Category Archives: Uncategorized

Top: National Cathedral, Washington, DC Middle: Rollins College, Orlando, FL Bottom: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Photo credits: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Our friend and colleague John Nye, who teaches economics at George Mason, has published a powerful critique of so many proposals calling for Pigovian taxes, i.e. taxes designed to reduce harmful externalities such as carbon emissions. You can read Professor … Continue reading →

With apologies to the late Ronald Coase. I teach at UCF (Go Knights!) but live across town, too far to bike to campus, so to avoid paying for on-campus parking, here is where I usually park off-campus: If the weather … Continue reading →

I presented a common law solution to the so-called “breaking bad problem” in my previous post, where I drew a distinction between void and voidable illicit promises, depending on the location of the harm generated by such promises. Here, I … Continue reading →

Thus far, we have surveyed the work of moral theorists to solve the breaking bad problem, i.e. to figure out what the moral status of an illicit promise is. What if we were to take a different approach, however, one … Continue reading →

In my previous post, I described one possible solution to the breaking bad problem: deny that an immoral promise is a promise. I also explained why such a philosophical solution does not work. Why not? Because a promise is a … Continue reading →

In my previous post I explained why illicit promises generate a moral paradox: promises are supposed to be morally binding, but what about a promise to perform an illegal or immoral act? Broadly speaking, moral philosophers have offered two plausible escape … Continue reading →

Illicit promises–like a promise to obstruct justice or Shylock’s pound-of-flesh pact in The Merchant of Venice or the usurious loan agreement at the center of the Buckeye Check Cashing case or the other examples in our previous post–pose a contradiction … Continue reading →

Let’s resume our legal and moral analyses of illicit promises, shall we? Why are such promises worth studying? Although the idea of an illicit promise may sound esoteric, exotic even, such promises are not infrequent, especially given the increase in … Continue reading →