Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Devaney and Holm, ‘The Transmutation of Deference in Medicine: An Ethico-Legal Perspective’
Abstract This article critically considers the question of whether an increase in legal recognition of patient autonomy culminating in the decision of the Supreme Court in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board in 2015 has led to the death of deference to doctors, not only within the courts and healthcare regulatory arenas in England and Wales […]
Matthew Kramer, ‘The Demandingness of Deontological Duties’
Abstract Consequentialist doctrines have often been criticized for their excessive demandingness, in that they require the thorough instrumentalization of each person’s life as a vehicle for the production of good consequences. In turn, the proponents of such doctrines have often objected to what they perceive as the irrationality of the demandingness of deontological duties. In […]
Bradley Wendel, ‘Economic Rationality and Ethical Values in Design-Defect Analysis: The Trolley Problem and Autonomous Vehicles’
Abstract The trolley problem is a well-known thought experiment in moral philosophy, used to explore issues such as rights, deontological reasons, and intention and the doctrine of double effect. Recently it has featured prominently in popular discussions of decision making by autonomous vehicle systems. For example, a Mercedes-Benz executive stated that, if faced with the […]
Craig Purshouse, ‘Utilitarianism as tort theory: countering the caricature’
Abstract Utilitarianism, the view that ‘actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness’, is no longer taken seriously either as a moral principle or as a theory of tort law. Rights-based theories appear to have won the day. The purpose of this […]
JE Penner, ‘We All Make Mistakes: A “Duty of Virtue” Theory of Restitutionary Liability for Mistaken Payments’
Abstract In contrast to the moral foundations of contract, tort, and the law of property, which are generally regarded as elements of Kantian ‘right’, the liability to return the value of mistaken payments is, it is argued, an example of the law’s enforcing a duty of virtue, the legalisation of the duty of beneficence in […]
‘Shiffrin on Morality and Negligence’
“Seana Shiffrin’s The Moral Neglect of Negligence (Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy vol 3) has been posted on dropbox. Here is an excerpt: ‘The moral significance of negligence is regularly downplayed in the legal and philosophical literature. Some question whether negligence is a coherent wrong at all, while others locate it on a fairly low […]
Kenneth Himma, ‘Is the Concept of Obligation Moralized?’
Abstract Conceptual jurisprudence is concerned to explicate the concept of law and other concepts central to core legal practices, as we understand them. The centrality of obligation-talk to legal practice is obvious, as the very point of litigation is to resolve disputes regarding the obligations of the various parties. In this essay, I argue that […]
Hurd and Moore, ‘The Hohfeldian Analysis of Rights’
Abstract This article is about Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s famous analysis of one of the most basic concepts used in law and in ethics: the concept of a right. Hohfeld urged that usages of the term ‘right’ are ambiguous between two senses of the word: persons have rights to do things and rights to have things […]
John Gardner, ‘Tort Law and Its Theory’
Abstract This paper explores the body of scholarly writing known as ‘tort theory’, and in particular the polarization of ‘economic’ and ‘moral’ approaches to the subject. It queries the ambitions, the discourses, and the presuppositions of work on both sides of that divide. In particular it investigates: the sense in which both approaches are (and […]
Iain Brassington, ‘On the Relationship between Medical Ethics and the Law’
Abstract In his comments on Bland, Lord Justice Hoffmann stated that ‘I would expect medical ethics to be formed by the law rather than the reverse’. But what judges expect, and what they have a right to expect, are different things; I shall use Hoffmann LJ’s statement as a way into looking at the relationship […]