Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Cato and Yahagi, ‘Discounting Offenders’ Private Benefits’
ABSTRACT There is an ongoing debate on whether offenders’ private benefits must be counted as part of social welfare. It has been argued on utilitarian grounds that their utility must be included, but it has also been argued on explicit or implicit deontological grounds that their utility should not be counted at all. In this […]
Daniel Fryer, ‘Justice as Repair’
ABSTRACT One standard story in political philosophy says that reparation is best viewed as supplementary to an ahistorical project of distributive justice. Once we figure out the forward-looking ideal, the argument goes, we can then focus on the necessary reparative interventions to transition us to that ideal state. I argue that this approach is mistaken. […]
Friedman and Adler, ‘Moral Capitalism: A Biblical Perspective’
ABSTRACT We argue that laissez-faire capitalism in its current form is unsustainable, and that if it is to survive, we need to develop a new moral capitalism. An underexplored source on the subject that may provide insight into current difficulties is the Hebrew Bible. We explicate four basic principles of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud […]
Bernat Roca, ‘Moral Rationalism and the Paradox of Compensation’
ABSTRACT This article introduces the Paradox of Compensation, a challenge for theories of moral obligation. The central question is how demands for compensation can be legitimate – as they often seem to be – even when the duty-bearer is justified in setting the relevant duty aside. I argue that the moral frameworks developed by R […]
Ira Chadha-Sridhar, ‘Why do we Owe Duties to Care?’
ABSTRACT We are often responsible for the care of others – we find ourselves accepting these responsibilities, and in turn, holding others accountable for fulfilling theirs. Yet while it is clear that we sometimes owe such duties, it is less clear why we owe them. What explains our duties to care? It is this question […]
Symposium: Weinrib’s Reciprocal Freedom (Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence)
Introduction (Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco) From Private to Public Right: Resizing Correlativity and Systematicity (Aditi Bagchi) On the Possibility and the Form of Acquired Rights to External Things (Stephen Bero) How Capacious is the Kantian System of Rights? (Claudio Michelon) Private Law Adjudication, Retroactivity, and the Rule of Law (John Oberdiek) Orthodox Private Law and Social Subordination […]
Paul Miller, ‘Good Faith as Integrity: Good Faith and the Nature of Voluntary Obligation’
ABSTRACT Good faith is a protean concept: it takes on different shades of meaning, and has been made to do many quite distinctive things, in private, public, and international law. These qualities have made good faith perplexing. Partly in consequence, conventional wisdom on good faith is decidedly anti-theoretical. Some have argued that good faith is […]
Stephen Bero, ‘On the Possibility and the Form of Acquired Rights to External Things’
ABSTRACT In the third chapter of his book, Reciprocal Freedom, Ernest Weinrib lucidly lays out a Kantian conception of ownership, and deftly lays to rest a series of questions to which that conception might be thought to give rise. Here I explore two issues lying at the root of the Kantian account of ownership as […]
Crescente Molina, ‘Wrongs and Rights Come Apart, by Nicolas Cornell’
Wrongs and Rights Come Apart, by Nicolas Cornell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025. Pp xii + 291. In Wrongs and Rights Come Apart, Nicolas Cornell argues against what he claims is a widespread thesis in normative theory: that committing a moral wrong against someone (or simply ‘wronging’ them) necessarily amounts to violating their rights. […]
Jonas Vandieken, ‘Third-party indignation as acting on behalf of another’
ABSTRACT On a relational understanding of morality, the entire set of our interpersonal moral obligations is best understood as a set of directed obligations. According to this view, A owes it to B to do X, because B has a valid claim against A that A do X. The challenge for the relational understanding of […]