Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
‘Commonsense Consent and Contract Law’
Joanna Demaree-Cotton and Roseanna Sommers, ‘Autonomy and the Folk Concept of Valid Consent’, 224 Cognition 105065 (2022). Much of contract law – including the doctrines pertaining to contract formation and to defects in the contracting process (such as mistake and duress) – revolves around the question of whether the parties have expressed a valid will […]
Giles Birchley, ‘Anything Goes? Analyzing Varied Understandings of Assent’
ABSTRACT Assent to medical research or treatment may be an intuitively attractive way to address the area between incapacity and capacity that might otherwise be subject to a best interests assessment. Assent has become a widely disseminated concept in law, research, and clinical ethics, but little conceptual work on assent has so far occurred. An […]
Alec Walen, ‘Deontology in Graphs: An Elucidation’
ABSTRACT In this paper, I grapple with four topics that I consider core to what I call ‘basic deontology’, the deontology that concerns what people are duty bound to do as agents and what may be done to them as patients based solely on their interactions as people. The four topics I represent and discuss […]
Rajat Rathi, ‘Essence of Morality in Tort Law’
ABSTRACT The law of private wrongs, particularly common law torts, fails to map onto our moral reality, according to the established orthodoxy. Skeptics concerning the moral basis of tort law have been particularly intrigued by four objections: They claim to throw doubt on the duty of care element’s moral appeal; they attack the objective standard of […]
Chunlin Leonhard, ‘The Inconsistencies of Consent’
ABSTRACT US legal scholars have devoted a lot of attention to the role that consent has played in laws and judicial consent jurisprudence. This essay contributes to the discussion on consent by examining judicial approaches to determining the existence of consent in three selected areas – contracts, tort claims involving medical treatment, and criminal cases […]
Nathaniel Romano, ‘Subsidiarity and Vulnerability Theory: A Case Study for Deepening the Relationship Between Catholic Social Teaching and the Responsive State’
ABSTRACT Religion and religious voices have long had a role to play in shaping community norms and values and public policy; this role continues in contemporary America. Yet, legitimate questions arise about the extent of this role and its place in a pluralist and democratic state. These questions are particularly pronounced when religion is perceived […]
Maxwell and Harding, ‘Private Law, Conscience and Moral Reasoning: The Role of the Judge’
ABSTRACT In this article, we focus on private law doctrines that invoke conscience to set standards for citizens in their dealings with each other. We argue that such conscience-based doctrines can — and should — provide guidance to transacting parties, so as to minimise the risk of unconscionable conduct arising in transactional settings. We argue […]
Aditi Bagchi, ‘Law and the Moral Dynamics of Collective Action’
ABSTRACT Many moral demands on social groups cannot be met without cooperation among group members. In some cases, individual action does not advance the collective moral interest at all without some threshold level of cooperation by other group members. Is an individual required to act as if others will cooperate even if she knows that […]
Laura García-Portela, ‘Backward-Looking Principles of Climate Justice: The Unjustified Move from the Polluter Pays Principle to the Beneficiary Pays Principle’
ABSTRACT Climate change involves changes in the climate system caused by polluting human activities and the social and natural effects of these changes. The historical and anthropogenic grounds of climate change play an important role in climate justice claims. Many climate justice scholars believe that principles of climate justice should account for the historical and […]
Giulio Fornaroli, ‘Neglecting Others and Making It Up to Them: The Idea of a Corrective Duty’
ABSTRACT I aspire to answer two questions regarding the concept of a corrective duty. The first concerns what it means to wrong others, thus triggering a demand for corrections (the ground question). The second relates to the proper content of corrective duties. I first illustrate how three prominent accounts of corrective duties – the Aristotelian […]