Pragmatism, Law, and Morality

Euthanasia, morality, and law.

Deception in Morality and Law

Drugs, Morality and the Law

 Arguments for and against the legal prohibition of drugs are surveyed. Various kinds of argument are identified and analysed: arguments against prohibition from a moral right to personal liberty; utilitarian and contractualist arguments for a right to personal liberty; arguments for prohibition from liberty-limiting principles (the harm principle, legal paternalism, legal moralism, Kan...

Law, liberty, and Christian morality

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should the...

Freestanding pragmatism in law and bioethics.

This paper represents the first installment of a larger project devoted to the relevance of pragmatism for bioethics. One self-consciously pragmatist move would be to return to the classical pragmatist canon of Peirce, James and Dewey in search of substantive doctrines or methodological approaches that might be applied to current bioethical controversies. Another pragmatist (or neopragmatist) m...