David Schmidtz
Biographic Data
| ID | 1191959 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Schmidtz |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Schmidtz |
| SIGNATURE | SCHMIDTZ D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1598-8915 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The State
Living Together: Inventing Moral Science
Moral philosophy begins with a question of how to live. Is moral philosophy more foundational than political philosophy? In other words, is “how to live?” more fundamental than “how to live together?” Philosophers were taught to say yes, but there was never any reason to believe it. Must rigorous reflection on how to live aim to derive necessary truths from timeless axioms, ignoring ephemeral circumstances of time and place? In the 1800s, philoso…
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is arguably the twentieth century’s most influential work of political philosophy after Rawls’s Theory of Justice. It substantially responds to Rawls, despite ranging over many topics. The Experience Machine, discussed in Part I, engagingly articulates Nozick’s discomfort with utilitarianism, and with Rawls’s way of modeling separate personhood. That is, Rawls depicts bargainers as separate consumers, entitled to separa…
The Ethics and Economics of Ecological Justice
If we are to emerge from the process of growing up with an adult conception of justice, it will be a conception of our place and of our due, alongside a conception of what other people are due, within a community that has a logic of its own. That logic will be described by economics (among other social sciences) and by ecology. Realistic possibilities are implications of those logics. Adult views about ethics and about justice will be disciplined…
The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism
Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism
The Impartial Spectator and the Moral Teachings of Markets
Market skeptics have persuasively argued that the market is a social arena that is not simply amoral but that has negative moral consequences. Market apologists have offered two basic responses to this kind of charge: that the market is amoral, and that it transforms private vice into public virtue. This chapter discusses the moral teachings of the market—that is, the moral sentiments individuals are likely to acquire and develop as they engage i…
Exploitation and Freedom
Karl Marx argued that capitalist economies are necessarily exploitative. Nineteenth-century classical liberal political economists agreed that exploitation was rampant, but blamed government grants of privilege rather than capitalism. This chapter argues that while both schools of thought produced genuine insights into exploitation in markets and politics, neither developed a tenable account of what exploitation actually is. Understanding exploit…
Freedom and Equality
Freedom and equality are often viewed as conflicting values. But there are at least three conceptions of freedom-negative, positive, and republican-and three conceptions of equality-of standing, esteem, and authority. Libertarians argue that rights to negative liberty override claims to positive liberty. However, a freedom-based defense of private property rights must favor positive over negative freedom. Furthermore, a regime of full contractual…
A Realistic Political Ideal
Over the past decade, political philosophers and political theorists have had a common purpose: to reflect on the merits of realism and idealism when theorizing about the human condition and the nature of justice. We have settled that no one is against being realistic or against being idealistic per se. The contributions to this volume represent a conversation about what would make one attempt to articulate ideals better than another.
The Oxford Handbook of Freedom
Debates about freedom traditionally focus on a few central themes. The chapters of this volume update those debates and launch new ones. Whether the freedom worth pursuing is one or many, whether it conflicts with equality, whether it can be secured by the institutions of the modern state, and whether it is compatible with a deterministic understanding of the universe are some of the central questions that animate the chapters in this volume. Our…
Environmental Conflict
A philosopher might presume that principles of justice somehow are more fundamental than principles of conflict resolution. But moral philosophy done well is neither as autonomous as that, nor as naïve. Moral philosophy done well tracks truth about the human condition, which means it tracks truth about what it actually takes in the real world for people to live in peace. Accordingly, the relationship between justice and conflict resolution is an …
Credit and Blame
The right to distribute
The examples in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) are among the most arresting ever constructed by a philosopher: the experience machine, Wilt Chamberlain, the distribution of mates, the distribution of grades, and pouring tomato juice in the ocean. Provocative though his examples have proven to be, they still strike me as somewhat underappreciated. This chapter reflects mainly on the second part of Nozick's book. There is some criticism here, and…
Nonideal Theory: What It Is and What It Needs to Be
The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is recognised as a classic of modern political philosophy. Along with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), it is widely credited with breathing new life into the discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. This Companion presents a balanced and comprehensive assessment of Nozick's contribution to political philosophy. In engaging and accessible chapters, the contributors analyse No…
Respect for Everything
Species egalitarianism is the view that all living things have equal moral standing. To have moral standing is, at a minimum, to command respect, to be more than a mere thing. Is there reason to believe that all living things have moral standing in even this most minimal sense? If so—that is, if all living things command respect—is there reason to believe they all command equal respect?1 1. This essay revises David Schmidtz (1998 Schmidtz, D. 199…
Property and Justice
When we’re trying to articulate principles of justice that we have reason to take seriously in a world like ours, one way to start is with an understanding of what our world is like, and of which institutional frameworks promote our thriving in communities and which do not. If we start this way, we can sort out alleged principles of justice by asking which ones license mutual expectations that promote our thriving and which ones do otherwise. Thi…
Person, Polis, Planet: Essays in Applied Philosophy
Liberty, Desert, and the Market: A Philosophical Study
Book Review| January 01 2007 Liberty, Desert, and the Market: A Philosophical Study Serena Olsaretti, Liberty, Desert, and the Market: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. viii + 184 pp. David Schmidtz David Schmidtz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2007) 116 (1): 128–131. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2006-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Li…
The Elements of Justice
What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due. However, what that means in practice depends on the context in which the question is raised. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity. Nonetheless, the integrity of justice is limi…
Mark Sagoff 's Price, Principle, and the Environment: Two Comments
I will discuss two themes that can be found in Mark Sagoff's (2004) most recent book, Price, Principle, and the Environment. Built from pieces fashioned in his entertaining and incisive critical es
Searching for Sustainability
A Companion to Environmental Philosophy
State, Civil Society, and Classical Liberalism
The assurance problem in a laboratory market
Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental Conflict
Sometimes people act contrary to environmentalist values because they reject those values. This is one kind of conflict: conflict in values. There is another kind of conflict in which people act contrary to environmentalist values even though they embrace those values: because they cannot afford to act in accordance with them. Conflict in priorities occurs not because people’s values are in conflict, but rather because people’s immediate needs ar…
How to Deserve
It is at very least a prominent view among political philosophers that common sense is mistaken in its optimism about the possibility of our being deserving. One reason is ideological: many high-profile academic conceptions of distributive justice are incompatible with common-sense thinking about what we deserve. Another reason is that it is, after all, startlingly difficult to come up with a philosophical framework that grounds significant claim…
Market failure
The Theory of Market Failure explores how markets respond, both in theory and in practice, to public‐goods and externality problems. Most of the articles in this anthology find that markets often meet the demand for public goods in a variety of cases where existing theory would lead one to expect market failure. Moreover, upon reflection, existing theory reveals itself to be in need of supplementation by a more realistic picture of how flexible m…
The assurance problem in a laboratory market
Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem
Justifying the State
When is Original Appropriation Required?
Journal Article When is Original Appropriation Required? Get access David Schmidtz David Schmidtz Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 73, Issue 4, 1 October 1990, Pages 504–518, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist19907342 Published: 09 December 2014
Rationality within Reason
Market failure
The Theory of Market Failure explores how markets respond, both in theory and in practice, to public‐goods and externality problems. Most of the articles in this anthology find that markets often meet the demand for public goods in a variety of cases where existing theory would lead one to expect market failure. Moreover, upon reflection, existing theory reveals itself to be in need of supplementation by a more realistic picture of how flexible m…
Choosing Ends
Hillel Steiner An Essay on Rights. Oxford: Blackwell1994. Pp. X + 305.
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When Preservationism Doesn't Preserve
According to conservationism, scarce and precious resources should be conserved and used wisely. According to preservation ethics, we should not think of wilderness as merely a resource. Wilderness commands reverence in a way mere resources do not. Each philosophy, I argue, can fail by its own lights, because trying to put the principles of conservationism or preservation-ism into institutional practice can have results that are the opposite of w…
Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility
The issue of social welfare and individual responsibility has become a topic of international public debate in recent years as politicians around the world now question the legitimacy of state-funded welfare systems. David Schmidtz and Robert Goodin debate the ethical merits of individual versus collective responsibility for welfare. David Schmidtz argues that social welfare policy should prepare people for responsible adulthood rather than try t…
Social welfare and individual responsibility
"The issue of social welfare and individual responsibility has become a topic of international public debate in recent years as politicians around the world now question the legitimacy of state-funded welfare programs. David Schmidtz and Robert Goodin debate the ethical merits of individual versus collective responsibility for welfare. David Schmidtz argues that social welfare policy should prepare people for responsible adulthood rather than try…
In Nature’s Interests: Interests, Animal Rights, and Environmental Ethics
Rational Choice and Moral Agency
Diminishing Marginal Utility and Egalitarian Redistribution
An Essay on the Modern State
Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental Conflict
Sometimes people act contrary to environmentalist values because they reject those values. This is one kind of conflict: conflict in values. There is another kind of conflict in which people act contrary to environmentalist values even though they embrace those values: because they cannot afford to act in accordance with them. Conflict in priorities occurs not because people’s values are in conflict, but rather because people’s immediate needs ar…
State, Civil Society, and Classical Liberalism
How to Deserve
It is at very least a prominent view among political philosophers that common sense is mistaken in its optimism about the possibility of our being deserving. One reason is ideological: many high-profile academic conceptions of distributive justice are incompatible with common-sense thinking about what we deserve. Another reason is that it is, after all, startlingly difficult to come up with a philosophical framework that grounds significant claim…
A Companion to Environmental Philosophy
Searching for Sustainability
The Elements of Justice
What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due. However, what that means in practice depends on the context in which the question is raised. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity. Nonetheless, the integrity of justice is limi…
Mark Sagoff 's Price, Principle, and the Environment: Two Comments
I will discuss two themes that can be found in Mark Sagoff's (2004) most recent book, Price, Principle, and the Environment. Built from pieces fashioned in his entertaining and incisive critical es
Liberty, Desert, and the Market: A Philosophical Study
Book Review| January 01 2007 Liberty, Desert, and the Market: A Philosophical Study Serena Olsaretti, Liberty, Desert, and the Market: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. viii + 184 pp. David Schmidtz David Schmidtz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2007) 116 (1): 128–131. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2006-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Li…
Person, Polis, Planet: Essays in Applied Philosophy
Property and Justice
When we’re trying to articulate principles of justice that we have reason to take seriously in a world like ours, one way to start is with an understanding of what our world is like, and of which institutional frameworks promote our thriving in communities and which do not. If we start this way, we can sort out alleged principles of justice by asking which ones license mutual expectations that promote our thriving and which ones do otherwise. Thi…
Philosophy (28 works) · Epistemology (26 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law and economics (15 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (15 works) · Politics (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Economics (11 works)