Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Sophia Moreau, ‘Objectionable Obligations’
ABSTRACT Many of our moral obligations result partly from wrongs or injustices, whether individual acts of wrongdoing or broader institutional or structural injustices. This article argues that in some of these cases, the agent is left ‘caged in’ by their own moral obligation, in the sense that they are morally compromised whether they fulfil it […]
Suzanne Whitten, ‘The Right to Reputation’
ABSTRACT Reputational damage from others’ speech can profoundly shape what we can do in the world, influencing whether our words receive uptake, the opportunities available to us, and whether we can credibly contest the characterisations made of us. Yet debates about reputational rights typically frame reputation and free speech as competing individual interests, asking when […]
Wanhong Huang, ‘The Normativity of Self-legislation in Intimate Relationships: Freedom, Morality, and Justice’
ABSTRACT Consider a lover who legislates for himself an unconditional law: whatever happens, however the beloved feels, I will keep loving her. This paper subjects such a vow to a three-layered normative analysis, and uses it as a lens on a general structure: the conditions under which the self-legislation of a shared life is free, […]
Takala and Häyry, ‘Justainability’
ABSTRACT Sustainability, properly understood, is an existential moral ideal. The United Nations, however, defines it in terms of 17 indivisible sustainable development goals. This definition changes the core idea of the concept. It turns sustainability from a moral ideal into a set of economy-based political aspirations. The European Union’s bioeconomy strategy demonstrates the shift aptly […]
Richard Pettigrew, ‘Consent and the Formation of Preferences’
ABSTRACT Under ideal conditions, explicit consent and related actions usually change the moral facts in a distinctive way: they make something permissible that was previously impermissible. But they don’t do this if the consent is coerced. And it seems they also don’t do it if the preferences on which the consent is based were formed […]
Jessica Li, ‘Difference-Making Under Metaphysical Indeterminacy’
ABSTRACT Many of the most pressing moral problems we face involve collective harms generated by large numbers of individually insignificant actions. Unlike triggering cases—where a threshold exists such that a single act could be decisive—non-triggering cases lack any such sharp cutoff. In these cases, no individual act appears to make a difference to whether harm […]
Matt Zwolinski, ‘Are markets coercive?’
ABSTRACT Are markets coercive? Contemporary debate is dominated by two answers. The first, longstanding among defenders of free markets, holds that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition: coercion enters the picture only when rights are violated. The second, revived from Robert Hale’s 1923 essay and embraced today by progressive legal scholars and post-liberal conservatives alike, […]
‘An Aspirational Theory of Negligence Responsibility’
Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco, Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective, and Civic Maturity (2025). To truly understand all the nuances and textures in Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco’s rich argument in her recent book, Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective, and Civic Maturity, a reader would likely need full fluency with the methodology and […]
Mumtaz Enser, ‘Responsibility Without Gaps: A Relational Theory of Responsibility in AI Systems’
ABSTRACT This paper synthesizes and systematizes a conceptual framework developed across a series of earlier preprints on artificial intelligence, responsibility, and socio-technical practices. It argues that the so-called ‘responsibility gap’ is not a genuine feature of AI systems, but a category mistake resulting from the mislocation of responsibility at the level of system outputs. Drawing […]
Michelle Madden Dempsey, ‘Wrongs (and Related Concepts) in Moral, Political, and Legal Perspectives’
ABSTRACT This paper develops a framework for understanding wrongs and related concepts by distinguishing three normative perspectives – moral, political, and legal – and analyzing the kinds of reasons that structure each. From the moral perspective, it treats wrongs as breaches of duty on a broadly Razian account, clarifies differences between prima facie, pro tanto, […]