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Jon Garthoff

Assistant Professor
Office: Crowe 3-148
E-mail: garthoff@northwestern.edu
Phone: 847-491-4452

Jon Garthoff's (Ph.D. UCLA, 2004) primary philosophical interests lie in ethical theory and political philosophy, including especially the Kantian traditions within these disciplines. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Structuring Value, which focuses on moral obligation, the idea that there are actions we must do. The monograph proposes that moral obligations are generated by a distinctive kind of value and uses this conception of obligation to illuminate the two central concerns of political philosophy: justice and legitimacy.

Curriculum Vitae

 

Work

Publications

• "Meriting Concern and Meriting Respect", Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 5:2, 2011. In this essay I argue that the best way to incorporate animal moral standing into Kantianism is to relax its logocentrism and maintain that consciousness, understood as a non-rational capacity, is a locus of moral standing independent from its relationship to rationality.
• "Philosophy as a Transhumanistic Discipline", forthcoming in Nanotechnology and the Weight of Justice, Eds. Laurie Zoloth and Daniel Seltzer, MIT Press, likely 2011. In this essay I defend the permissibility and advisability of transhumanism and I explore how issues raised by the emergence of biomedical nanotechnologies illuminate the nature of human well-being and affect what we should make of the basic facts of the human condition.
• "Legitimacy Is Not Authority", Law and Philosophy 29:6, 2010. In this essay I argue that the legitimacy of a law is neither necessary nor sufficient for its normative authority, and I argue further that the need for legitimacy in law arises regardless of whether it is coercively enforced.
• "Mimicking Korsgaard", in Rethinking Kant: Volume Two, Ed. Pablo Muchnik, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. In this essay I elucidate and motivate some of Christine Korsgaard’s insights about value and its relationship to when actions are morally required by attempting to show how these insights can be recovered within an account of value very different from Korsgaard’s, and very different from Immanuel Kant’s as well.
• "Structuring Ends", Philosophia 38:4, 2010. In this essay I defend an account of human well-being which seeks to capture the virtues of both aim-constituted and substantive good approaches. I explicate a kind of end that has received insufficient attention in the literature on practical reason and I show how to use this end to reconcile these two approaches to the theory of well-being.
• "The Embodiment Thesis", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7:1, 2004. In this essay I defend the claim that moral values underdetermine the obligations and entitlements of individuals and I argue that actual social structures must embody morality by specifying these moral relations.
  
• "Zarathustra's Dilemma and the Embodiment of Morality", Philosophical Studies 117:2, 2004. In this essay I defend and expand on John Rawls’s view that what morality requires of major social institutions – the “basic structure of society” – is fundamentally different from what morality requires of individual moral agents. I do this by motivating the view that many moral relations are not purely interpersonal, but rather are specified and mediated by the institutions of the basic structure.
  

Work in Progress

• "Moral Coordination Problems". In this essay I investigate a family of issues in moral and political philosophy I call moral coordination problems. Moral coordination problems arise because, in some domains of moral concern, the abstract content of morality is insufficiently specific to guide action. For example: individuals with ample resources are obligated to provide aid to those in extreme poverty, but in conditions like ours where a large number of people are obligated to provide such aid and a large number of people are entitled to receive it, morality in the abstract fails to specify what each individual is obligated to provide and to whom she is obligated to provide it. These obligations can guide action with sufficient precision only if those obligated to provide coordinate their provision. There are multiple fair schemes of provision, however, so individuals face a problem of coordination when discharging obligations of aid.
• "Perfectionist Liberalism". In this essay I explain the commitment in political philosophy called “perfectionist liberalism”, and I also explain why despite appearances this view need not include any problematic internal tensions. As part of this effort I present a brief overview of the historical tradition from which perfectionist liberalism emerged and I situate perfectionist liberalism with respect to its chief contemporary rival within the liberal tradition: the anti-perfectionism of John Rawls and his followers.
• "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus Revisited". In this essay I argue for a novel interpretation of John Rawls's model of overlapping consensus. I argue further that although overlapping consensus is more appealing on this interpretation than on the standard interpretation, the model so interpreted should neverthess be rejected.
• "The First Virtue and the Realistic Utopia". In this essay I argue that the best Rawlsian account of justice maintains that securing constitutional essentials and a suitable social minimum has the normative force of moral requirement but that satisfying the fair equality of opportunity principle and the difference principle has the normative force only of a regulative ideal.
• "The Priority and Posteriority of Right". In this essay I articulate and motivate two pairs of appealing theses about the relation within ethical theory between the domain of the right and the domain of the good. I then sketch and argue for an account of morality that is able to satisfy all four theses, notwithstanding a nearly universal consensus that they are not all true.

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