Publications
“Sin, Tyranny, and the Metaphysics of Money” in Ethics, January 2026
This paper (co-authored with David Birks) argues that certain influential objections to the state funding things like art galleries, abortion services, and churches rest on a mistaken understanding of the nature of money. These objections start from the idea that when the state funds something, it does so via taxation. Taxation coerces people, and coercion is the kind of thing that requires special justification. For political liberals, coercion by the state cannot be legitimately justified by appeal to some substantive conception of the good life. And so, insofar as justifications for state provision of art galleries, abortion services, or churches depend on an appeal to substantive conceptions of the good, these are not the kinds of things that can be legitimately funded via coercive taxation. In reply, we note that when a modern state funds something, it typically does so by creating money and not by coercively taking money from taxpayers. If this is right, a key step in the political liberal’s argument is blocked. We go on to consider how political liberals might respond to this problem.
Projects
“A Measure of Coercion” (in preparation)
One way in which political liberals might respond to the money problem is by agreeing that no one is directly coerced when the state creates money, but nonetheless arguing that creating money coerces people indirectly. Creating money can be inflationary and a higher rate of taxation may be required in order to balance this inflationary effect. If we think that whenever the rate of taxation is increased, there is more or greater coercion of taxpayers than there was before, then the funding of art galleries and the like will indirectly result in coercion that (by the political liberal’s lights) cannot be legitimately justified. This would solve the political liberal’s money problem. Whatever one thinks of this argument, it raises a more general question about when we should say that there is more or greater coercion. That is, it asks how we should measure coercion. In this paper (again co-authored with David Birks), we consider how best to answer this question and set out some implications of answering it in what we think is the most defensible way.