Should hate speech be banned? This article sets out a framework through which to organize the current scholarly debate. It contends that the debate must be disaggregated into discrete analytical stages, lest its participants continue to talk past one [...]

My thesis is that we should regard ethics and public policy (EPP) as a special subfield of political philosophy, marked by a particular methodological commitment: to assist citizens and policymakers in their actual deliberations about public policy. EPP can assist [...]

This paper interrogates Cécile Laborde’s account of the proper role of religion in the liberal state. It begins by examining Laborde’s claims that prevailing liberals are not committed to broad neutrality about the good, but rather only restricted neutrality about [...]

Should governments pay ransoms to terrorist organizations that unjustly kidnap their citizens? The United Kingdom and the United States refuse to negotiate with terrorist groups that kidnap and threaten to kill their people. In contrast, continental European countries, such as [...]

Why value democracy? One familiar answer is that democracy expresses respect for citizens, whereas non-democratic modes of governance insultingly express disrespect. Recent work has subjected this view to substantial criticism, raising serious doubts about its plausibility. This article contends that [...]

The proposal that the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation—rather than retribution, deterrence, or expressive denunciation—is among the least popular ideas in legal philosophy. Foremost among rehabilitation’s alleged weaknesses is that it treats criminals like blameless patients to be [...]

Is it wrong for the state to induce its citizens to commit crime? Legal and political philosophers tend to agree that entrapment is morally problematic, yet we lack a convincing explanation as to why. This article furnishes a new explanation [...]

Democratic contractarianism aspires to unite two previously unconnected strands in political philosophy: firstly, a democratic commitment to a social world in which citizens yield equal power; and secondly, a contractarian commitment to a strictly prudential justification of political morality. I [...]

This article advances a partially epistemic justification of democratic authority by defending what David Estlund has called the democracy/contractualism analogy: the idea that democracy can track justice due to crucial similarities between effective democratic politics and the hypothetical deliberations employed [...]

The idea that victims of social injustice who commit crimes ought not to be subject to punishment has attracted serious attention in recent legal and political philosophy. R. A. Duff has argued, for example, that states that perpetrate social injustice [...]