My research lies primarily in the liberal tradition. I’m most interested in building defenses of liberal political and economic order and answering important questions about how liberal societies and liberal politics should function. I have strong interests in liberal political economy and liberal approaches to religion and politics. I also have research interests in the study of social and political trust and contractualist ethics. My research projects can be broken down as follows.
Public Reason Liberalism
While I find many variants of liberal political theory attractive, I defend a version of public reason liberalism, which combines a defense of traditional liberal institutions, such as liberal rights, democratic government, constitutional rule, markets, and social insurance, with a requirement that the moral and legal rules to which are subject be justified for each person based on what one regards as a sufficient reason to endorse and abide by those rules. The best argument for liberal institutions is that liberal institutions alone can be justified to publics with many diverse and incompatible worldviews. Only liberal institutions, therefore, can be publicly justified. I have written about public reason in over a dozen articles. Further, my book Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society (OUP 2018) defends a form of public reason liberalism. I ground public justification in the value of social trust, and then argue that only liberal institutions can be publicly justified. Thus, if we care about having a social order that can sustain social trust between diverse persons, that order must be liberal.
Some of my public reason articles:
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- “Against Public Reason’s Accessibility Requirement,” 2011, Journal of Moral Philosophy 8(3): 366-389. [Link][PDF.]
- “Public Justification versus Public Deliberation: The Case for Divorce,” 2015, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45(2): 139-158. [Link][PDF]
- “In Defense of Intelligible Reasons in Public Justification,” 2016, Philosophical Quarterly 66 (264): 596-616.[Link][PDF]
Religion and Liberal Politics
I defend a revisionary account of the proper role of religion in the public life of liberal democracies, one that protects a significant role for religious reasoning in politics and robust religious exemptions. In my view, defenders of the dominant Rawlsian version of public reason liberalism have mistakenly interpreted the ideal of public reason and public justification in ways that are unjustifiably hostile to religion and other non-public ideals and values. For instance, orthodox public reason liberals often emphasize the need for a fund of shared reasons on which everyone endorses principles of justice. However, what matters is that citizens have a shared commitment to justice and constitutional rules, not that these be endorsed for the same reasons. Many reasons are not shared, especially religious reasons; so by barring unshared reasons from entering into public justification, public reason liberals prevent non-public ideals and values from grounding liberal institutions. I developed these ideas in Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (Routledge 2014). I have also co-edited a volume on these matters with Michael Weber, Religious Exemptions (Oxford UP 2018). Many of my articles concern this topic.
My recent work addresses anti-liberal religious movements who have a boldly illiberal vision of political life. I critique these views, especially Catholic integralism, in my book, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP 2023)
Some of my public reason articles:
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- “The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity: The Implications of Convergence, Asymmetry and Political Institutions,” 2009, (Gaus & Vallier), Philosophy & Social Criticism 35(1): 51-76.[Link][PDF]
- “Liberalism, Religion and Integrity,” 2012, Australasian Journal of Philosophy90(1): 149-165.[Link][PDF]
- “The Symmetry Argument for Catholic Integralism,” Journal of Analytic Theology, 11, 67-84.[Link][PDF]
- “The Justice Argument Against Catholic Integralism,” Political Studies, forthcoming. [Link][PDF]
Liberal Political Economy
I am interested in the new research paradigm of PPE or Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I believe that the case for liberal order must be grounded in models and data found in each of these three fields. I not only believe in PPE research, but in teaching PPE courses to students, including as PPE minors and majors. I think of PPE as the study of complex social orders, both how they work and how their shared moral and political practices are to be understood and made coherent with themselves. Philosophy helps us to understand such an order’s underlying normative practices, and whether these practices correspond to moral reality. Political science and economics help us to understand how economic, legal, and political institutions work, and when they work well. Consequently, I have written broadly in PPE, from historical work on Mill’s political economy, to a critique of arguments for property-owning democracy, to the relationship between economic rationality and social ontology. I see my book Trust in a Polarized Age (Oxford UP 2020) as an exercise in PPE-based political theory.
Some of my articles in PPE:
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- “A Moral and Economic Critique of the New Property-Owning Democrats: On Behalf of a Rawlsian Welfare State,” 2015, Philosophical Studies 172(2): 283-304.[Link][PDF]
- “Is Economic Rationality in the Head?” 2015, Minds & Machines 25(4): 339-360.[Link][PDF]
- “Rawls, Piketty, and the Critique of the Welfare State,” 2019, Journal of Politics, 81(1): 142-152.[PDF][Link]
- “Three Concepts of Political Stability,” 2017, Social Philosophy & Policy, 34(1): 232-259.[PDF][Link]
Social Trust [Link]
Part of my defense of liberal order lies in the study and analysis of social trust, the trust held by society and placed in society. I think social trust is incredibly valuable and that liberal institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social trust not merely among reflective persons, but among citizens of real liberal polities. These points figure into Must Politics Be War? They are even more central in my third book, Trust in a Polarized Age. There I argue that political polarization and conflict can be managed through liberal rights practices, policies, and political participation that generate social and political trust between diverse persons. I think there is a very deep connection between social trust and liberal order, and this has led me to research social trust itself.
My work on trust appears primarily in my twin books on the topic, as well as an edited volume, Social Trust (Routledge 2021), but my more recent articles on trust includes:
Contractualist Ethics
My interests in ethical theory correspond to my interest in social contract theories in political philosophy. I think there is a domain of moral truth that concerns what we owe to each other, and that this system of rights, duties, obligations, and their associated practices of moral responsibility is best explained by and grounded in contractualist theories of right action. In future work, I hope to develop a form of contractualism that can relate social contract theory to the realm of response-independent moral truth. Public reason liberals tend to be constructivists about justice and moral facts broadly, but I reject metaethical constructivism and embrace moral realism. Consequently, if I hope to preserve a contractarian defense of liberal order, I must develop a realist foundation for the ideal of public justification.
Some of my articles include:
I have also recently taken these ideas in a Christian direction: