Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
James Chang, ‘The Psychologists are Coming! On Neuroscience and Psychology’s Role in Affecting Our View on Moral and Legal Culpability’
ABSTRACT Advances in social psychology and neurosciences have forced legal theorists to face a dilemma. Legal theorists are finding their ‘intuitive sense of justice’ challenged, as it is confronted by the discovery of biological pathology and social factors external to the human individuals that may be associated with criminal and socially undesirable behavior. This is […]
‘Reflections on Charles Fried’s Contract as Promise’
Charles Fried (1935-2024) passed away recently, and the achievements of his life have been widely recounted: a long-time professor at the Harvard Law School who also fit in service at different times as Solicitor General and as an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He wrote important works across a wide range of […]
Sebastian Lewis, ‘Stare Decisis and Equitable Power’
ABSTRACT One of the main moral costs of stare decisis lies in the continuous possibility of entrenching morally deficient decisions in the law. Although legal systems usually make provision for dealing with morally deficient precedents, there are cases in which the legal obligation of later courts to follow one of these precedents is undefeated. This […]
Rowan Mellor, ‘Joint Ought’
INTRODUCTION Sometimes, what you ought to do depends on what other people will do: whether or not Dad ought to pick the kids up from school depends on whether Mom is going to do it. This seems obvious enough. Yet, it leads to a problem. Suppose that several agents each have two options: A or […]
Daniel Loewe, ‘Compensation and Overcoming of Historical Injustice’
ABSTRACT On the basis of Waldron’s supersession thesis, this article discusses the historical injustice argument and contends that in order to evaluate moral claims for restitution of territorial titles it is important to consider the legitimate expectations of citizens that have been formed historically and have been sanctioned by the state through institutional mechanisms of […]
Shahrzad Goudarzi, Vivienne Badaan, and Eric Knowles, ‘Neoliberalism and the Ideological Construction of Equity Beliefs’
ABSTRACT Researchers across disciplines, including psychology, have sought to understand how people evaluate the fairness of resource distributions. Equity, defined as proportionality of rewards to merit, has dominated the conceptualization of distributive justice in psychology; some scholars have cast it as the primary basis on which distributive decisions are made. The present article acts as […]
Victor Tadros, ‘Beyond the Scope of Consent’
INTRODUCTION When, why, and in what ways, do a person’s errors have a bearing on whether they validly consent to another person’s conduct? One answer relies on the scope of consent. Consider the following schematic set of facts. Y owes X a set of consent-sensitive duties not to perform some set of token acts {v1-vn}. […]
Gregory Keating, ‘Enterprise Liability’
ABSTRACT In American tort law ‘enterprise liability’ is a response to the profound transformation of the social world brought about by modern industrial, technological society. In this world, most accidental harm is not the random byproduct of isolated individuals going about their idiosyncratic existences in civil society. Instead, the harms and wrongs characteristic of modern […]
Breakey, ‘When normal is normative: The ethical significance of conforming to reasonable expectations’
ABSTRACT People give surprising weight to others’ expectations about their behaviour. I argue the practice of conforming to others’ expectations is ethically well-grounded. A special class of ‘reasonable expectations’ can create prima facie obligations even in cases where the expectations arise from contingent pre-existing practices, and the duty-bearer has not created them, or directly benefited […]
d’Almeida, ‘Wrongs and Sanctions in the Pure Theory of Law’
ABSTRACT This short paper addresses a well-known difficulty in the Pure Theory of Law: the definition of a legal wrong. Kelsen was unable to offer a suitable one, critics say. I agree. But the critics misdiagnosed the problem, and prescribed for it a fruitless solution. The reason for Kelsen’s failure, the critics say, was that […]