Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Jonas Vandieken, ‘Third-party indignation as acting on behalf of another’
ABSTRACT On a relational understanding of morality, the entire set of our interpersonal moral obligations is best understood as a set of directed obligations. According to this view, A owes it to B to do X, because B has a valid claim against A that A do X. The challenge for the relational understanding of […]
Buchanan and Wilson, ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property’
ABSTRACT We conduct an experiment to compare how people respond to the appropriation of rivalrous versus nonrivalrous goods. Analysis of chat transcripts indicates that people use language associated with ‘stealing’ exclusively for rivalrous goods. Moreover, taking rivalrous goods precipitates negative emotional shifts in conversations, while appropriating nonrivalrous goods does not. Even though their work is […]
Ernest Weinrib, ‘Theology in Vincent v Lake Erie’
ABSTRACT The famous US case of Vincent v Lake Erie refers to the view of theologians that ‘a starving man may, without moral guilt, take what is necessary to sustain life, but it could hardly be said that the obligation would not be upon such a person to pay the value of the property so […]
Eric Boot, ‘Climate Change and Complicit Lawyers’
ABSTRACT This paper sets out to answer two questions: (1) Are lawyers complicit in their fossil fuel clients’ contributions to climate change and, if so, how blameworthy are they for this complicity?; (2) If lawyers are blameworthily complicit, how is the degree of blameworthiness impacted by their professional role? In order to answer the first […]
John Oberdiek, ‘Private Law Adjudication, Retroactivity, and the Rule of Law’
ABSTRACT In his rich discussion of the rule of law in Reciprocal Freedom, Ernest Weinrib observes that the prospectivity central to the rule of law seems incompatible with the apparent retroactivity of adjudication, for ‘parties to litigation are held to a norm of which they had no specific notice when the impugned conduct occurred’. Weinrib […]
Sandy Steel, ‘Private Right and Public Right’
ABSTRACT This comment focuses on two intersections between private right and public right: (1) permissions to use another’s property in circumstances of necessity, and (2) distributive justice. My overall claim is that the boundaries Weinrib deftly articulates between private right and public right should not be drawn exactly as Reciprocal Freedom maintains. Sandy Steel, Private […]
Munch and Steglich-Petersen, ‘Wrongful discrimination as biased discrimination’
ABSTRACT People working on the ethics of discrimination have struggled with accounting for a kind of moral wrongdoing that is thought to be present in all instances of wrongful discrimination. So far, any moral wrong claimed to be characteristic of wrongful discrimination in this way has failed to generalize to all cases of wrongful discrimination, […]
Michael Law-Smith, ‘Perfecting Imperfect Duties Through Law’
ABSTRACT Some moral philosophers argue that our personal obligations to help address the collective economic, environmental, and intergenerational crises of our time are imperfect duties. According to this view, we must all do our part to help resolve these crises, but each of us enjoys some latitude to decide how and when to do so. […]
Sagi Peari, ‘Kant and mistaken payments: a wrong-based perspective’
ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the contemporary puzzle of mistaken payments. What is the normative basis of the transferor’s right to receive their money back? Under what conditions (if at all) should this right be denied by the transferee? While joining the growing literature which doubts the predominant unjust enrichment rationale, the article also […]
Avihay Dorfman, ‘The Independence of Tort Law’
ABSTRACT This paper seeks to identify a structural gap between the principle of freedom as independence and the law of torts in the common law tradition. Contrary to influential arguments made by contemporary proponents of this principle, I argue that independence can neither illuminate nor justify core areas of tort law. This shortcoming has broader […]