other hand, have received little constitutional protection since the New Deal period of the 1930s. This modern dichotomy is particularly striking because it obscures an older constitutional tradition that equated economic liberty and freedom of expression. This tradition saw both property rights and speech rights as essential to the protection of personal freedom by restraining the power of government.

Is it possible for a person to understand that what he proposes to do is morally wrong and yet prefer to do it nonetheless? I shall argue that wickedness consists in a defect of character that results in one's often having just such preferences. Yet many philosophers think that wickedness so conceived is impossible, because, for them, having such a preference is incompatible with believing, or at least knowing, that the act would be wrong.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about at least two normative challenges on unprecedented scale for liberal democracies. One concerned prioritization decisions when health care resources were constrained. The other, which arguably led to lasting damage to social cohesion and citizens’ trust in government and government public health institutions, concerned policies introduced with the aim of reducing the spread of SARS-CoV2, some of which turned out to be mistaken. I discuss in this essay a few examples of misguided, liberty-limiting public health policies and describe how public health and public health ethics principlism provided cover for such policies. Citizens had reasons to be concerned about the duration of such liberty-infringing policies, the absence of predictable government policies, and the absence of transparent justifications for the policies that were implemented.

Until recently, economics conceived of poverty solely as a lack of material resources. This view likely captures the reality of poverty experienced by many people around the globe. However, two waves of behavioral economics demonstrate that the narrowing of people’s external environments may change people themselves: poverty lowers the quality of decision-making and poverty and oppression may depress the capacity to aspire. Poverty and a history of oppression also change how individuals are perceived. To overcome these effects may require helping people acquire new mental models. This essay discusses key findings from behavioral economics, the implications for agency, and some interventions with promising outcomes. We hope to inspire scholars and policymakers to think more deeply about the nature of poverty and oppression and to consider policies that target the psychological and sociological factors that create cycles of poverty.

This paper seeks to examine two conflicting strands in the United States Supreme Court's treatment of “freedom of association,” by exploring some aspects of the historical development of the doctrine. It suggests that there are two conceptions of “freedom of association,” an older, traditional one, that eschews forcing odious contact on members of associations, and a newer one which privileges antidiscrimination doctrines over “freedom from association.” These two conceptions still exist on the Court, resulting in irreconcilable decisions such as those permitting the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters, but forcing the Jaycees to accept women. The preference of one conception over the other is also evident in the work of different scholars, whose doctrinal approaches are similarly irreconcilable. The Supreme Court has explained the discontinuities in the doctrine by seeking to characterize it in terms of the First Amendment's “freedom of speech” clause, but the paper argues that it makes more sense, in the context of these two cases, to regard them as related to the First Amendment's “freedom of religion” clauses.

Why hasn’t economic progress lowered work hours more? One of Keynes’s most famous essays is his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Keynes predicts that within one hundred years — which would bring us to 2030 — most scarcity will have disappeared and most individuals will work no more than fifteen hours a week. My question is a simple one: Why wasn’t Keynes right? Why have working hours remained as long as they have? Why hasn’t progress taken a more leisurely and less material form than what we have observed? Investigating that issue will help us get at the question of just how much progress has occurred. Under one view, Western life has been caught in a kind of rat race, and a lot of the gains of progress are illusory. For instance there is the argument that higher incomes are largely consumed as part of a futile race to win relative status, and living standards aren’t nearly as high as they might appear. Under some alternative scenarios, people haven’t moved to Keynes’s scenario for some good reasons, such as enjoying work more than we might think, or other hypotheses, as I will outline. In that case the observed changes in real income are robust, and measured correctly, or progress may even be greater than income measurements would indicate. I hope that addressing Keynes’s paradox can help us better understand this longstanding debate on the nature of modern progress.

The threat of terrorism once again raises some of the classic questions about constitutionalism: is it possible for constitutions to do what they aim to do—channel and control political power in such a way as to make it safe and beneficent for those under its rule but also competent to govern? Does not terrorism reraise the Schmittian problem of “the exception”, i.e., the situation of emergency that necessarily escapes all constitutional limitations? Although they did not face the problem of terrorism as we know it, the American founders developed three different models of constitutionalism, embodying three different ways of responding to emergent circumstances and yet remaining bound to the constitutionalist aspiration. We develop the main outlines of the three models both conceptually and historically and show how they continue to be relevant to current discussions of constitutionalism in the age of terror. Finally, we make a tentative effort to judge which of the three models is most able to do what constitutions should do in difficult times.