Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
‘Group Duties: Their Existence and Implications for Individuals’
“Stephanie Collins, Group Duties: Their Existence and Implications for Individuals, Oxford University Press, 2019, 218pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198840275. As Stephanie Collins notes in the opening lines of her book, we (as philosophers, but also as members of political, civic, religious and other communities) frequently assume that groups can have moral responsibilities. In her extraordinarily […]
Elizabeth Emens, ‘On Trust, Law, and Expecting the Worst’
Intimate Lies and the Law. By Jill Elaine Hasday. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2019. Pp. 294. $34.95. A man says he will marry a woman, while he’s secretly involved with someone else, just long enough to get her brother’s kidney. The couple sets a date, and the kidney transplant takes place. Riding home […]
Jeffrey Brown, ‘What Makes Disability Discrimination Wrong?’
INTRODUCTION … In this paper, I aim to connect the rich literature on what makes discrimination wrong to disability law and policy’s reasonable accommodation requirements. Specifically, I argue that disability discrimination, ie, a failure to provide reasonable accommodations, is wrongful when and because it violates the principles of relational equality. One vital concern for relational […]
Samantha Godwin, ‘Children’s Capacities and Paternalism’
ABSTRACT Paternalism is widely viewed as presumptively justifiable for children but morally problematic for adults. The standard explanation for this distinction is that children lack capacities relevant to the justifiability of paternalism. I argue that this explanation is more difficult to defend than typically assumed. If paternalism is often justified when needed to keep children […]
‘Medieval Theories of Obligationes’
“Obligationes (literally, ‘obligations’) or disputations de obligationibus were a medieval disputation format that became very widespread in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although their name might suggest they had something especially to do with ethics or moral duty, they did not. The purpose of these disputations was strictly logical. Several kinds of disputations de obligationibus […]
Kimberley Brownlee, ‘Getting Rights out of Wrongs’
ABSTRACT This chapter presents a typology of the rights that we can get through wrongdoing. It builds up a profile of the contexts in which new wrong-generated rights seem to emerge when we do wrong ourselves (Section 1), and when others do wrong (Section 2). The chapter then analyses why some wrongs change the moral […]
Yitzhak Benbaji, ‘Welfare and Freedom: Towards a Semi-Kantian Theory of Private Law’
ABSTRACT The Kantian theory of private law, as Ernest Weinrib and Arthur Ripstein have developed it over the last two decades, is based on a fundamental normative truth, viz, no person is subordinate or superior to another person. Kantians construe any attempt to understand and justify the distribution of the rights-claims and rights-liberties that constitute […]
Stephen Bero, ‘Holding Responsible and Taking Responsibility’
ABSTRACT In matters of responsibility, there are often two sides to the transaction: one party who holds another responsible, and the other who (ideally) takes responsibility for her conduct. The first side has been closely scrutinized in discussions of the nature of responsibility, due to the influential Strawsonian conjecture that an agent is responsible if […]
‘Self-ownership’ – Special number of Social Philosophy and Policy
The Problem of Self-Ownership (Bas van der Vossen and David Schmidtz) Boundary Problems and Self-Ownership (Jessica Flanigan) Self-Ownership and Agent-Centered Options (Seth Lazar) Ownership and the Moral Significance of the Self (Victor Tadros) Libertarianism without Self-ownership (Chandran Kukathas) Self-Ownership and the Importance of the Human Body (Ian Carter) Self-Ownership as Personal Sovereignty (John Thrasher) When […]
Bert Huang, ‘Law’s Halo and the Moral Machine’
ABSTRACT How will we assess the morality of decisions made by artificial intelligence – and will our judgments be swayed by what the law says? Focusing on a moral dilemma in which a driverless car chooses to sacrifice its passenger to save more people, this study offers evidence that our moral intuitions can be influenced […]