Legitimacy
5 writings
The Dworkin–Williams Debate: Liberty, Conceptual Integrity, and Tragic Conflict in Politics
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1): 3–29. 2024. doi:10.1111/phpr.13002
By reconstructing the little-known Dworkin-Williams debate over whether political concepts like liberty and equality can and should be reconciled to avoid conflict, the article explores the nature of political values, the limits of philosophical intervention in politics, the challenge of pluralism, and the conditions for political legitimacy in the face of inevitable conflict and loss.
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Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering
The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010
Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.
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Theorizing the Normative Significance of Critical Histories for International Law
Journal of the History of International Law 24 (4): 561–587. 2022. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1163/15718050-12340207
Addresses the question of whether the tainted history of international law should affect our present-day evaluation of it. It argues that critical histories derive their power in three primary ways: by subverting the historical claims that support a practice’s authority, by failing to meet the normative expectations readers bring to the past, and by tracing the functional continuities that link past problems to the present. The framework explains how history can be normatively significant even when its direct influence on legal argument is unclear.
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Whence the Demand for Ethical Theory?
American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2): 135–46. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.2307/48614001
Offers a practical derivation of the need for public and judicial reasoning to take a more discursive and consistent form than private deliberation (a theme more fully explored in ch. 10 of my second book).
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Revealing Social Functions through Pragmatic Genealogies
In Social Functions in Philosophy: Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives. Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael Van Riel (eds.), 200–218. London: Routledge. 2020. doi:10.4324/9780429435393
This paper argues that state-of-nature stories, read as dynamic models rather than history, can reveal how key normative practices meet collective needs of coordination, conflict-management, and non-domination. Drawing on Hume’s genealogy of justice, Williams’s genealogy of truthfulness, and related work, it shows how concepts like property, knowledge, and testimonial justice underpin social cooperation and political legitimacy. In doing so, it offers social and political philosophers a way to explain both the persistence of ideas and institutions and the grounds on which they can be criticized.
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