Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
van Domselaar and De Bock, ‘The Case of David vs Goliath. On Legal Ethics and Corporate Lawyering in Large Scale Civil Liability Cases’
ABSTRACT Large corporations contribute to wealth and make an important contribution to economies. At the same time, their business operations and products form a serious threat to the rights of large groups of citizens, be it their right to health, to housing, a minimum wage, occupational safety, privacy, environment, to financial stability or to equality […]
Nicholas McBride, ‘Are There Any Moral Duties?’
ABSTRACT This is a substantially expanded version of a paper that will appear in a collection of essays in honour of John Gardner’s contribution to thinking about private law. The idea that there are such things as moral duties was central to John’s thought about private law. This paper suggests that we have reason to […]
Nicolas Cornell, ‘Looking and Seeing’
ABSTRACT Negligence resides at the boundaries of ethics and perception. Consider a typical case: a driver fails to see an object in the road and causes an accident. In both law and moral life, we routinely hold people accountable for such failures. It is tempting to cast such failures in terms of a breach of […]
Alexandra Trofimov, ‘Negligence is not ignorance’
ABSTRACT Recent interest in the epistemic condition on moral responsibility has raised a new challenge to the view that persons are directly responsible for negligent conduct. According to an influential argument, the epistemic condition on responsibility requires genuine, clear eyed akrasia. All other kinds of wrongdoing, including negligence, constitute ignorant wrongdoing. My aim in this […]
Flanagan, de Almeida, Struchiner and Hannikainen, ‘Moral Appraisals Guide Intuitive Legal Determinations’
ABSTRACT Socialization demands the capacity to observe a plethora of private, legal, and institutional rules. To accomplish this, individuals must grasp rules’ meaning and infer the class of conduct each proscribes. Yet this basic account neglects important nuance in the way we reason about complex cases in which a rule’s literal or textualist interpretation conflicts […]
Critical Legal Thinking on Scott Veitch’s Obligations: New Trajectories in Law
Rights, Obligations and Torture: On Veitch’s Obligations (Julen Etxabe, 14 December) The Structures and Subjects of Obligation: On Veitch’s Obligation (Matt Stone, 15 December) Eco-Legal Bonds: On Veitch’s Obligations (Margaret Davies, 16 December) On Veitch’s Obligations (Stacy Douglas, 17 December) A Reply – Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Scott Veitch, 20 December) First posted 2021-12-20 […]
Vivencio Ballano, ‘Analyzing the Morality of Owning and Suspending Patent Rights for COVID-19 Vaccines in the Light of Catholic Social Teaching’
ABSTRACT Using the Roman Catholic Church’s set of moral principles on social concerns called Catholic social teaching (CST) and utilizing some secondary data and scientific research literature, this article examines the morality of India and South Africa’s request to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily suspend the property rights and patents of top pharmaceutical […]
‘Seeing Negligence for What It Is’
Nicolas Cornell, ‘Looking and Seeing’, in New Conversations in Philosophy, Law and Politics (Ruth Chang and Amia Srinivasan eds, forthcoming), available at SSRN. 1Ls are often taught that the tort of negligence differs from its counterpart in morality by not requiring blameworthy or culpable misconduct. As Holmes famously put it, whereas ‘the courts of Heaven’ […]
‘Legal Theory Lexicon: Metaethics’
“Suppose that we are debating a question in normative legal theory – eg, whether gay couples should have a constitutional right to marry or whether tort law should replace the negligence standard with strict liability. In debates about what the law ought to be, two kinds of questions can arise. There are first order questions, […]
‘False Necessity and the Political Morality of Tort Law’
Sandy Steel, On the Moral Necessity of Tort Law: The Fairness Argument, 41 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 192 (2021). The language of private law is the language of rights, duties, and obligations. There is a long tradition of thought that interprets that language as the reflection of private law’s foundations, and that therefore reads […]