Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
‘Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility’
A self-driving taxi has no passengers, so it parks itself in a lot to reduce congestion and air pollution. After being hailed, the taxi heads out to pick up its passenger – and tragically strikes a pedestrian in a crosswalk on its way. Who or what deserves praise for the car’s actions to reduce congestion […]
Cameron Harwick, ‘Morality is Fractal’
ABSTRACT If the basic purpose of moral norms is to coordinate on the conditions under which one should cooperate in social dilemmas, this paper shows that the boundaries of such conditions must be fractal. In other words, as one focuses on the border of the area in signal space where the best response flips from […]
Guanghua Yu, ‘The Idea of Private Law: A Communitarian version of Kantian Rights’
ABSTRACT This Article begins with the introduction of two competing schools in private law. One school claims that private law is to achieve efficient resource allocation or wealth maximization. The other school follows the bipolar structure of corrective justice with the assistance of the Kantian theory. While each side is very strong and elegant, neither […]
Diogo Tapada dos Santos, ‘A Concept of Personal Autonomy Fit for Contract Law’
ABSTRACT The interplays between autonomy and many areas of law are somehow evident but many times redundant and unclear. In this paper, I offer an account of personal autonomy that can be useful in reading private law phenomena, especially focusing on the doctrine of contract as promise. This doctrine, which assimilates contracts and promises, poses […]
‘The Ethics of Personalised Digital Duplicates: A Minimally Viable Permissibility Principle’
It’s now possible, with the right set of training data, for anyone to create a digital copy of anyone. Some people have already done this as part of research projects, and employers are proposing to do it for employees. What are the ethics of this practice? Should you ever consent to having a digital copy […]
Igor Wysocki, ‘Blackmail, Unproductive Exchanges, Fraud, and the Libertarian Theory of Voluntariness’
ABSTRACT The main purpose of this paper is to rationally reconstruct Nozick’s account of unproductivity, especially vis-à-vis his characteristically libertarian, and hence uncompromising, ban on fraud. We posit that, when Nozick’s theory is interpreted charitably, it does not yield to contradictory prescriptions concerning permissibility. That is, there does not have to be any inconsistency in […]
Calderón Gómez, Talisse and Weymark, ‘Market Virtues and Respect for Human Dignity’
ABSTRACT Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden have provided a normative defense of markets from a virtue ethics perspective. They interpret market exchange as being a practice in the sense of Alasdair MacIntyre. For Bruni and Sugden, the telos of a market is mutual benefit and a market virtue is a character trait or disposition that […]
Rebecca Stone, ‘Who are the Bearers of Tort Law’s Duties?’
ABSTRACT Like corrective justice theorists, Gregory Keating contends that tort law is centrally concerned with the vindication of individual rights. Like economic theorists, he rejects the idea that individual injurers are the inevitable site of tort duties. While some tort doctrines instantiate relational rights and duties, others instantiate collective duties to potential victims. There is […]
Babie, Williams, Viven-Wilksch and Stewart, ‘Private Law as Morality: A Critique of Peter M Gerhart’s Contract Law and Social Morality’
ABSTRACT This review essay offers a constructive critique of Peter M Gerhart’s Contract Law and Social Morality (‘CLSM’); it examines, in a very preliminary way, whether humans – parties to contractual negotiation – ever behave in other-regarding, or altruistic, ways. The essay does this through three explorations or investigations. The first considers other-regarding behavior, or […]
Linda Eggert, ‘Compensating beneficiaries’
ABSTRACT This paper illuminates a typically obscured ground for rectificatory obligations: harms justified as ‘lesser evils’. Lesser-evil harms are not the result of overall morally prohibited acts but of acts permissibly carried out to prevent significantly greater harm. The paper argues that harms caused as unintended side effects of acting on lesser-evil justifications, notably in […]