Explanation, Vindication, and the Role of Normative Theory in Legal Scholarship

I find Yuracko\u27s inquiry quite intriguing, but I have doubts about the central thesis. My aim, in the discussion that follows, is to press Yuracko on two fronts, one methodological, the other substantive. As concerns substance, I shall say a bit as this commentary progresses about why Yuracko would need much more support to make good on her claim that an implicit perfectionism explains decisional antidiscrimination law. My chief interest, however, lies with certain questions as to what methodology she means to follow in her efforts to develop a more complete theory of employment discrimination law. Yuracko\u27s approach is one that seems to me to be quite common in legal scholarship, at least in legal scholarship with more theoretical ambitions. For reasons that I shall offer shortly, I find the approach puzzling and problematic. I want to be clear, however, that in pressing methodological questions, my aim is not so much to pose a problem for Yuracko, who understandably adopts what seems the usual approach of scholars in her field. Rather, I mean to point out how and why, in my view, legal theorists need to pay far greater attention to methodology than they generally have. As for Yuracko, I greatly admire her efforts, in this article and elsewhere, to tackle complex questions about the theoretical unity and underpinnings of employment discrimination law. For that very reason, I want to urge her to adopt an approach better suited to exploring theoretical issues and to supporting her most central ideas

What is the Meaning of Marriage ?

There is legitimacy to the conservative approach that goes beyond looking at the impact on people\u27s welfare. This article responds to Professor Arneson by offering a different framework to investigate the underlying theoretical values behind appropriate state policies regarding private relationships. Neither the prioritarian consequentialist, nor the lockean libertarian captures the other side of the marriage debate, that is, the traditional ideal. The state’s interest in fostering the conservative, traditional marriage relationships begins to emerge through the author\u27s assumptions that Kantian ethics is correct, that social stability depends on others—inviolate value, and that through love one can apprehend the value of another. Therefore, the author concludes that to the extent that same-sex marriage helps to encourage these assumptions—that is, encouraging a regard for the value of others—the state also has compelling reasons to extend the boundaries of legal marriage to encompass same sex-unions

"The End of Immortality!" Eternal Life and the Makropulos Debate

Responding to a well-known essay by Bernard Williams, philosophers (and a few theologians) have engaged in what I call “the Makropulos debate,” a debate over whether immortality—“living forever”—would be desirable for beings like us. Lacking a firm conceptual grounding in the religious contexts from which terms such as “immortality” and “eternal life” gain much of their sense, the debate has consisted chiefly in a battle of speculative fantasies. Having presented my four main reasons for this assessment, I examine an alternative and neglected conception, the idea of eternal life as a present possession, derived in large part from Johannine Christianity. Without claiming to argue for the truth of this conception, I present its investigation as exemplifying a conceptually fruitful direction of inquiry into immortality or eternal life, one which takes seriously the religious and ethical surroundings of these concepts

Self-invention and the good.

In the past fifteen years, ethical theory construction has come under attack from a number of directions. I aim to provide a deeper foundation for these critiques by examining recent efforts to define "good" as a part of theory construction in ethics. I argue that the reforming definitions of "good" offered by John Rawls, Richard Br and t, and most recently, Peter Railton, deprive us of the ability to raise the questions that we as human agents want to be able to raise about what to desire. More generally, determinate accounts of the good are contrary to a kind of deliberation that is essential to being a person. To be a person, I contend, is to be an inventor of possible selves, a creature who engages in self-invention. Our capacity for self-invention involve deliberation that enables us to make of ourselves persons for whom different things are good. Self-invention is thus a process that involves invention of our good. Determinate accounts of the good, by fixing what is to be our good, are at odds with our capacity for self-invention. Questions about a person's good, I argue, are not separable from her questions about what sort of person to be. and decisionmaking about a person's good is an open-ended, creative process in which she simultaneously constructs her identity and her good.Ph.D.PhilosophyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162520/1/9014003.pd