Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Sangiuliano, ‘Bottom-Up and Top-Down Theories of Antidiscrimination Law’
ABSTRACT This article restates and critically analyses two prevalent philosophical approaches towards studying antidiscrimination law. So-called ‘bottom-up’ approaches are committed to ‘moralism’, the view that a discriminatory act’s being morally wrong gives a reason to legally prohibit it, and a ‘prescriptive’ method for theorising about antidiscrimination law, which constructs a theory of the moral wrongness […]
Kirchmair, ‘How to Regulate Moral Dilemmas Involving Self-Driving Cars: The 2021 German Act on Autonomous Driving, the Trolley Problem, and the Search for a Role Model’
ABSTRACT With the promulgation of the Autonomous Driving Act in summer 2021, Germany took the worldwide lead on regulating self-driving cars. This Article discusses the (non-)regulation of moral dilemmas in this act. To this end, it clarifies the role of the so-called trolley problem, which influenced the report of the German Ethics Commission that paved […]
Gibert, ‘The Wrong of Wrongful Manipulation’
INTRODUCTION Why is it wrong to engage in manipulation, when it is wrong to do so? Manipulating someone can be wrong not (or not only) because it’s manipulative, but because it has other bad effects. I am interested in the first sort of wrong. What is it about wrongful instances of manipulation that makes them […]
Knudsen, ‘A Pluralist Approach to Joint Responsibility’
INTRODUCTION Sometimes reactive attitudes target groups rather than individuals. This suggests that groups are sometimes morally responsible. A growing number of moral philosophers agree with this, yet fail to recognize just how diverse the set of morally responsible groups is. Dominant approaches to group responsibility thus suggest that only one type of group is morally […]
Tan, ‘The Enigma of Interpersonal Justice in Private Law Theory’
ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to establish that contemporary private law theory has located no foolproof conception of interpersonal justice. I examine four accounts and find them wanting: the instrumentalist deterrence and loss-spreading approaches of economists; Kantian right and corrective justice; critical and social justice accounts; and the human flourishing approach. If my […]
Gilligan, ‘Ernest J Weinrib, Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right’
Ernest J Weinrib, Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, 240 pp, hb, £90.00. At the heart of Ernest Weinrib’s much-celebrated theory of private law lies an insistence on private law’s distinctiveness qua private, and the resultant impossibility of its satisfactory theoretical reduction to mere ‘public law in disguise’ (L […]
Fahmy, ‘Never Merely as a Means: Rethinking the Role and Relevance of Consent’
ABSTRACT For several decades, Kant scholars, inspired by the Groundwork false-promising example, have constructed consent-based criteria for using another merely as a means. Unfortunately, these consent-based accounts produce assessments that are both counter-intuitive and un-Kantian in relatively simple cases. This article investigates why these consent-based accounts fail and offers an alternative. The Groundwork false-promising example […]
Daniel Viehoff, ‘Legitimate Injustice and Acting for Others’
“It is practically inevitable that even the best-intentioned public officials occasionally inflict unjust harm on people who should not have to suffer it. They mistakenly arrest innocent suspects, and convict innocent defendants. They erroneously adopt and enforce criminal laws that unduly restrict our freedom. They vote for, implement, and enforce tax laws that unfairly burden […]
Erik Encarnacion, ‘Book Review: Andrew Gold, The Right to Redress (2020)’
ABSTRACT A book review for Andrew Gold’s book, The Right to Redress, now out in paperback. Highlights Gold’s distinction between redressive and corrective justice. Praises as distinctive and provocative his ‘persistence thesis’, which is a version of the continuity thesis applied to rights of self-defense and similar rights to protect one’s rights. Argues that, given […]
Stephen Bogle, Review of Obligations by Scott Veitch
Obligations by Scott Veitch, Abingdon, Routledge, 2021, 121 pp, £46.99 (Hardback) and £16.99 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-0-367-34598-3. In this book, Veitch starts with the observation that our social, political, and legal worlds are filled with obligations, yet this has been overshadowed in modernity by a legal prioritisation of rights. We live, it appears, in the ‘age […]