Kyle Swan

• California State University, Sacramento

The law of religious liberty in the United States tends to treat religion as special in two ways. It does first by offering religious citizens certain exemptions and accommodations based on their religious objections to otherwise generally applicable law. Second, it enforces certain exclusions of public expressions of religious doctrines or values....

Despite the increasing amount of literature on the legal and political questions triggered by a commitment to liberty of conscience, an explanation of the normative significance of conscience remains elusive. We argue that the few attempts to address this fail to capture the reasons people have to respect the consciences of others. We offer an alte...

Gerald Dworkin’s overlooked defense of legal moralism attempts to undermine the traditional liberal case for a principled distinction between behavior that is immoral and criminal and behavior that is immoral but not criminal. According to Dworkin, his argument for legal moralism “depends upon a plausible idea of what making moral judgments involve...

Despite the increasing amount of literature on the legal and political questions raised by liberty of conscience, an explanation for the normative significance of conscience remains elusive. In our view, a compelling explanation of the normative significance of conscience is a much needed addition to the literature. In our paper, we attempt to show...

While most Christians have come to accept that there should be no attempt on the part of the state to coerce strict matters of conscience, many actively support the state coercively interfering with certain modes of conduct that violate God's moral law. The development of this stance occurred during the seventeenth-century English toleration debate...

Escapism, a theory of hell proposed by Andrei Buckareff and Allen Plug, explicitly relies on claims about divine reasons for action. However, they say surprisingly little about the general account of reasons for action that would justify the inferences in the argument for escapism. I provide a couple of plausible interpretations of such an account...

overty comes naturally to human beings. We enter the world with nothing and leave with less. During the interim, labor affords whatever subsistence or better life we enjoy. A useful way to appraise the human condition, then, is in terms of the means we have learned to employ for edging away from the natural condition of want. During the seventeenth...

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed...

The distinction between negative and positive liberty is familiar to political philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as noninterference. The positive variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently there has been an attempt on the part of a growing number of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars to recapture a third concept of...

John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle-ground position in the twentieth century Anglo-American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealist-expressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version...

The paper investigates different ways to understand the claim that non–cognitivists theories of morality are incoherent. According to the claim, this is so because, on one theory of truth, non–cognitivists are not able to deny objective truth to moral judgments without taking a substantive normative position. I argue that emotivism is not self–defe...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2003. Includes bibliographical references.