Robert S Taylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 1162770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert S Taylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert S |
| FAMILY NAME | Taylor |
| SIGNATURE | TAYLOR R S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3328-6397 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 82 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Trauma drama: The trouble with competitive victimhood
Writing a college-application essay has become a rite of passage for high-school seniors in the United States, one whose importance has expanded over time due to an increasingly competitive admissions process. Various commentators have noted the disturbing evolution of these essays over the years, with an ever-greater emphasis placed on obstacles overcome and traumas survived. How have we gotten to the point where college-application essays are a…
Reading Rawls Rightly: A Theory of Justiceat 50
Donation without Domination: Private Charity and Republican Liberty
Contemporary republicans have adopted a less-than-charitable attitude toward private beneficence, especially when it is directed to the poor, worrying that rich patrons may be in a position to exercise arbitrary power over their impoverished clients. These concerns have led them to support impartial public provision by way of state welfare programs, including an unconditional basic income (UBI). In contrast to this administrative model of public …
Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought
How can citizens best protect themselves from the arbitrary power of abusive spouses, tyrannical bosses, and corrupt politicians? 'Exit Left' makes the case that in each of these three spheres the answer is the same: exit. By promoting open and competitive markets and providing the information and financial resources necessary to enable exit, the book argues that this can empower people's voices and offer them an escape from abuse and exploitatio…
Religious Conservatives and Safe Sex: Reconciliation by Nonpublic Reason
Religious conservatives in the United States have frequently opposed public health measures designed to combat sexually transmitted diseases among minors, such as sex education, condom distribution, and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. Using Rawls’s method of conjecture, I will clear up what I take to be a misunderstanding on the part of religious conservatives: even if we grant their premises regarding the nature and source of sexual norm…
Illiberal Socialism
Is “liberal socialism” an oxymoron? Not quite, but I will demonstrate here that it is a much more unstable and uncommon hybrid than scholars had previously thought and that almost all liberals should reject socialism, even in its most attractive form. More specifically, I will show that three leading varieties of liberalism—neutralist, plural-perfectionist, and deliberative-democratic—are incompatible with even a moderate form of socialism, viz.,…
Market Freedom as Antipower
Historically, republicans were of different minds about markets: some, such as Rousseau, reviled them, while others, like Adam Smith, praised them. The recent republican resurgence has revived this issue. Classical liberals such as Gerald Gaus contend that neorepublicanism is inherently hostile to markets, while neorepublicans like Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit reject this characterization-though with less enthusiasm than one might expect. I a…
The Self-Extinguishing Despot: Millian Democratization
Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J. S. Mill, he sometimes endorses nondemocratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from nondemocratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive and parallel material, cultural, institutional, and cha…
Kant's Political Religion: The Transparency of Perpetual Peace and the Highest Good
Scholars have long debated the relationship between Kant's doctrine of right and his doctrine of virtue (including his moral religion or ethico-theology), which are the two branches of his moral philosophy. This article will examine the intimate connection in his practical philosophy between perpetual peace and the highest good, between political and ethico-religious communities, and between the types of transparency peculiar to each. It will sho…
Rawlsian Affirmative Action
Children as Projects and Persons: A Liberal Antinomy
Suppose I said that I had a project, one that required a major investment of time, money, and energy (e.g., climbing Mt. Everest), and that this entitled me to a bigger than usual share of social resources, whether in the form of money (travel grants) or leisure (paid leave from work). Fur ther suppose that I was deeply committed to this project, both intellectu ally and emotionally, and found it difficult to imagine life without it; the project …
Democratic Transitions and the Progress of Absolutism in Kant's Political Thought
Against several recent interpretations, I argue in this paper that Immanuel Kant's support for enlightened absolutism was a permanent feature of his political thought that fit comfortably within his larger philosophy, though he saw such rule as part of a transition to democratic self-government initiated by the absolute monarch himself. I support these contentions with (1) a detailed exegesis of Kant's essay “What is Enlightenment?” (2) an argume…
Kantian Personal Autonomy
Jeremy Waldron has recently raised the question of whether there is anything approximating the creative self-authorship of personal autonomy in the writings of Immanuel Kant. After considering the possibility that Kantian prudential reasoning might serve as a conception of personal autonomy, I argue that the elements of a more suitable conception can be found in Kant’s Tugendlehre, or “Doctrine of Virtue”—specifically, in the imperfect duties of …
Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism
In the longstanding debate between liberals and libertarians1 over the morality of redistribute labor taxation, liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have consistently taken the position that such taxation is perfectly compatible with individual liberty,2 whereas libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have adopted the (very) contrary position that such taxation is tantamount to slavery.3 I will demonstrate over the course…
Self-Realization and the Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity
The lexical priority of fair equality of opportunity in John Rawls’s justice as fairness, which has been sharply criticized by Larry Alexander and Richard Arneson among others, is left almost entirely undefended in Rawls’s works. I argue here that this priority rule can be successfully defended against its critics despite Rawls’s own doubts about it. Using the few textual clues he provides, I speculatively reconstruct his defense of this rule, sh…
A Kantian Defense of Self‐Ownership
Many scholars, including G. A. Cohen, Daniel Attas, and George Brenkert, have denied that a Kantian defense of self-ownership is possible. Kant's ostensible hostility to self-ownership can be resolved, however, upon reexamination of the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals. Moreover, two novel Kantian defenses of self-ownership (narrowly construed) can be devised. The first shows that maxims of exploitation and paternalism that violate self-o…
Rawls's Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction
Unionization and Union Leadership: The Road Haulage Industry
Eu Technology Transfer to China: The automotive industry as a case study
Since the inception of the open-door economic reform under Deng Xiaoping's initiative in 1978, the Chinese economy has in the past twenty years grown at an average annual rate of 9.4 per cent. China's path mirrors in many respects the experiences of Japan and South Korea in their rapid growth periods. A fundamental difference, however, is the fact that the rapid growth in China has been accompanied by increasing inflows of foreign direct investme…
Asian economies in transition: Reforming Centrally Planned Economies
1997). Asian economies in transition: reforming centrally planned economies. Asian Affairs: Vol. 28, Review article, pp. 57-181
Problem dimensions and information traits
Information systems design can progress toward meeting the needs of the population of decision‐makers, managers, policy‐makers, and interdisciplinary workers by attention to specifications obtained from the user's situation. The user situation is represented by problems and their component dimensions, of which subject is only one dimension. The other problem dimensions, which relate to information traits, are discussed for the purpose of proposin…
The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Seventies
Market Freedom as Antipower
Historically, republicans were of different minds about markets: some, such as Rousseau, reviled them, while others, like Adam Smith, praised them. The recent republican resurgence has revived this issue. Classical liberals such as Gerald Gaus contend that neorepublicanism is inherently hostile to markets, while neorepublicans like Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit reject this characterization-though with less enthusiasm than one might expect. I a…
Rawls's Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction
Illiberal Socialism
Is “liberal socialism” an oxymoron? Not quite, but I will demonstrate here that it is a much more unstable and uncommon hybrid than scholars had previously thought and that almost all liberals should reject socialism, even in its most attractive form. More specifically, I will show that three leading varieties of liberalism—neutralist, plural-perfectionist, and deliberative-democratic—are incompatible with even a moderate form of socialism, viz.,…
Kant's Political Religion: The Transparency of Perpetual Peace and the Highest Good
Scholars have long debated the relationship between Kant's doctrine of right and his doctrine of virtue (including his moral religion or ethico-theology), which are the two branches of his moral philosophy. This article will examine the intimate connection in his practical philosophy between perpetual peace and the highest good, between political and ethico-religious communities, and between the types of transparency peculiar to each. It will sho…
Kantian Personal Autonomy
Jeremy Waldron has recently raised the question of whether there is anything approximating the creative self-authorship of personal autonomy in the writings of Immanuel Kant. After considering the possibility that Kantian prudential reasoning might serve as a conception of personal autonomy, I argue that the elements of a more suitable conception can be found in Kant’s Tugendlehre, or “Doctrine of Virtue”—specifically, in the imperfect duties of …
Donation without Domination: Private Charity and Republican Liberty
Contemporary republicans have adopted a less-than-charitable attitude toward private beneficence, especially when it is directed to the poor, worrying that rich patrons may be in a position to exercise arbitrary power over their impoverished clients. These concerns have led them to support impartial public provision by way of state welfare programs, including an unconditional basic income (UBI). In contrast to this administrative model of public …
The Self-Extinguishing Despot: Millian Democratization
Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J. S. Mill, he sometimes endorses nondemocratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from nondemocratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive and parallel material, cultural, institutional, and cha…
Democratic Transitions and the Progress of Absolutism in Kant's Political Thought
Against several recent interpretations, I argue in this paper that Immanuel Kant's support for enlightened absolutism was a permanent feature of his political thought that fit comfortably within his larger philosophy, though he saw such rule as part of a transition to democratic self-government initiated by the absolute monarch himself. I support these contentions with (1) a detailed exegesis of Kant's essay “What is Enlightenment?” (2) an argume…
A Kantian Defense of Self‐Ownership
Many scholars, including G. A. Cohen, Daniel Attas, and George Brenkert, have denied that a Kantian defense of self-ownership is possible. Kant's ostensible hostility to self-ownership can be resolved, however, upon reexamination of the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals. Moreover, two novel Kantian defenses of self-ownership (narrowly construed) can be devised. The first shows that maxims of exploitation and paternalism that violate self-o…
Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism
In the longstanding debate between liberals and libertarians1 over the morality of redistribute labor taxation, liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have consistently taken the position that such taxation is perfectly compatible with individual liberty,2 whereas libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have adopted the (very) contrary position that such taxation is tantamount to slavery.3 I will demonstrate over the course…
Asian economies in transition: Reforming Centrally Planned Economies
1997). Asian economies in transition: reforming centrally planned economies. Asian Affairs: Vol. 28, Review article, pp. 57-181
The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Seventies
Problem dimensions and information traits
Information systems design can progress toward meeting the needs of the population of decision‐makers, managers, policy‐makers, and interdisciplinary workers by attention to specifications obtained from the user's situation. The user situation is represented by problems and their component dimensions, of which subject is only one dimension. The other problem dimensions, which relate to information traits, are discussed for the purpose of proposin…
Asian economies in transition: Reforming Centrally Planned Economies
1997). Asian economies in transition: reforming centrally planned economies. Asian Affairs: Vol. 28, Review article, pp. 57-181
Eu Technology Transfer to China: The automotive industry as a case study
Since the inception of the open-door economic reform under Deng Xiaoping's initiative in 1978, the Chinese economy has in the past twenty years grown at an average annual rate of 9.4 per cent. China's path mirrors in many respects the experiences of Japan and South Korea in their rapid growth periods. A fundamental difference, however, is the fact that the rapid growth in China has been accompanied by increasing inflows of foreign direct investme…
Rawls's Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction
Unionization and Union Leadership: The Road Haulage Industry
Self-Realization and the Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity
The lexical priority of fair equality of opportunity in John Rawls’s justice as fairness, which has been sharply criticized by Larry Alexander and Richard Arneson among others, is left almost entirely undefended in Rawls’s works. I argue here that this priority rule can be successfully defended against its critics despite Rawls’s own doubts about it. Using the few textual clues he provides, I speculatively reconstruct his defense of this rule, sh…
A Kantian Defense of Self‐Ownership
Many scholars, including G. A. Cohen, Daniel Attas, and George Brenkert, have denied that a Kantian defense of self-ownership is possible. Kant's ostensible hostility to self-ownership can be resolved, however, upon reexamination of the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals. Moreover, two novel Kantian defenses of self-ownership (narrowly construed) can be devised. The first shows that maxims of exploitation and paternalism that violate self-o…
Kantian Personal Autonomy
Jeremy Waldron has recently raised the question of whether there is anything approximating the creative self-authorship of personal autonomy in the writings of Immanuel Kant. After considering the possibility that Kantian prudential reasoning might serve as a conception of personal autonomy, I argue that the elements of a more suitable conception can be found in Kant’s Tugendlehre, or “Doctrine of Virtue”—specifically, in the imperfect duties of …
Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism
In the longstanding debate between liberals and libertarians1 over the morality of redistribute labor taxation, liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have consistently taken the position that such taxation is perfectly compatible with individual liberty,2 whereas libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have adopted the (very) contrary position that such taxation is tantamount to slavery.3 I will demonstrate over the course…
Democratic Transitions and the Progress of Absolutism in Kant's Political Thought
Against several recent interpretations, I argue in this paper that Immanuel Kant's support for enlightened absolutism was a permanent feature of his political thought that fit comfortably within his larger philosophy, though he saw such rule as part of a transition to democratic self-government initiated by the absolute monarch himself. I support these contentions with (1) a detailed exegesis of Kant's essay “What is Enlightenment?” (2) an argume…
Rawlsian Affirmative Action
Children as Projects and Persons: A Liberal Antinomy
Suppose I said that I had a project, one that required a major investment of time, money, and energy (e.g., climbing Mt. Everest), and that this entitled me to a bigger than usual share of social resources, whether in the form of money (travel grants) or leisure (paid leave from work). Fur ther suppose that I was deeply committed to this project, both intellectu ally and emotionally, and found it difficult to imagine life without it; the project …
Kant's Political Religion: The Transparency of Perpetual Peace and the Highest Good
Scholars have long debated the relationship between Kant's doctrine of right and his doctrine of virtue (including his moral religion or ethico-theology), which are the two branches of his moral philosophy. This article will examine the intimate connection in his practical philosophy between perpetual peace and the highest good, between political and ethico-religious communities, and between the types of transparency peculiar to each. It will sho…
The Self-Extinguishing Despot: Millian Democratization
Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J. S. Mill, he sometimes endorses nondemocratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from nondemocratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive and parallel material, cultural, institutional, and cha…
Market Freedom as Antipower
Historically, republicans were of different minds about markets: some, such as Rousseau, reviled them, while others, like Adam Smith, praised them. The recent republican resurgence has revived this issue. Classical liberals such as Gerald Gaus contend that neorepublicanism is inherently hostile to markets, while neorepublicans like Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit reject this characterization-though with less enthusiasm than one might expect. I a…
Religious Conservatives and Safe Sex: Reconciliation by Nonpublic Reason
Religious conservatives in the United States have frequently opposed public health measures designed to combat sexually transmitted diseases among minors, such as sex education, condom distribution, and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. Using Rawls’s method of conjecture, I will clear up what I take to be a misunderstanding on the part of religious conservatives: even if we grant their premises regarding the nature and source of sexual norm…
Illiberal Socialism
Is “liberal socialism” an oxymoron? Not quite, but I will demonstrate here that it is a much more unstable and uncommon hybrid than scholars had previously thought and that almost all liberals should reject socialism, even in its most attractive form. More specifically, I will show that three leading varieties of liberalism—neutralist, plural-perfectionist, and deliberative-democratic—are incompatible with even a moderate form of socialism, viz.,…
Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought
How can citizens best protect themselves from the arbitrary power of abusive spouses, tyrannical bosses, and corrupt politicians? 'Exit Left' makes the case that in each of these three spheres the answer is the same: exit. By promoting open and competitive markets and providing the information and financial resources necessary to enable exit, the book argues that this can empower people's voices and offer them an escape from abuse and exploitatio…
Donation without Domination: Private Charity and Republican Liberty
Contemporary republicans have adopted a less-than-charitable attitude toward private beneficence, especially when it is directed to the poor, worrying that rich patrons may be in a position to exercise arbitrary power over their impoverished clients. These concerns have led them to support impartial public provision by way of state welfare programs, including an unconditional basic income (UBI). In contrast to this administrative model of public …
Reading Rawls Rightly: A Theory of Justiceat 50
Trauma drama: The trouble with competitive victimhood
Writing a college-application essay has become a rite of passage for high-school seniors in the United States, one whose importance has expanded over time due to an increasingly competitive admissions process. Various commentators have noted the disturbing evolution of these essays over the years, with an ever-greater emphasis placed on obstacles overcome and traumas survived. How have we gotten to the point where college-application essays are a…
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (5 works) · Economic Justice (5 works)