Gregory Robson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4418928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gregory Robson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gregory |
| FAMILY NAME | Robson |
| SIGNATURE | ROBSON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Iowa State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3952-9887 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Mapping Justice
This essay examines the role of action-guiding theorists of justice in articulating the demands of justice. Section I discusses challenges that theorists face from epistemic and social complexity. Section II considers the idea of theorists of justice thinking of theories as maps that help them (or citizens) navigate their way out of ignorance of social facts and complexity. This part puts in one place leading accounts of moral theorizing as mapma…
The Varieties of Moral Vice
Freedom in Business
Elizabeth Anderson claims that the prevailing culture of business is one of domination. “Most workplace governments in the United States are dictatorships, in which bosses. . don’t merely govern workers; they dominate them” (2017, p. xxii; italics in the original). If this diagnosis is correct, then the culture of business poses a significant threat to human liberty, as each year millions of people in the employ of businesses spend hundreds or th…
Are social contracts possible without actual negotiation
This article addresses one of the several moral arguments for the state, the social contract argument, showing that this argument has been inadequately justified. The terms of any contract are determined by negotiation among the parties to the contract. The terms of any contract cannot be known absent actual negotiation to produce them. Social contract theorists widely believe that actual negotiation and actual agreement with a social contract di…
How to Object to the Profit System (and How Not To)
The Duty to Be Transparent When Supporting Laws in Public Discourse
Political liberals on the left (e.g., Rawls) and right (e.g., Nozick) have long been concerned with the moral justification of coercive legal structures. I argue that anyone who publicly advocates a new coercive law is under a moral duty to those whom the law might negatively affect. The duty is to say that the law would be impactful and why its impacts (e.g., its coerciveness and welfare effects) are worth having all-things-considered. This is a…
Technology Ethics
In this chapter, the author explains the post-phenomenological approach to ethics of technology. He introduces post-phenomenology itself, as a specific way to analyze technology and its role in society and discusses the various dimensions of the moral significance of technology that become visible from the post-phenomenological approach. The author explains how technologies mediate moral actions and decisions, how they help to shape value framewo…
The profit system
Magistrates, Mobs, and Moral Disagreement
I defend convergentist realism from counterarguments that appeal to apparently deep and widespread moral disagreement. Pace recent claims by antirealists, I first argue that scenarios such as the prominent “Magistrate and the Mob” case betray cognitive defects in subjects, such as partiality, that we would not find in ideal agents. After this, I defend three reasons to expect cross-cultural disagreement on moral cases even if convergentist realis…
The Dialectics of Liberty
The contributors to this anthology insightfully explore ‘the context of human freedom’ (p. 13). This exploration is ‘dialectical’ because it engages in logical analysis and synthesis of economic, political, and other principles and ideas that often just appear in tension with one another (pp. 3–4). I will describe Dialectics of Liberty and then discuss two related essays on the moral status of government coercion. The book's three parts include c…
Two Underappreciated Reasons to Value Political Tradition
The rationality of political experimentation
Theorists from John Stuart Mill to Robert Nozick have argued that citizens can gain insight into the demands of justice by experimenting with diverse forms of political life. I consider the rationality of such experimentation, arguing for three distinct but related claims. First, rational citizens will not be highly incentivized to conduct experiments in living. Here I develop an account of what I call the ‘prudential rationality constraint’ (PRC…
Two Psychological Defenses of Hobbes’s Claim Against the “Fool”
A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool mo…
The rationality of political experimentation
Theorists from John Stuart Mill to Robert Nozick have argued that citizens can gain insight into the demands of justice by experimenting with diverse forms of political life. I consider the rationality of such experimentation, arguing for three distinct but related claims. First, rational citizens will not be highly incentivized to conduct experiments in living. Here I develop an account of what I call the ‘prudential rationality constraint’ (PRC…
Two Psychological Defenses of Hobbes’s Claim Against the “Fool”
A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool mo…
Two Underappreciated Reasons to Value Political Tradition
The rationality of political experimentation
Theorists from John Stuart Mill to Robert Nozick have argued that citizens can gain insight into the demands of justice by experimenting with diverse forms of political life. I consider the rationality of such experimentation, arguing for three distinct but related claims. First, rational citizens will not be highly incentivized to conduct experiments in living. Here I develop an account of what I call the ‘prudential rationality constraint’ (PRC…
Magistrates, Mobs, and Moral Disagreement
I defend convergentist realism from counterarguments that appeal to apparently deep and widespread moral disagreement. Pace recent claims by antirealists, I first argue that scenarios such as the prominent “Magistrate and the Mob” case betray cognitive defects in subjects, such as partiality, that we would not find in ideal agents. After this, I defend three reasons to expect cross-cultural disagreement on moral cases even if convergentist realis…
The Dialectics of Liberty
The contributors to this anthology insightfully explore ‘the context of human freedom’ (p. 13). This exploration is ‘dialectical’ because it engages in logical analysis and synthesis of economic, political, and other principles and ideas that often just appear in tension with one another (pp. 3–4). I will describe Dialectics of Liberty and then discuss two related essays on the moral status of government coercion. The book's three parts include c…
How to Object to the Profit System (and How Not To)
The Duty to Be Transparent When Supporting Laws in Public Discourse
Political liberals on the left (e.g., Rawls) and right (e.g., Nozick) have long been concerned with the moral justification of coercive legal structures. I argue that anyone who publicly advocates a new coercive law is under a moral duty to those whom the law might negatively affect. The duty is to say that the law would be impactful and why its impacts (e.g., its coerciveness and welfare effects) are worth having all-things-considered. This is a…
Technology Ethics
In this chapter, the author explains the post-phenomenological approach to ethics of technology. He introduces post-phenomenology itself, as a specific way to analyze technology and its role in society and discusses the various dimensions of the moral significance of technology that become visible from the post-phenomenological approach. The author explains how technologies mediate moral actions and decisions, how they help to shape value framewo…
The profit system
The Varieties of Moral Vice
Freedom in Business
Elizabeth Anderson claims that the prevailing culture of business is one of domination. “Most workplace governments in the United States are dictatorships, in which bosses. . don’t merely govern workers; they dominate them” (2017, p. xxii; italics in the original). If this diagnosis is correct, then the culture of business poses a significant threat to human liberty, as each year millions of people in the employ of businesses spend hundreds or th…
Are social contracts possible without actual negotiation
This article addresses one of the several moral arguments for the state, the social contract argument, showing that this argument has been inadequately justified. The terms of any contract are determined by negotiation among the parties to the contract. The terms of any contract cannot be known absent actual negotiation to produce them. Social contract theorists widely believe that actual negotiation and actual agreement with a social contract di…
Mapping Justice
This essay examines the role of action-guiding theorists of justice in articulating the demands of justice. Section I discusses challenges that theorists face from epistemic and social complexity. Section II considers the idea of theorists of justice thinking of theories as maps that help them (or citizens) navigate their way out of ignorance of social facts and complexity. This part puts in one place leading accounts of moral theorizing as mapma…
Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law and economics (9 works) · Economics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (5 works)