Alan Thomas

A book length monograph on wealth or asset focused egalitarianism. It defends both a positive model of justice – from a liberal-republican perspective – and a diagnosis of the roots of current levels of inequality and their impact on the quality of social democratic governance. Remedies are proposed in the tradition of Meade, Rawls, Atkinson and Piketty. Forthcoming from OUP (USA) in summer of 2016.

A monograph on the philosophy of Thomas Nagel. Chapter one: Subjective and Objective. Chapter two: Understanding, Knowledge and Reason. Chapter three: Placing the Mind in the Physical World.  Chapter four: The Possibility of Altruism. Chapter five: Practical Objectivity, Freedom and a Realistic Autonomy. Chapter six: Normative Ethics – Nagel's Hybrid Ethical Theory. Chapter seven: Justice, Equality and Partiality.

Brad Hooker once claimed that it was a brute contingency that all Rossian prima facie duties were in fact grounded on a single rule consequentialist principle. This did not imply any degree of epistemic priority in either direction. This paper builds on an earlier critique of the view as it responds to Jeffrey Brand-Ballard's defense of Hooker's position. Hooker's argument does no  more than identify a co-variation and that does not suffice for a moral explanation that is principled in form.

A challenging argument following the global financial crisis of 2007-8 is that it marks a decisive shift in the development of capitalism in the affluent societies of the West. Both James K. Galbraith and Andrew Gamble have argued that the Crisis has undermined the very idea of a " normal " state of a capitalist economy as one that involves continual growth. This view is compared to Thomas Palley's " structural Keynesian " analysis of the Crisis and it is argued that one form of egalitarian view – asset-based or predistributive egalitarianism – is uniquely the best response to our " new normal " of debt overhang, chronic stagnation, and the threat of deflation. Parallel to this economic analysis is Gamble's claim that the affluent societies of the West face a series " crises without end " in political legitimation. It is argue that rediscovering the justificatory resources in the work of Meade and Rawls of an egalitarianism that combines justice and efficiency will forestall this conclusion.

Peter Temin’s ambitious monograph on the recent political history of the USA combines economic data about inequality, a complementary theory of politics, and a consequent discussion of how those politics have produced, and sustain, various negative social effects. It is no accident that the book opens with the economic data. In Temin’s view it is America’s radical inequality, with its persistent inter-woven strand of racism, that explains much else about America’s oligarchic form of government. [Gilens & Page, 2014; Temin, 2017, pp. 71–85, p. 115] (Temin gives his reasons for preferring the term “plutocracy” to “oligarchy”. [Temin, 2017, p. 94]) He believes that the negative social effects of both inequality and oligarchic governance follow ineluctably from Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” that Temin endorses in the second part of this book. [Ferguson, 1995]
I will divide this Critical Review as follows: the first section describes some key economic data to provide a context for Temin’s discussion; the second section describes his characterization of his “bi-sectoral” model of the US economy; the third section turns to the key problem of social mobility. The fourth section discusses Temin’s account of the Investment Theory of Politics. Section five discusses the role of private debt in Temin’s argument while while section six addresses some of the broader issues raised by the book.

Political realism criticises the putative abstraction, foundationalism and neglect of the agonistic conception of political practice in the work of John Rawls. This paper argues that had Rawls not fully specified the implementation of his theory of justice in one particular form of political economy then he would be vulnerable to a realist critique. But he did present such an implementation: a property-owning democracy. An appreciation of Rawls's specificationist method undercuts the realist critique of his conception of justice as fairness.

The forty year period 1970-2010 saw two developments in the USA: first, at the level of theory, intense academic interest in the egalitarianism of John Rawls. Second, at the level of practice, fundamental changes in the institutions, policies and norms of US society that have led Gilens and Page [2014] to conclude that it has become an oligarchy de facto if not de jure. A central component in that practical development is the tolerance of extensive inequality and the emergence of not merely the “1 percent”, but the elevation of an “upper decile” of wealthy individuals into a position of economic and political dominance. In spite of pioneering work by Krouse, MacPherson and Arneson, little academic attention has been paid to whether a political economy with roots in Rawls’s work might be the most effective response to these practical and institutional changes. That situation may be about to change given the popular, as well as academic, response to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In this paper I will consider whether a form of economic system described by Cambridge economist James Meade – a common source for both Rawls and Piketty – offers a feasible egalitarian ideal. It will be argued that the USA represents a "test case" for other advanced democracies faced with the challenge of a new form of patrimonial capitalism. It is further argued that only a structural change to  society’s fundamental wage setting institutions, along the lines recommended by Meade and Rawls and implicit in Piketty, will bring about the necessary structural change to implement a political economy for a just society.

What is action from integrity and how does this idea connect to the idea of a reason to be moral? These questions are addressed from the standpoint of Bernard Williams's approach to moral psychology, particularly the history in his thought of the idea of a "ground project".

John McDowell has recently changed his line of response to philosophical scepticism about the external world. He now claims to be in a position to use the strategy of tran- scendental argumentation in order to show the falsity of the sceptic’s misrepresenta- tion of our ordinary epistemic standpoint. Since this transcendental argument begins from a weak and widely shared assumption shared with the sceptic herself the falsity of external world scepticism is now demonstrable even to her. Building on the account of perceptual intentionality defended in the Woodbridge lectures, McDowell argues that the idea of narrow perceptual content is unavailable to anyone, including the sceptic. This argument is assessed by drawing out an analogy with parallel responses to error theories in ethics.

This paper evaluates Amartya Sen’s criticisms of Rawls’s theory of justice, in particular his critique of the ideal versus nonideal distinction in Rawls, and corrects what I take to be various misconceptions that underpin this critique. I will then move on to the more general issue of how we are to understand the role of the ideal versus nonideal dis- tinction (and how we ought not to understand it) before going on to consider one focused application of Sen’s ideas. I will look at the choice between property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism, drawing on the important work of Ingrid Robeyns specifically on ‘‘gender justice’’, in order to argue that Sen’s methodological claims will – if heeded – send us all off on the wrong track.

This paper assesses G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawlsian special incentives. Two arguments are identified and criticized: an argument that the difference principle does not justify incentives because of a limitation on an agent’s prerogative to depart from a direct promotion of the interests of the worst off, and an argument that justice is limited in its scope. The first argument is evaluated and defended from the criticism that once Cohen has conceded some ethically grounded special incentives he cannot sustain his critique of special incentives. But it is finally re- jected as a subtle form of an unreasonably demanding moral rigorism. The second argument is interpreted as the more plausible of Cohen’s claims. It has, however, to be defended via two subsidiary theses: the claim that Rawls endorses a moral division of labour and that this in turn grounds a further commitment to moral dualism as opposed to moral monism. This argument is assessed and rejected. Neither the moral division of labour nor moral monism supports the claim that in applying the principles of justice to a basic structure one does not thereby apply them to the individuals constrained to act within that structure in the marketing of their labour. Nor is it plausible to identify local aspects of social relations where the principles of justice are suspended. Such principles are presupposed, for example in market relations or the family, but limitation in scope of direct application does not limit the scope of justification. That scope extends at least as far as individual decisions to market one’s labour. The latter are made fair in the only possible way they could be made fair. Rawls’s commitment to the revisionary socialism of James Meade illustrates this point. It is concluded that no version of Cohen’s critique succeeds. However, Cohen’s critique identifies the most plausible version of Rawls’s egalitarianism.

The non-monotonicity of practical reasoning creates a prima facie presumption that ethical judgement is the exercise of a "contentless ability" and thus makes the case for particularism. Particularism stems from truisms about practical reasoning in general; ethical reasoning involves hedged principles, but not the kind of self-hedging principles involved in Richard Holton's principled particularism. Principled particularism re-locates the problem posed to judgement by the fact that practical reasoning is non-monotonic, but it does not solve it. Holton needs a "no true junk" rule and that is the resurrection of the problem posed by non-monotonicity in a new guise.

A cognitivist form of virtue ethics explains both how moral reasons are reasonably partial and how one can relate to oneself in a non-alienated way. Drawing upon work by Sartre and Williams, the paper argues that an explanation of the idea of integrity is indeed a way of resisting a consequentialist understanding of demandingness. This is not to deny that there are duties of immediate rescue or natural duties of general benevolence. Given the state of the world morality is, indeed, demanding, but not in the sense defended by Elizabeth Ashford and Peter Unger.

Sartre famously criticised Freud's model of repression as involving an infinite regress. The postulation of a mechanism of repression does not solve the problem of how a person can both be influenced by a repressed thought (hence be aware of it) but not be aware of it (because it has been repressed). It is argued that it is Sartre's argument that leads to an infinite regress. This becomes clear if one focuses on his implicit model of rational control of thought. In assuming that thoughts we are conscious with are thoughts we are conscious of Sartre makes a representative mistake. This paper describes an understanding of Freudian repression that is not vulnerable to Sartre's critique.

La crítica de Sartre del modelo freudiano de represión como regresión infinita es bien conocida. La postulación de un mecanismo de represión no resuelve la cuestión de cómo una persona puede ser influida por un pensamiento reprimido (y por ello ser consciente del mismo) y al mismo tiempo no ser consciente del mismo (al haber sido reprimido). Se podría argüir que es el argumento de Sartre el que llevaría a una regresión infinita. Dicho argumento se hace aparente si uno se centra en su modelo implícito del control racional del pensamiento. En el supuesto de que los pensamientos de los que somos conscientes sean pensamientos que representan Sartre comete un error típico. Este artículo describe un entendimiento de la represión freudiana que no es vulnerable a la crítica de Sartre.

This paper develops an adverbial theory of consciousness. One motivation is the Dretskean intuition that consciousness involves awareness not dependent on any reflexive intentional relation between a subject and mental state; another is that an adverbial theory of consciousness can avoid an act/object construal of such conscious awareness. An adverbial is described and contrasted with Mark Rowlands' similar distinction between actualist and objectualist construals of consciousness; the two views are very similar given their antecedents in Kant's distinction between inner sense and apperception. Adverbialism has also been defended as an interpretation of Brentano by Amie Thomasson; this view is described and endorsed and defended from its near rival, Keith Hossack's Brentano inspired identity thesis. The paper then develops an account of globally supported self-ascription to embed this neo-Brentanian view of experiencing consciously within a more general account of the relation between consciousness and self-knowledge. This approach is contrasted to Shoemaker's functionalist treatment of the self-tokening of conscious states and of "self-blindness". It is argued that to be fully consistent, Shoemaker has to abandon the claim that introspectionism is guilty of a self-scanning model or rational control as he seems committed to that model too. The view defended in this paper is a person level acount of conscious self-ascription, not a "no reasons" view in which warrant is supplied by underlying cognitive mechanisms.

This paper has three aims. The first is to characterize the problem of perceptual presence and to argue that it needs to be taken seriously in the philosophy of perception. The second is to evaluate a solution to this problem pioneered by Kant (1781; 1783) and refined by Sir Peter Strawson (Strawson 1971) and Wilfrid Sellars (Sellars 1978). I will argue that this composite neo-Kantian view is the only avail- able solution to the problem of perceptual presence. My third aim is to examine the role that this account of imagination in perception plays in the recent work of John McDowell. He objects to a theory of this kind during his discussion of Sellars’s work in McDowell’s Woodbridge Lectures (McDowell 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). In later work his assessment of this aspect of Sellars’s view is revised; this partly involves a more sympathetic treatment of Sellars’s views on imagination in perception (McDowell 2009f, 114, 123–24). However, I will argue that the theory I defend here not only solves the problem of perceptual presence, but makes far more of a positive contribution to McDowell’s own views about perceptual intentionality than he recognizes. The irony is that McDowell is a rapidly moving target and in his most recent work he seems to have abandoned his Sellars-inspired view of perceptual intentionality as involving “claims” more or less completely (McDowell 2009h). I will argue that this most recent change in his views is poorly motivated.

Virtue epistemology attempts to explain central epistemic concepts by appealing to epistemic virtues. It is argued in this paper that epistemic virtues and the domains of epistemic goods with which they are correlated requires an account of "thick" concepts. Williams' account of such concepts proceeds, in Truth and Truthfulness, via a vindicatory genealogy of the practices in which such concepts are deployed. This genealogy reveals function where none was supposed and argues for a basic set of epistemic concepts that are universal, developed via a set of historically and culturally local articulations that are, by contrast, historically particular. This paper assesses this project of supplying a vindicatory genealogy for core epistemic virtues in the context of an inquiry-focused virtue epistemology. It explores the similarities and the differences between the interpretation of ethical and epistemic thick concepts.

A putative problem for the moral particularist is that he or she fails to cap- ture the normative relevance of certain considerations that they carry on their face, or the intuitive irrelevance of other considerations. It is argued in response that mastery of certain topic-specific truisms about a subject matter is what it is for a reasonable interlocutor to be engaged in a moral discussion, but the relevance of these truisms has nothing to do with the particularist/generalist dispute. Given that practical reasoning is plausibly a form of abductive reasoning, and is therefore non-monotonic, any arbi- trary addition of information can change the degree of support evidence offers for a conclusion. Given this arbitrariness, it is no objection to the particularist if he or she represents the ‘normative landscape as flat’ in a way that does not display the ‘obvious’ relevance of certain considerations. The normative landscape is flat and our best account of practical reasoning represents it precisely as such. Appealing to a distinction between practical reasoning and moral reasoning does not help to resurrect this pseudo- problem for particularism.

Peter Winch seems to have described the following kind of paradox. Two agents in a morally dilemmatic situation can agree on the values in that situation and their bearing on decision but come to different all things considered verdicts about what to do. Yet this kind of blameless disagreement is not a Protagorean relativism in which "right" reduces to "right for A" and "right for B". This paper tries to preserve the appearances while avoiding relativism, abandoning cognitivism about value or abandoning the "impartiality" of reasons. It is argued that Sen's notion of evaluator relativity in which outcomes differ in value according to whether one is the proposed author or viewer of the proposed action can be adapted to solve the problem. The sense in which values are perspectival is compatible with their objectivity as they systematically transform across viewpoints; Sen has correctly identified that the "author/viewer" parameter is perspectival in a different sense in which this kind of transformation test does not hold. However, a minimal realism about value suggests that Sen's insight is into the importance of an agency stance towards proposed outcomes. Practical reasons are perspectival in a more radical way than judgements of value, but still objective. Adapting his insight by explaining it as a claim about reasons not values solves the paradox while remaining cognitivist about values and impartialist about reasons.

This paper argues that political liberalism is best placed to accommodate the insights of the civic republican tradition in political theory. Political liberalism is described and its compatibility with certain interpretations of republicanism demonstrated. It is explained why the republican liberal values active citizenship in the context of civil society and the overall theory is defended from the charge that it is an unstable compromise. It is argued that civil society is an essential precondition of liberal democracy.

Minimalist and quasi-realist approaches to problematic discourses such as the causal, moral and modal are compared and contrasted. The problem of unasserted contexts demonstrates that while quasi-realism can meet the challenge of reconstructing a logic of "commitment" to cover both "projected" and "detected" discourses, it can only do so at an unacceptable cost. The theory must globally revise logic, in spite of its implicit commitment to a substantial notion of truth for "detected" discourses. Thus, quasi-realism fails to meet its own standards for theory acceptance. By contrast, minimalism does not face the problem of unasserted contexts, can give a global account of the truth predicate and can explain the univocality of the logical connectives. This demonstrates the dialectical superiority of the minimalist's approach.

It is argued that reasonable partiality allows an agent to attach value to particular objects of attachment via recognition of the value of the holding of that relation between agent and object. Such an explanation does not view the agent herself as capable of generating a disproportionate evaluation of objects simply because they are related to her. It thereby respects the objectivity and intelligibility of any evaluative claim. The reasonableness of partiality is ensured by a background context set by the agent’s virtues, notably justice. It is argued that reasonable partiality is the only view that is compatible with our best account of the nature of self-knowledge. That account rules out any instrumental relationship between moral demands and moral character, but that familiar claim is given an unfamiliar explanation. Instrumentality depends on a prior objectification of the self and it is that kind of objectification that, in the ethical case, represents a form of ethical evasion. Self-knowledge is transparent, incomplete and essentially connected with first person endorsement. The transparency condition is that knowledge of one’s state of mind is “taken” transparently to its object. More specifically, ethical transparency is the feature that my virtues do not exhibit themselves to me in self-knowledge, but take me transparently to the way in which they saliently represent the world as containing evaluative properties calling for various forms of response. It is concluded that reasonable partiality grounded in the nature of the virtues is the only reflective account of morality compatible with the most plausible account of the nature of self-knowledge. The demands of impartiality are incompatible with a condition of having a personal point of view, namely, that a self can stand in a non-alienated relation to itself via its capacity for self-knowledge.

This paper examines some of the central arguments of John McDowell's Mind and World, particularly his treatment of the Kantian themes of the spontaneity of thought and of the nature of self-consciousness. It is argued that in so far as McDowell departs from Kant, his position becomes less plausible in three respects. First, the space of reason is identified with the space of responsible and critical freedom in a way that runs together issues about synthesis below the level of concepts and at the level of complete judgements. This leads to the unwarranted exclusion of animal minds from the space of reasons. Second, McDowell draws no essential distinction between apperception and inner sense, a distinction which is important to a defensible Kantian view and to the very idea of a sui generis transcendental knowledge of the mind that is consistent with Kant's critical principles. McDowell does not take into account some of Kant's developed arguments about the inherently reflective nature of consciousness which is interpreted as an adverbial theory of the nature of conscious experience, a mode of being in a mental state (so neither an intrinsic nor extrinsic property of it). Third, McDowell endorses a standard treatment of Kant's approach to the mind in which a merely formal account of mind needs to be anchored outside consciousness on the physical body. The arguments for this conclusion, both in Mind and World and in related work by Bermudez and Hurley, is shown to be very inconclusive as a criticism of Kant. The capacity to self-ascribe thoughts that are already conscious shows, but does not say, a truth about the unity of our conscious experience that does not require further anchoring on a physical body; at that stage of the Critique Kant is describing conditions for conscious experience in general, not the conscious experience of spatio-temporally located makers of judgements. The alleged lacuna in Kant's arguments is no lacuna at all.

This paper interprets Bernard Williams's claim that all practical reasons must meet the internal reasons constraint. It is argued that this constraint is independent of any substantive Humean claims about reasons and its rationale is a content scepticism about the capacity of pure reason to supply reasons for action. Conversely, the argument can be interpreted as about what we are entitled to assume, for free, about the very idea of a practically rational agent. Hooker's and Korsgaard's critiques of Williams are considered and rejected as not considering sufficiently the prior commitment to content scepticism. The dispute between Williams and McDowell is separately discussed and identified in terms of psychologism, which Williams was happy to adopt for practical reasons, McDowell not, and whether appeal to the content of the reasons of a phronimos gives any purchase on the contents of an agent's reasons. It is argued that it does not and that McDowell's account of external reasons involves illegitimate idealisation. The final sections attempt a positive reconciliation of the internal reasons account with the motivation for external reasons, namely, securing practical objecitivy in the form of a commitment to impartiality. Impartiality is given a contractualist interpretation in the limited sense that socialised agents have a central disposition to hold those reasons that are defensible to reasonable interlocutors, but this is not a substantive constraint on their content.

This paper critically analyses Brad Hooker's attempt to undercut pluralism by arguing that any plausible set of prima facie duties can be derived from a more fundamental rule consequentialist principle. It is argued that this conclusion is foreshadowed by the rationalist and epistemologically realist interpretation that Hooker imposes on his chosen methodology of reflective equilibrium; he is not describing pluralism in its strongest and most plausible version and a more plausible version of pluralism is described and defended.

It is argued that Nagel' s pessimistic conclusion that current welfare state arrangements approximate to the most pragmatically effective way of reconciling the demands of morality and of an egalitarian liberalism, while not removing a deep seated incoherence between these view, can be resisted. The key part of his argument is his conception of the interface between morality and politics and the claim that the demands of impartialist egalitarianism are foreshadowed at the level of the ethics of individual conduct by the impartialist component of that view. The objective/subjective dichotomy, in this case applied via the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction, does the damage: understood in Hegelian terms as the "placing" of different categories of reason, even a minimal realism makes it difficult to understand how embedding agent-relativity alongside the agent-neutral can be understood as adding to the relevant values, just by moving from a more particular to a less particular conception of the world. This transition also cannot be seen as giving us insight into the intrinsicality of certain values, as that would be to renege on the idea that the subjective point of view is still a point of view on value and one that is expanded, not renounced. A more promising interpretation takes the move to the impartial standpoint to place two classes of reason in relation to a single category of value and this would connect Nagel's discussion to his contractualist model of political legitimacy. That process must involve "reasons we can share" and hence must be agent-relative reasons. It is argued that the standard objection that contractualism is fatally circular is even more plausible in the case of its use as a theory of political legitimacy and Nagel's use of it is quite open about this circularity. Criticising Nagel's philosophical anthropology allows one to develop his positive arguments for egalitarianism; the development of civic virtue, from a perspective in which "the personal" acknowledges the demands of others in one's political community, leads to a political egalitarianism located in a distinct political morality independent of a moralised politics.

A limited defence of Darwall's account of second personal reasons from a critique developed by Mark LeBar. LeBar is right, however, that agent-relativity is an unhappy concept for expressing that which is distinctive and insightful about Darwall's position.

A defence of G A Cohen's critique of special incentives from the accusation that conceding some ethically grounded prerogatives leads inevitably to the concession that such incentives are justified. However, the defence is limited - it involves a conception of prerogatives that is ultimately indefensible. Cohen's "limitation of prerogatives" argument does not work but he is not guilty of sliding down the slippery slope from some morally grounded prerogatives to Rawlsian incentives.

Williams has often been misunderstood. And Thomas takes care to correct misunderstandings and to disentangle various threads in Williams's thought. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) Williams argued that the kind of account of moral knowledge defended by Wiggins and McDowell is persuasive only so long as it is taken to be an account of knowledge claims making use of 'thick'concepts within some particular social world, from the standpoint of

The forty year period 1970-2010 saw two developments in the USA: first, at the level of theory, intense academic interest in the egalitarianism of John Rawls. Second, at the level of practice, fundamental changes in the institutions, policies and norms of US society that have led Gilens and Page [2014] to conclude that it has become an oligarchy de facto if not de jure. A central component in that practical development is the tolerance of extensive inequality and the emergence of not merely the “1 percent”, but the elevation of an “upper decile” of wealthy individuals into a position of economic and political dominance. In spite of pioneering work by Krouse, MacPherson and Arneson, little academic attention has been paid to whether a political economy with roots in Rawls’s work might be the most effective response to these practical and institutional changes. That situation may be about to change given the popular, as well as academic, response to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century: in this paper I will consider whether a form of economic system described by Cambridge economist James Meade – a common source for both Rawls and Piketty – offers a feasible egalitarian ideal. I will compare and contrast this ideal with three other views: individual capital holding schemes that have played a role in generating the New Inequality and not in averting it; the bundle of “pre-distributive” egalitarian policies recommended by Jacob S. Hacker, and the continuation of the social progressivist tradition in Lane Kenworthy’s proposal for a ‘Social Democratic America’. It will be argued that only a structural change to  society’s fundamental wage setting institutions, along the lines recommended by Meade and Rawls and implicit in Piketty, will bring about the necessary structural change to implement a political economy for a just society.

Philip Pettit is the leading defender of republicanism in recent political philosophy. In this book, a successor to his pioneering Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Pettit develops a theory of democracy that tries to substantiate this claim by explaining the legitimacy of law via an account of democratic governance.