srapp
SRAPP - the Suisse-Romande Association for Practical Philosophy
Aims
SRAPP aims to:
- Facilitate and encourage research on practical philosophy in Suisse-Romande; and
- Establish and maintain a network of practical philosophers in Suisse-Romande.
Practical Philosophy
'Practical philosophy' is understood broadly to include moral, political, and legal philosophy. It also includes those who identify it primarily as a method, i.e., as normative or applied philosophy, or as an attitude to philosophical inquiry (e.g., willingness to be informed by empirical research). For the purposes of the Association, 'practical philosophy' includes these understandings, but is not limited to any one of them. The Association is designed to be an inclusive space where the very possibilities and parameters of 'practical philosophy' are kept open.
Membership
The Association welcomes members from any parts of Switzerland and beyond who wish to participate in the Association's activities. Membership is not limited to professional philosophers or even academics. On the contrary, the Association encourages a wide spectrum of persons with broad interests in practical and public affairs to come together to discuss and debate issues, prospects, and methods. Membership is free.
Launch and Mailing List
The Association will be launched at the Inaugural Conference on 25 and 26 September 2009. Please see more below for details, including a PROVISIONAL PROGRAM.
To join the mailing list please email Maksymilian Del Mar. All comments about the Association's scope, aims, activities are welcome and will be gratefully received.
Inaugural Conference: 25-26 September 2009
The Inaugural Conference will be held at the University of Bern, on 25-26 September 2009. The theme is 'Conversations on Method in Practical Philosophy.' The keynote speakers are Professor Andrew Halpin, University of Swansea (Wales, UK), and Professor Michael Giudice, York University (Canada).
The format of the workshops on Friday will include a short introduction by the moderator, and thereafter proceed straight into discussion. Participants will have been expected to have read the papers assigned. The papers are available on request from Maksymilian Del Mar.
The Conference is being co-hosted by Sequitur.
DRAFT PROGRAMME
NB. The venue for the Friday keynote addresses and the Saturday talks is Auditorium 501 (Kuppelraum 501), Universität Bern, Hochschulstrasse 4); the venue for the workshops on Friday is Seminar Rooms 204 and 217, Universität Bern, Hochschulstrasse 4. The Auditorium is in the main university building just above the central train station in Bern.
Friday 25th September
10.00 - 11.15 Keynote Address by Prof. Andrew Halpin, 'How Can Theory Communicate More About Practice? Some General Suggestions From Reflecting on Law'
11.30 - 13.00 Workshop with Prof. Andrew Halpin
ADVANCED READINGS (available on request): A, Halpin, 'Methodology and the Articulation of Insight: Some Lessons from MacCormick's Institutions of Law', in Del Mar, M and Bankowski, Z (eds), Law as Institutional Normative Order, Ashgate 2009, 145-160; and F, Schauer, 'Retaking Hart', (2005-6) 119 Harvard Law Review 852
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.15 Keynote Address by Prof. Michael Giudice, 'From Necessity to Contingency and Back: Observations on Recent Methodology Debates in Analytical Jurisprudence'
15.30 - 17.00 Workshop with Prof. Michael Giudice
ADVANCED READINGS (available on request): D, Priel, 'Jurisprudence and Necessity', 2007 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence; and J, Raz, 'Can There Be a Theory of Law?', in Between Authority and Interpretation (OUP, 2009)
19.00 - Conference Dinner
Saturday 26th September
10.00 - 11.30 Emma Tieffenbach, Geneva, 'When the Bell Rings: On Pettit’s Defense of Self Interest'
11.30 - 13.00 David Furrer, Geneva, 'Yes, We Can. Pros and Cons of the Over-demandingness Argument'
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.30 Triantafyllos
Gouvas, Athens, 'Resisting the Buck-Passing Account of Legal Normativity'
15.30 - 17.00 Katerina Hadjimatheou, Essex, 'Unhelpful Idealisation in Applied Ethics: The Case of Ethnic Profiling in Counter-Terrorism'
17.00 - Drinks
ABSTRACTS of Saturday's Presentations
Emma Tieffenbach, 'When the Bell Rings: On Pettit’s Defense of Self Interest'
Abstract: Economic models are either built for the epistemological purpose of explain features of the reality and/or for the practical purpose of issuing recommendations about the sort of political arrangements to be implemented. Given these purposes, economic models often assume self interest on the part of agents. From the explanatory point of view, the self interest assumption endows economic models with parsimony, endowing them with the capacity explain a lot by little (Coleman, 1990). On the practical point of view, the assumption shows how some collective good could very well be attained on the basis of each one pursuing her own advantage. The claim offers the prospect of not having to rely on some corruptible legislators or on some too unreliable other-regarding dispositions on the part of agents for obtaining the collective good (Mandeville, 1723, Smith, 1776). Yet self interest is not a realistic feature of human beings. It is in any case at odd with what empirical evidences reveal about the way agents behave even in economic contexts. As results from numerous these laboratory experiments show, agents depart from the self interest assumptions in many ways. They, for instance, act in light of other-regarding considerations (Fehr et al., 2002), in light of self-less emotions such as revenge and anger (Holmes, 1990) and the cultural framing of the situation in which they are embedded play an essential role in the way they deliberate (Henrich et al., 2005). As being based on a false statement about the sort of considerations in light of which real agents actually behave, many question the ability of economic models to serve the explanatory and practical functions for which they are built (cf. Sen, 1979, Rosenberg, 1995, Blaug, 2002). Yet Pettit (1990, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2007, 2008) argue that the self interest has nonetheless a legitimate place within economic models. His way of rescuing the self-interest assumption is to say that it plays a virtual role in the way agents deliberate. The idea is that whenever the agents begins to cease seeing that their behavior as fulfilling their other-regarding motivations, «the alarm bells ring and prompt them to consider personal advantage» (2007). Moreover, as a stand-by cause of the institution that is designed, the self-interest assumption will cast light on its resilience (2008). On a practical level, the self-interest assumption is legitimated on the ground that we should design the institutions for the worse-case scenario in which agents are when they deliberate in a self-regarding mentality. This way, the designed institution will have the incentive-compatibility dimension that all desirable political arrangement should have. We find this way of rescuing the self interest assumption to be faulty on three grounds. First, we can see that Pettit's defense of the self-interest assumption comes at the cost of considerably limiting the explanatory force of economic models to the resilience of institution, leaving their emergence and maintenance unaccounted for. Second, to allow self interest to play a virtual role in the way agents deliberate does not ensure that the designed institution will be resilient. This is because we cannot legitimately predict that self-interested considerations, once on stage, will motivate agents to continue to act the way they are used to. Third, Pettit's defense of the self-interest assumption suffers from circularity. If there is a level of threat to self-interest which agents are unwilling to endure, the question is: how is this level to be determined? To phrase it in Pettit's words: “when does the bell ring?” Pettit’s answers is to say that the bell rings when the agents subjectively feel that their self-interest is threatened. But this answer is unsatisfactory because it circularly amounts to saying that agents will reconsider their behavior when they hear the bells ring and that they hear the latter when they feel that their self-interests are threatened to the point that they should not reconsider their behavior. On this account, the ringing bell inadequately plays two incompatible roles. It both (i) reveals agents’ switching preferences and (ii) gives them reason to reconsider the situation in light of new preferences.
David Furrer, 'Yes, We Can. Pros and Cons of the Over-demandingness Argument'
Abstract: Armchair practical philosophy is over. That is at least what an increasing number of scholars tend to think. In the fields of moral, political, and legal philosophy, the question is no more “Should normative research be informed by empirical research?”, but “How should normative research be informed by empirical research?”; the fact that it has to do so is by now largely acknowledged. There is, in the debate on the relations between normative and empirical endeavours, an argument that bears cross-disciplinary implications within practical philosophy: the Over-demandingness Argument (OA). This argument says roughly that practical prescriptions must not require of an individual or a group something that is not possible for them to achieve, because at best it will be useless and most of the time counter-productive. Obviously, a practical theory that entails useless prescriptions would thus fail to meet a minimal criterion of what a good theory is supposed to be. No need to say that if a practical theory entails prescriptions that have a counterproductive effect on reaching its desired outcomes (whatever these are), it would all the more indicate its inadequacy. The over-demandingness argument, as formulated above, has to major components. There is, on the one hand, what is demanded and, on the other hand, what is possible. Long time controversy has been going on about the relation of deontic to alethic modal logic, essentially over the “ought implies can” principle. This principle is intuitively evident: it does seem that there can be no duty to do something where there is no possibility to do that same thing. If one accepts that if they ought, then they can, one must also accept its logical corollary: that if they can’t, then it’s not the case that they ought. It is precisely from this principle that the OA takes its force. But what kinds of possibilities are relevant to problem discussed? This paper will insist particularly on the fact that psychological and sociological possibilities are time and place dependant, whereas mathematical and logical (and nomological?) possibilities are not. This particular feature of psychological and sociological possibilities explains very well why many political theories that commend what they take to be ideal forms of social organisation – such as absolute egalitarianism, perfect libertarianism, well ordered anarchism, etc. – do make sense and do have defenders despite being very unlikely outcomes of collective action as we know it. With these tools in hand, we will argue that it is an essential feature of normative endeavour to be directed at redesigning the boundaries of what is possible. Practical philosophy – as a prescriptive discipline and by contributing to change the psychological and institutional setting from an individual or a society at a particular place and time – has an influence on future possibilities. Rejecting a theory because what it prescribes is – for the time being – too idealistic, can prevent the very possibility of it becoming a realistic option. On the other hand, it is clear that some things simply are not possible. The conclusion will thus be that there should be no restriction on demandingness for practical philosophies, provided that they show good awareness of present possibilities and their evolution over time. Kant’s plan for Perpetual Peace gives a good example of this kind of step-by-step programme that allows a very idealistic goal to become realistic.
Triantafyllos Gouvas, 'Resisting the Buck-Passing Account of Legal Normativity'
Abstract: In this paper, I shall claim that the majority of theoretical accounts of legal normativity share the same fallacious reductionist ambition. Irrespective of their further jurisprudential allegiances the major competing theories of legal normativity are committed to the common assumption that the only way to explicate the normativity of law is to cash it out into the question of how law can make a practical difference, that is, of how law can provide reasons for action that trump or silence the underlying moral or prudential reasons of agents. Instead of following that route, I suggest that we take a statement about what counts as law in a certain legal order as entailing a wide-scope (WS) normative commitment. On this view it is not the case that by acknowledging the legal validity of a prescriptive proposition in virtue of its satisfying the criteria set out by a particular constitutive convention, one has a self-standing normative reason to treat this prescription as binding. Rather, it is the case that one ought (by acknowledging the legal validity of a prescriptive proposition in virtue of its satisfying the criteria set out by a particular constitutive convention, to treat this prescription as binding). The latter proposition involves an ‘ought’ with scope over the entire conditional within the brackets rather than merely over the consequent. Given that WS requirements generate disjunctive obligations, my way of utilizing the WS formula for our present purpose is premised on the assumption that law should be viewed as a practice made up of constitutive rules of a special kind. Differently put, I shall argue that what is crucial for the elucidation of the WS normativity of law is to understand legal rules as compact propositions performing both a constitutive and a regulative function. Instead of understanding law as system of secondary or constitutive and primary or regulative rules, I suggest that we perceive of legal rules as elliptical conditional propositions that embed as a consequent obligations and permissions to perform certain actions. Their implied antecedent consists of the factual criteria that allow the ascription of the term “legally valid” to the deontic consequent that constitutes the “visible” content of every legal rule. Therefore, in the case of legal rules the notion of constitutivity does not consist in providing a stipulative definition of a norm as merely existing in a legal system but rather aims at constituting the import, that is, the normative consequence, of the ascription of the term “legally valid”. The latter term is not simply a vacuous one affixed to a norm, but its ascription introduces further consequences. In that way it is not the concept of legal validity but the very prescriptive content of each and every legal rule that becomes definitive of the legal practice. Legal rules do not simply describe how those subject to a legal order in fact behave. Taking legal rules to be definitive of the legal practice they belong to makes it intelligible to assert that what assigns a WS function to legal normativity is that a legal rule cannot provide normative guidance if we assume an external point of view and deliberate about the moral or prudential merits of conforming to the rule. Grasping the intuitive appeal of this idea invites us to think of someone who simultaneously affirms that following a legal rule is the only way to do an action specified by the legal practice, yet raises the question of whether she has a moral or prudential reason to act on that rule. That person would rather seem to miscomprehend the situation because the very act of drawing the normative force of a rule from a practical conclusion about what is the right or optimal thing to do makes it unintelligible to appeal to that rule as legal. Given that a rule is legal in virtue of its being constitutive of a legal practice, the question of whether one ought to apply it is settled insofar as we grant to it legal status; hence, taking the further step of thinking about its normative import based on whether its content is morally or prudentially qualifiable leads to an unintuitive trivialization of the constitutive, that is, the definitive, function of legal rules within a certain legal system. As a result, I suggest we read the WS account of legal normativity as entailing the following disjunctive prescription: one ought either to treat a rule as binding irrespective of its content insofar as that rule is recognized as legal, that is, as constitutive of a legal practice, or to view the rule as merely regulative and reflect upon whether its content provides a moral or prudential reason for action. The only combination of attitudes that is rationally excluded by this WS requirement is to deliberate about the moral merits of following a particular rule qua legal while insisting on treating it as constitutive of the legal practice. In that way, I hope to be able to show that the normative status of law cannot be cashed out in terms of self-standing (or narrow-scope) normative reasons to follow its rules. Just like the constitutive rules of chess cannot settle for anyone the question of whether they have reason to play chess or not, a legal rule cannot settle for the judge, or anyone else for that matter, whether they should play by the rules of law, or not. The irreducibility of legal normativity to moral normativity does not exclude the rational possibility of holding law to be answerable to morality. The latter possibility is totally intelligible provided that one chooses to reflect upon the merits of a rule as viewed from without the practice it is definitive of.
Katerina Hadjimatheou, 'Unhelpful Idealisation in Applied Ethics: The Case of Ethnic Profiling in Counter-Terrorism'
Abstract: Ethnic profiling in counter-terrorism- that is, police actions that rely on ethnic generalisations as evidence of terrorist criminality- has gained increasing political support in recent years. At the same time, its compatibility with democratic commitments to equality has become the subject of intense philosophical debate. The aim of this paper is not to take sides in this debate, but to expose a tendency amongst some proponents of profiling to idealise the practice of profiling in ways that, it is argued, miss or conceal some of its most troubling moral implications. This idealisation occurs, it is argued, when the ethics of ethnic profiling is analysed in abstraction from the social circumstances in which profiling is applied. Such abstraction may take the form of counterfactual reasoning: 'Ethnic profiling would not conflict with moral commitments to equality if it were applied in a society not already pervaded by ethnic prejudice and inequality; therefore it is compatible with commitments to equality when applied in this society'. Or it may take the form of more a stylised moral heuristic device: 'Ethnic profiling would be consented to by hypothetical individuals situated in an original position of perfect equality; therefore it is fair under real conditions of inequality'. Proponents of ethnic profiling Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser adopt the former in their article 'Racial Profiling', while Paul Bou-Habib employs the latter in his 'Security, Profiling, and Equality'. This paper argues that moral analysis that utilises abstractions such as these may inadvertently rationalise unjust practices. For it may obscure two morally significant features of profiling as it is applied in reality: firstly, that ethnic profiling is used only in the pursuit of crimes committed by ethnic groups that already suffer significant social disadvantage, and may therefore reflect pre-existing prejudices towards those groups; secondly, is that ethnic profiling applies a lower, group-based standard of suspicion to the pursuit of crimes committed by some ethnic groups but not to those committed by others, and therefore treats the former with less concern and respect than the latter. The paper concludes by arguing that any attempt to assess the compatibility of ethnic profiling, or indeed any similar public policy, with moral commitments to equality should include specific reference to, rather than abstraction from, existing social conditions.
BIOGRAPHIES of Saturday's Speakers
Emma Tieffenbach is a PhD student in the department of philosophy at the University of Geneva.
David Furrer is a postgraduate student in political theory and undergraduate student in philosophy at the University of Geneva. His interests range from meta- to applied ethics, and include more specifically animal ethics, utilitarianism, and most recently human enhancement ethics
Triantafyllos
Gouvas is a teaching assistant at the Department of History and Theory of Law, Faculty of Law, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He is currently in the process of applying to philosophy and legal Ph.D. programs in Europe and the US for the 2010 fall semester.
Conversations on Method: A Brief Overview of the Theme
In recent decades, moral, legal and political philosophers have been confronted with a myriad of methodological issues. One of the most pressing issues, for all these areas, is how to conceive of the relationship between empirical and normative research. Recent decades have seen a revival of this issue in legal theory, with gaps between burgeoning programs in socio-legal studies and empirical legal research and mainstream legal theory becoming ever greater. An essentially similar problem has arisen in political and moral philosophy: in the case of the first, the discussion has been framed in terms of the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory; in the case of the second, the relevance of moral psychological insights, as well as more recent insights from neuroscience, has issued challenges to moral philosophers.
Unfortunately, though many of the methodological challenges are arguably similar in all three disciplines, there has been very little, if any, cross-disciplinary exploration of them. This Conference aims to fill that gap.
The description below offers a brief and incomplete guide through some of the literature. (Thanks to Raffaele Rodogno for assistance with the moral philosophy summary.)
State of the Art
The last decade has witnessed a particularly intensive debate amongst legal philosophers on methodological issues. For a while, the debate was anchored in a discussion of the viability and exact parameters of what H.L.A. Hart, in The Concept of Law (1961), called ‘the internal point of view’ (the necessity for a philosopher of law to grasp the attitudes of citizens and officials to laws from their perspective). Hart’s own characterization of his work as an exercise in ‘descriptive sociology’ (made on the basis of the adoption of the internal point of view, originally garnered from Max Weber, popularized at the time in Oxford by Peter Winch) was attacked both by ‘pure’ philosophers and ‘pure’ sociologists. For the philosophers, it was a mischaracterization of an essentially (and, for them, appropriate and adequate) ordinary language approach to legal philosophy; for the sociologists, it was simply too naïve sociologically (partly because Hart himself did not engage in any empirical work). Although the debate between a philosophical (again, predominantly, linguistic) and a sociological analysis of law continues (see the helpful summary in Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, 1996), and was recently revived (at least around those influenced by Hart) by Nicola Lacey’s intellectual biography (2004) and her recent article (2006), the terms of the methodological debate have shifted somewhat to the proper scope, within legal philosophy, of the turn to naturalism.
The most important contributor and proponent of the naturalist turn in legal philosophy has been Brian Leiter. At stake in Leiter’s re-interpretation of the legal realists is an issue similar to that which animated the quarrels between sociologists of law and philosophers of law, namely, the proper scope and place of empirical work in a philosophy of law. However, the focus of the naturalism debate is not on the applicability of general positivist claims (such as the claim that all legal systems, properly so-called, must involve the union of primary and secondary rules) to certain normative regimes at other times and at other places – a debate concerning not only sociologists (see, for example, Tamanaha, 1997), but also international lawyers (for international law was, according to Hart, not really law, given the general definition requiring the union of primary and secondary rules). The focus of the new debate is firmly on the scope of empirical insights in a theory of adjudication. To what extent ought theorists of adjudication be informed by empirical accounts of judicial behaviour? Ought we to adopt, as Ronald Dworkin has urged (not only in Law’s Empire, but also in a major article focusing on method in 2004), the image of an ideal judge, ‘Hercules’ (the term is Dworkin’s), acknowledging that we can never adopt an Archimedean point of view (as might be suggested by an empirically-motivated theory), and thus engaging, explicitly and transparently, in normative legal theory (on Dworkin’s article see also Andrew Halpin’s 2006 paper)? Or, ought we, as Leiter has argued, base our normative prescriptions on carefully tested hypotheses about how judges actually do decide cases?
There are some recent contributions that attempt to go beyond the normative-descriptive divide (where the two options are seen as mutually exclusive). For example, a recent article by Michael Robertson (2007) argues that legal actors (in particular, legal officials) are always and already constrained, their deliberative field narrowed by the institutional conditions within which they work; however, at the same time, those constraints are not determinative, but rather enabling of future action. Under this view, a reconciliation between normative and descriptive methods might be possible: taking the legal actor as already constrained by institutional conditions, theorists need an appropriately sophisticated empirical account of those conditions; however, theorists also need an account of how legal actors ought to behave within the necessarily narrowed deliberative field. There is much work that remains to be done in this respect (see also, Winter 2001).
A similar debate over the appropriate place and scope of empirical work (or the adoption of empirically-informed conditions as assumptions by a normative theory) has occupied the works of political and moral philosophy. The most relevant aspect in relation to the former is that of the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory. Some recent papers (for example, Phillips, 2005) argue for a transition from ideal to non-ideal theory in political philosophy. Others call for various forms of reconciliation (see, for example, the recent unpublished paper by Adam Swift, presented at a political philosophy conference whose theme was ‘Social Justice: Ideal Theory, Non-Ideal Circumstances’ in Helsinki in May 2007). In this respect, a sophisticated work, straddling both moral and political philosophy, is Liam Murphy’s Moral Demands in Non-Ideal Theory (2000). The work of Gerard Brennan and Phillip Pettit (2005) on feasibility conditions, as well as that of Brian Goodin’s work on political theory and practice (1995), is also important here.
As for moral philosophy, the debates here over the appropriate place for advances in psychology have been around for some time – for one, we have G.E.M. Anscombe’s call, made many decades ago now (1958), for a more extensive and robust moral psychology as the foundation for work in moral philosophy. That call is progressively being answered in at least five central areas of moral philosophy: (a) Character and Virtue Ethics (Flanagan, 1992; Harman, 1999; Doris, 2002); (b) Moral Motivation (Nichols, 2002; Roskies, 2003; Rodogno, manuscript); (c) Moral disagreement and relativism (Wong, 2006; Doris & Plakias, 2008); (d) Determinism and Responsibility (Woolfolk et al. 2006; Nahmias et al. 2006; Nichols and Knobe, 2007); and (e) Emotions and Moral Judgements (Greene & Haidt, 2002; Prinz, 2007).
There is also a growing concern for questions of methodology in moral philosophy and in particular whether an empirically informed approach to ethics can improve the classical intuition-based methodology (Horowitz 1998; Sinnott-Armstrong 2005; Sunstein 2005) and, more generally, how empirical work in psychology, bounded rationality (see Gigerenzer 2001), neuroscience (on this, see a recent paper by Habermas, 2007) and other descriptive disciplines can inform a normative discipline such as ethics without deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ or without falling pray to the ‘open question’ argument (Casebeer, 2003; Prinz, 2007; Flanagan et al. 2008; Greene 2008; see Thiele 2006 for a helpful overview of references). These questions clearly connect this recent debate to a number of long-standing issues in meta-ethics (see Sayre-McCord, 1988; and Smith, 1995).
The Conference aims to facilitate discussion of these methodological issues and, in doing so, to create a space for dialogue between conceptually and empirically oriented work in practical philosophy.
References
• Anscombe, G.E.M. “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) 33 Philosophy 1-19
• Brennan, Gerrard and Philip Pettit, “The Feasibility Issue” in Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2005, 258-279
• Casebeer, William D, Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003
• Coyle, Sean and George Pavlakos, Jurisprudence or Legal Science? Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005
• Dickson, Julie, Evaluation and Legal Theory, Oxford University Press, 2001
• Doris, John, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behaviour, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002
• Doris, J. M., and Plakias, A, “How to Argue About Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism” in Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (ed), Moral Psychology. The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, MIT Press, 2008
• Dworkin, Ronald, “Hart’s Postscript and the Character of Political Philosophy” (2004) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1-37
• Dworkin, Ronald, Law’s Empire, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1986
• Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981
• Flanagan, Owen, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism, Harvard University Press, 1991
• Flanagan Owen, Sarkissian Hagop, Wong David “Naturalising Ethics” in Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (ed), Moral Psychology. The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, MIT Press, 2008
• Gigerenzer, Gerd, and Reinhard Selten (eds), Bounded Rationality: the Adaptive Toolbox, MIT Press, 2001
• Giudice, Michael, “Normativity and Norm-Subjects” (2006) 31 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 50-71
• Giudice, Michael, “Ways of Understanding Diversity among Theories of Law” (2005) 24(5) Law and Philosophy 509-545
• Greene, Joshua “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul” in Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (ed) Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, MIT Press, 2008
• Greene, J. and Haidt, J. “How (and Where) Does Moral Judgment Work?” (2002) 6 Trends in Cognitive Science 517-23
• Habermas, Jürgen, “The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism be Reconciled with Ontological Monism?” (2007) 10(1) Philosophical Explorations 13-50
• Habermas, Jürgen, Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge: Polity, 1996
• Halpin, Andrew, “The Methodology of Jurisprudence: Thirty Years off the Point” (2006) 19 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 67
• Harman, Gilbert “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error” (1999) 99 Proceeding of the Aristotelian Society (1999) 315-31
• Hart, HLA, The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961
• Horowitz, Tamara “Philosophical Intuitions and Psychological Theory” in DePaul, M and W. Ramsey (eds), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008
• Lacey, Nicola, “Analytical Jurisprudence versus Descriptive Sociology Revisited” (2006) 84(4) Texas Law Review 945-982
• Lacey, Nicola, The Nightmare and the Noble Dream: A Life of HLA Hart, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Leiter, Brian, Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007
• Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience and Narrative, Cambridge University Press, 2006
• MacCormick, Neil, Institutions of Law: an Essay in Legal Theory, Oxford University Press, 2007
• Murphy, Liam, Moral Demands in Non-Ideal Theory, Oxford University Press, 2000
• Nahmias, E. A., Morris, S. G., Nadelhoffer, T. and Turner, J, “Is Incompatiblism Intuitive?” (2006) 73(1) Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
• Nichols, Shaun, “How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism; or, is it Irrational to Be Amoral?” (2002) 85 The Monist 285-304
• Nichols, Shaun, Sentimental Rules on the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Nichols, Shaun and Joshua Knobe, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions” (2007) 41(4) Nous
• Phillips, Michael, “Reflections on the Transition from Ideal to Non-Ideal Theory” (1985) 19(4) Nous 551-570
• Prinz, Jesse, The Emotional Construction of Morals, Oxford University Press, 2007
• Raz, Joseph, Practical Reason and Norms, Princeton University Press, 1982
• Robertson, Michael, “Does the Unconstrained Legal Actor Exist?” (2007) 20(2) Ratio Juris 258-279
• Rodogno, Raffaele “Demandingness as Impracticability: an Empirically Informed Assessment”, submitted manuscript
• Roskies, A, “Are Ethical Judgments Intrinsically Motivational? Lessons from ‘Acquired Sociopathy’” (2003) 16 Philosophical Psychology 51-66
• Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey (ed), Essays on Moral Realism, Cornell University Press, 1988
• Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, “Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology” in Horgan, T and M, Timmons (eds), Metaethics After Moore, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005
• Smith, Michael (ed), Meta-Ethics, Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing, 1995
• Sunstein, Cass, “Moral Heuristics” (2005) 28 Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2005) 531-42
• Swift, Adam, “The Value of Philosophy in Non-Ideal Circumstances”, unpublished manuscript, 2007
• Tamanaha, Brian, Realistic Socio-Legal Theory: Pragmatism and a Social Theory of Law, Oxford University Press, 1997
• Thiele, Leslie Paul, The Heart of Judgement: Practical Wisdom, Narrative and Neuroscience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
• Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2nd edition, 1990
• Winter, Steven, A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life and Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001
• Wong, David Natural Moralities: a Defense of Pluralistic Relativism, Oxford University Press, 2006
• Woolfolk, R. L., Doris, J. M. and Darley, J. M, “Identification, Situational Constraint, and Social Cognition: Studies in the Attribution of Moral Responsibility” (2006) 100(2) Cognition