Tim Sommers is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at The College of William & Mary. He teaches and writes on ethical, legal, and political philosophy. His current work focusses on equality and inequality, including distributive and relational, gender and racial inequalities. His “Can there be Relational Equality Across Generations? Or at All?” appeared in Res Publica this year, and “Range Egalitarianism: A Novel Principle of Distributive Justice” is under review. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from Brown. Tim has won storytelling slams in London and elsewhere and was once a bodyguard for The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (for one night). He can be reached at [email protected].
by Tim Sommers Do You Own Yourself? In 1646, the Leveller leader, Richard Overton became the first person in the English-speaking world to assert that we own ourselves. “To every Individuall in nature, is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any,” he wrote, “for every one as he…
by Tim Sommers Even as we want to do the right thing, we may wonder if there is “really” a right thing to do. Through most of the twentieth-century most Anglo-American philosophers were some sort of subjectivist or other. Since they focused on language, the way that they tended to put it was something like…