Franklin & Marshall College

My main project concerns justice in distribution within the democratic society.  I argue that members of a democratic society owe one another, as a matter of justice, access to what they need to function as full and equal citizens.  I am not unique in taking individuals’ needs qua full and equal citizens as central to democratic distributive justice.  However, the needs-based accounts proposed by philosophers such as Rawls and Anderson test and disappoint the expectation that reasons will be available to citizens that they can offer one another in justification of their society’s principles of justice.  These views rely on moral intuitions that citizens need not accept as part of their implicit commitment to basic democratic values-- in particular, robustly egalitarian intuitions.  I demonstrate how far-reaching and attractive a floor for distributive justice can be, even when based on an insistently political account of full and equal citizenship that eschews such controversially egalitarian intuitions.   

Very recently, I have become interested in philosophers' debates regarding global justice. My main research explores democratic citizens’ obligations to fellow citizens, to the exclusion of considering citizens’ obligations to non-citizens abroad or within their society.  The literature on global distributive justice observes a similar distinction: some writers fall into the camp that assigns obligation exclusively on the basis of association membership (such as shared citizenship), while philosophers such as Peter Singer promote a cosmopolitanism that ignores association membership in assigning obligations to provide positive aid.  I believe that the debate in these terms is ill-conceived--we ought to acknowledge both ways of grounding claims of distributive justice, and move on to figure out how to adjudicate  the competition between members-only claims and all-inclusive cosmopolitan claims for societies' resources and attention.