Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Journals

  • Jonathan Wight’s 2014 Presidential Address to the Association for Social Economics

    Mark D. White Because he's too bashful to tell you, I'll tell you that Jonathan Wight's 2014 Presidential Address for the Association for Social Economics, delivered at January's ASSA meetings, has just been published in the Review of Social Economy, and the link has been posted to the ASE blog. The title is "Economics within…

  • What explains the lack of criminal prosecutions related to the financial meltdown?

    Mark D. White Many people, including in the media and academia, have wondered about the lack of criminal prosecutions stemming from the 2007-08 financial meltdown, especially related to fraud in the banking sector. In the new issue of Crime, Law and Social Change (61/1, February 2014), Henry N. Pontell, William K. Black, and Gilbert Geis…

  • Revise and resubmit… with style!

    Mark D. White This weekend's Wall Street Journal featured an article by Helen Sword entitled "Yes, Even Professors Can Write Stylishly," in which she criticized the quality of writing by most academics–and praised the exceptions, explaining some features that make good academic writing shine. (More can be found in her book, Stylish Academic Writing.) Having…

  • The Currency of Justice and Freedom?

    Mark D. White When economists debate the neutality of money, they are concerned with its effects on real output and growth. But other scholars, such as philosophers and sociologists, consider the social neutrality of money–that is, whether the pervasive use of money in society has a qualitative effect on the way we think about both…

  • Kant and copyright: Public sphere vs public domain

    Mark D. White Anne Barron (LSE, Department of Law) has an interesting paper in the latest issue of Law and Philosophy (31/1, January 2012) exploring a Kantian approach to copyright law: Kant, Copyright and Communicative Freedom Abstract: The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information,…

  • How does lack of desire compare to its satisfaction?

    Mark D. White A fascinating article in the latest issue of Utilitas (23/4, December 2011) by Toby Handfield (Monash University) titled "Absent Desires" takes up the issue of absent desire in relation to satisfied and frustrated desire, arguing that having absent desires is incommensurable with having satisfied desires: What difference does it make to matters…

  • The Moral Problem of Risk Impositions

    Mark D. White Just a brief note to draw your attention to a terrific new article forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy that summarizes the literature on the ethics of imposing risk, an omnipresent problem with no easy solution but which is of critical concern to anyone dealing with issues of harm, whether from…

  • Assessing Competence to Refuse Medical Treatment

    Mark D. White Last night I read a wonderful and concise article by Jillian Craigie (King's College London) from the latest issue of Bioethics (25/6, July 2011) titled "Competence, Practical Rationality and What a Patient Values." The abstract follows: According to the principle of patient autonomy, patients have the right to be self-determining in decisions…

  • Making Good Choices in Situations of Radical Uncertainty

    Mark D. White Barry Schwartz (author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less), Yakov Ben-Haim, and Cliff Dasco have a paper in the latest issue of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (41/2, June 2011) titled "What Makes a Good Decision? Robust Satisficing as a Normative Standard of Rational Decision Making," in…

  • Steve Medema on the Coase Theorem and history of economic thought

    Mark D. White In the latest issue of Journal of the History of Economic Thought (33/1, March 2011), we find Steve Medema's History of Economic Society presidential address, titled "The Coase Theorem: Lessons for the Study of the Study of Economic Thought": The Coase theorem has occupied a prominent place in economic discourse for the last…