Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Bastian Steuwer, ‘Contractualism, Complaints, and Risk’
ABSTRACT How should contractualists assess the permissibility of risky actions? Both main views on the question, ex ante and ex post, fail to distinguish between different kinds of risk. In this article, I argue that this overlooks a third alternative that I call ‘objective ex ante contractualism’. Objective ex ante substitutes discounting complaints by epistemic […]
Andrew Halpin, ‘No-Right and its Correlative’
ABSTRACT This article aims to dispel the confusion over no-right by drawing attention to three straightforward points, and by examining a neglected source of complexity. The former embrace the practical significance of a no-right within Hohfeld’s scheme; the important difference between the practical significance of a normative position and the theoretical status of the concept […]
Stefan Riedener, ‘Don’t make a fetish of faults: a vindication of moral luck’
ABSTRACT Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove recklessly but didn’t harm anyone, and Cleo drove recklessly and killed a child. Luck-advocates emphasize that in real life we do blame such agents very unequally. […]
‘Medieval Theories of Conscience’
“The question of what role the human mind plays in moral behaviour – or the study of moral psychology – has been a fruitful area of research in medieval philosophy since at least the early to mid-1990s. Since then scholars have done much to illuminate medieval contributions to such perennial topics as the freedom of […]
Jay Spitzley, ‘The Future of Moral Responsibility and Desert’
ABSTRACT Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad […]
Maja Nisevic, ‘A study on the personal data processing and the UCPD: Focused on Italy, Germany and the UK’
ABSTRACT Manipulation with Big Data Analytics allows commercial exploitation of individuals based on unfair commercial practices. Consequently, the concepts of consumer protection are essential in the data-driven economy and a central issue for effective safety for individuals in the Big Data Age. Although the fields of consumer protection and data protection in the European Union […]
‘Legal Theory Lexicon: Normativity, Morality, and Ethics’
“In ordinary English, the words we frequently use words like ‘normative’, ‘moral’, and ‘ethical’ in loose and imprecise ways. Sometimes, these terms are used interchangeably, and so one could say that a ‘normative argument’ is an ‘ethical argument’ and that both of those phrases are equivalent to ‘moral argument’. There is nothing wrong these usages […]
Jeffrey Helmreich, ‘Accepting Forgiveness’
ABSTRACT Forgiving wrongdoers who neither apologized, nor sought to make amends in any way, is controversial. Even defenders of the practice agree with critics that such ‘unilateral’ forgiveness involves giving up on the meaningful redress that victims otherwise justifiably demand from their wrongdoers: apology, reparations, repentance, and so on. Against that view, I argue here […]
‘Deontological Ethics’
“The word deontology derives from the Greek words for duty (deon) and science (or study) of (logos). In contemporary moral philosophy, deontology is one of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. In other words, deontology falls within the domain of moral theories that guide and assess our […]
Victor Mardellat, ‘Contractualism and the paradox of deontology’
ABSTRACT Scanlonian contractualism rejects the consequentialist assumptions about morality, value, and rationality in virtue of which deontological constraints appear paradoxical. And yet, Jeffrey Brand-Ballard and Robert Shaver have claimed that it cannot succeed in defending the said restrictions. That is because they see Scanlon’s tie-breaking argument as threatening to justify aggregation in paradox of deontology […]