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Even in secular and civil contexts, marriage retains sacramental connotations. Yet what moral significance does it have? This book examines its morally salient features - promise, commitment, care, and contract - with surprising results. In Part One, "De-Moralizing Marriage," essays on promise and commitment argue that we cannot promise to love and so wedding vows are (mostly) failed promises, and that marriage may be a poor commitment strategy. The book contends with the most influential philosophical accounts of the moral value of marriage to argue that marriage has no inherent mor

Abstract:The debate over whether philosophy makes progress has focused on its failure to answer a core set of "big" questions. I argue that there are other kinds of philosophical progress which are equally important yet underappreciated: the creative development of new "philosophical devices" which increase our ability to think about the world, and the broadening of philosophical topics to ever greater adequacy to what matters. The conception of philosophy as defined by a narrow "core" set of questions is responsible for skepticism about progress, as well as for philosophy's "marketing problem" — its failure to reach the general public. I argue for abandoning the distinction between "core" and "marginal" questions. The greater openness of philosophy to methodological diversity and diversity in topics, especially applied topics, will make a distinct kind of progress: in the breadth and completeness of the questions asked, phenomena investigated, and theories generated. Such openness may also make philosophy more hospitable to more diverse practitioners. This would also be conducive to progress, in the sense of reaching true answers to philosophical questions: greater diversity of philosophical practitioners has epistemic benefits, such as increasing objectivity.

Caring relationships and material caregiving are politically significant goods that should be distributed according to principles of justice. I argue that, within Rawlsian liberalism, care should be considered a primary good and propose a third principle of justice requiring access to the social and legal supports of caring relationships. I examine what social and legal institutions supporting care might require, with particular attention to allowing the infirm elderly and persons with disabilities access to caring relationships. I propose the formation of a Care Corps, providing access to caring relationships for elderly and housebound citizens. If universally required and compensated, the Care Corps could address two other injustices related to care: the unjust distribution of caring labor between men and women and the relatively low status of caring work.

Compared to economics, sociology, political science, and law, the discipline of history has had a limited role in the wide-ranging efforts to reconsider strategies of regulatory governance, especially inside regulatory institutions. This article explores how more sustained historical perspective might improve regulatory decisionmaking. We first survey how a set of American regulatory agencies currently rely on historical research and analysis, whether for the purposes of public relations or as a means of supporting policymaking. We then consider how regulatory agencies might draw on history more self-consciously, more strategically, and to greater effect. Three areas stand out in this regard -- the use of history to improve understanding of institutional culture; reliance on historical analysis to test the empirical plausibility of conceptual models that make assumptions about the likelihood of potential economic outcomes; and integration of historical research methods into program and policy evaluation. Adapted from the source document.

Liberal egalitarians face unappreciated challenges in explaining why the state should assist citizens in disaster recovery and why the state should ever assist in rebuilding in high-risk areas. Addressing these challenges and justifying state-funded disaster recovery assistance requires invoking the most politically salient aspect of disasters: their tendency to increase social inequality. A liberal egalitarian principle of equal opportunity justifies assistance in recovery, at least for disadvantaged citizens. But further argument is required to show why the state should ever subsidize rebuilding as opposed to relocation, if citizens can have access to equally good opportunities in a low-risk area. I argue that displacement has costs which matter under equal opportunity – but this rationale for disaster recovery extends to other causes of displacement, such as gentrification.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: Biography of a Bibliography: Three Decades of Feminist Response to Rawls -- Contributors -- 1 Radical Liberals, Reasonable Feminists: Reason, Power, and Objectivity in MacKinnon and Rawls -- 2 Feminism, Method, and Rawlsian Abstraction -- 3 Rereading Rawls on Self-Respect: Feminism, Family Law, and the Social Bases of Self-Respect -- 4 "The Family as a Basic Institution": A Feminist Analysis of the Basic Structure as Subject -- 5 Rawls, Freedom, and Disability: A Feminist Rereading -- 6 Rawls on International Justice -- 7 Jean Hampton's Reworking of Rawls: Is "Feminist Contractarianism" Useful for Feminism? -- 8 Liberal Feminism: Comprehensive and Political -- References -- List of Contributors -- Index