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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Simmons’ Critique Of Natural Duty Approaches To The Duty To Obey The Law, David Lefkowitz
Simmons’ Critique Of Natural Duty Approaches To The Duty To Obey The Law, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In his most recent book on the moral duty to obey the law, A. John Simmons considers and rejects a number of natural duty approaches to justifying political authority. Among the targets of Simmons’ criticism is the account defended by the book’s co-author, Christopher Heath Wellman. In this essay, I evaluate the force of Simmons’ objections to Wellman’s account of political obligation. As will become clear below, I think Wellman’s defense of the duty to obey the law defective in certain ways—but not in all of the ways that Simmons argues it is. By rebutting some of Simmons’ criticisms and …
A Theory Of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, And The Bonds Of Society By Margaret Gilbert (Book Review), David Lefkowitz
A Theory Of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, And The Bonds Of Society By Margaret Gilbert (Book Review), David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Does membership in a political society, in and of itself, involve obligations to uphold that society’s political institutions? Margaret Gilbert offers a novel argument in defense of an affirmative answer to this question, which she labels the membership problem. Given a plausible construal of the concepts obligation, political society, and membership in a political society, Gilbert argues that it follows analytically that to be a member of a political society just is to have an obligation to uphold and support that society’s political institutions. The key to Gilbert’s argument is the idea of a joint commitment; those …
A Theory Of Argument (Book Review), G. C. Goddu
A Theory Of Argument (Book Review), G. C. Goddu
Philosophy Faculty Publications
A Theory of Argument is an advanced textbook “written for upper-level undergraduate students who have completed at least one prior course in argumentation theory, critical thinking, informal logic, formal logic, or some other related discipline” (ix). This puts Vorobej’s book in a unique position since, to my knowledge, there are no other second course undergraduate textbooks with a nonsymbolic focus. (Second course symbolic logic textbooks written for undergraduates, rather than primarily for graduate students, were relatively rare until recently; the past decade has seen a proliferation in such texts.)
Walton On Argument Structure, G. C. Goddu
Walton On Argument Structure, G. C. Goddu
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In previous work I argued against (i) the likelihood of finding a theoretically sound foundation for the linked/convergent distinction and (ii) the utility of the distinction even if a sound theoretical basis could be found. Here I subject Douglas Walton’s comprehensive discussion of the linked/convergent distinction found in Argument Structure: A Pragmatic Theory to careful scrutiny and argue that at best Walton’s theory remains incomplete and that attempts to fill out the details will run afoul of at least one of the problems adduced above—i.e., result in either a theoretically unsound distinction or a theoretically sound, but unnecessary distinction.
On A Moral Right To Civil Disobedience, David Lefkowitz
On A Moral Right To Civil Disobedience, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In this essay I argue that citizens of a liberal-democratic state, one that I argue has a morally justified claim to political authority, enjoy a moral right to engage in acts of suitably constrained civil disobedience, or what I will call a moral right to public disobedience. Such a claim may well appear inconsistent with the duty usually thought to correlate to a legitimate state’s right to rule, namely, a moral duty to obey the law. If successful, however, the arguments that follow entail that the duty correlative to a liberal-democratic state’s justified claim to political authority is in fact …