Should one individual have, prior to any consent, property rights in another person? Libertarians answer that they should not--and that this commitment requires rejecting all positive duties. Liberals-egalitarians largely agree with the libertarian's answer to the question, but deny the corollary they draw from it, arguing that egalitarian regimes do not require other-ownership. Drawing on recent property theory, I argue that both sides are mistaken, and that a prohibition on other-ownership guides us towards a middling political position, both allowing and constraining our positive duties and liabilities to others.

Socialists believe that equality, community, and economic democracy can only be achieved by a system of joint ownership in the means of production. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to their own person. Libertarians believe that individual liberty and autonomy are only coextensive with a set of stringent rights to the person and its powers. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to the external world. Bringing libertarianism and socialism together is therefore, in principle, possible. This paper takes this further step, by sketching a constituiton that reconciles individual autonomy with radical equality of condition. To those libertarians drawn to socialist values (such as the pioneers of nineteenth-century anarchism), the paper offers a reconciliation that is arguably more true to these values than left-libertarianism. To those socialists drawn to libertarian values, it offers an alternative to left-libertarianism that avoids the pitfalls of statism.

Justifications of group-differentiated rights commonly overlook a crucial practical consideration: if rights are to be allocated on the basis of group membership, how should we determine which individuals belong to which group? Assuming that social identities are fixed and transparent runs the risk of creating further injustices, whilst acknowledging that social groups are porous and heterogeneous runs the risk of rendering group-differentiated rights impracticable. In this paper, I develop a schema for determining group membership that avoids both horns of this dilemma.

Many argue that our reasons to value choice do not depend on our having libertarian free will.The paper argues against this view. One reason to value choice is that it is constitutive of a life of self-determination. If choices are determined, however, they can be predicted and brought about by others; and if choices are randomly indeterministic, they can be mimicked. In either case, the importance of choice to self-determination is challenged. Thus, it is only as long as our choices are free in a libertarian manner that the importance of choice as a means to self-determination makes full sense.

This paper provides a critical examination of the strongest defenses of the pure lifetime view, according to which justice requires taking only people's whole lives as relevant when assessing and establishing their distributive entitlements and obligations. The paper proposes that we reject a pure lifetime view and replace it with an alternative view, on which some time-specific considerations--that is to say, considerations about how people fare at specific points in time--have nonderivative weight in determining what our obligations are to them.

Contemporary philosophy offers two main accounts of how parental obligations are acquired: the causal and the voluntarist account. Elizabeth Brake's provocative paper "Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?" seeks to clear the way for the voluntarist account by focusing on the relevance of abortion rights to parental obligations. The present paper is concerned with rebutting Brake's argument that, if a woman does not acquire parental obligations to an unborn child just by having voluntarily acted in such a way that had the reasonably foreseeable consequence of bringing him or her into being, neither does a man acquire parental obligations to a child once he or she is born just by having voluntarily acted in the same way.

However liberalism is best understood, liberals typically seek to defend a wide range of liberty. Some have argued that it is the recognition of same-sex marriage--not its prohibition--that conflicts with liberalism's commitments. I refer to the thesis that recognition of same-sex marriage is illiberal as "The Charge." As a sympathetic liberal, I take The Charge seriously enough to consider and ultimately reject it. Ultimately, I contend that The Charge is simply misguided and that arguments for it either fail to find support in some liberal principle or else find support from some illiberal principle.

Fischer has argued elegantly that the free actions of a person, the actions of self-expression, play a special role in the story of the person. They are the vehicles of content for the construction of that story. I argue that the experiences of those actions by a person are both representations in the story of a life, vehicles of content, and an exhibit of the content represented, the life itself. Experiences become exemplars that refer back to themselves becoming part of what the story is about. Autonomous choice of my story shows me and others what I am like.

In several essays, John Fischer motivates his guidance control view of moral responsibility by discussing the value of acting freely. What we value, he argues, is unhindered self-expression that derives its meaning from a narrative structure. In this paper, I claim that while Fischer may be correct that self-expression (understood in its narrative sense) is the value of acting freely, it is less clear that the kind of self-expression that we value sits comfortably with determinism. The meaning of one’s narrative may include the accuracy of one’s self-conception, an accuracy that may be substantially undermined by the truth of determinism.

I discuss two claims defended in Fischer’s recent work. The first is the default status of compatibilism. This is part of a conception of our agency and moral responsibility as being independent of the truth or the falsity of the thesis of determinism. I try to further bolster Fischer’s arguments in favor of this position. The second is Fischer’s defense of the narrative conception of moral responsibility, according to which the value of self-expression supports and explicates the value of being morally responsible. I argue that the cases and insights taken to support the idea that our lives have a distinctive kind of narrative value are best accounted for in other terms.

Many philosophers endorse the view that global or “narrative” features of a life at least partly determine its value.  For instance, a life in which the subject redeems her past failures and sacrifices with later successes is thought to be better, ceteris paribus, than one in which her later successes are unrelated to her previous failures.  In this paper I distinguish some views about narrative value, including Fischer’s views about the importance of free will for narrative value, and raise a number of problems for the idea of narrative value.

I argue that Fischer’s attempts to undermine the “Ought” Implies “Can” principle (OIC) fail. I argue both against his construal of the natural motivation for OIC and against his argument for the falsity of OIC. I also consider some attempts to salvage Fischer’s arguments and argue that they can work only if the true moral theory is motive determinative--i.e., it is such that, necessarily, any action performed from a motive which renders one of the blame emotions appropriate is morally impermissible, no matter what other features it has. But, as motive-determinative moral theories are implausible, Fischer’s arguments are not salvageable.

I suggest that Fischer concedes too much to the consequence argument when he grants that we may not make a difference. I provide a broad sketch of (my take on) the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists, while suggesting that some of the discussion may have confused the freedom required for moral responsibility with a very different notion of autonomy. I introduce that less usual notion of autonomy and suggest that those who are autonomous, in this sense, do make a difference.

Although libertarians and compatibilists disagree about whether moral responsibility requires the falsity of determinism, they tend to agree that moral responsibility is at least compatible with the falsity of determinism. But there is a real worry about how that can be: after all, if my actions aren’t determined, then isn’t their occurrence just a matter of luck? In this paper, I offer a suggestion for how to understand and deal with this problem by appealing to the influential and powerful theory of moral responsibility developed by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza.

Lucretius famously argued that if we think death is bad because it deprives us of time we could have had by living longer than we do, then when we are born must be bad too, since we could have been born earlier than we were, and so be deprived of that time as well. John Martin Fischer thinks Lucretius’s symmetry argument fails because we have a bias toward the future. I argue that Fischer’s approach does not answer Lucretius. In contrast to Fischer, I think that we can show an objective difference between the time before our birth and the time after our death, which means that we are justified in adopting different attitudes towards them. I revise a point made by Thomas Nagel that while we might live longer than we do, we cannot exist earlier than we did and remain the same people throughout.