Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Claudio Michelon, ‘How Capacious is the Kantian System of Rights?’
ABSTRACT This paper discusses ways in which the Kantian account of private law might be more capacious than some of its critics believe it to be, and identifies more precisely the reasons that Kant’s system excludes from bearing on private rights. The development of Weinrib’s conception of private law in Reciprocal Freedom clarifies that certain […]
Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco, ‘Abstraction and Determination in Weinrib’s Reciprocal Freedom: The Dynamics of Backward-Looking and Forward-Looking Deliberation in Judging’
ABSTRACT The recognition of the particular in law is crucial, and any good lawyer or judge should be able to correctly establish the potential instantiation of the abstract into the particular. This is the arduous task of the so-called ‘determination’. In his influential new book, Reciprocal Freedom, Ernest Weinrib elucidates the dynamic relationship of transforming […]
Magaña and González-Ricoy, ‘Intergenerational Subjection’
ABSTRACT Can the dead subject later generations to their will? Legal and political philosophers have long worried about this question. But some have recently argued that subjection between generations that do not overlap is impossible. Against these views, we offer an account of this kind of subjection and the conditions under which it may occur […]
Jonathan Crowe, ‘The Idea of Small Justice’
ABSTRACT Talk about social or distributive justice, at least among legal and political philosophers, tends to focus heavily on institutions. This way of thinking about justice owes a great deal to John Rawls. Rawls’s theory of justice was famously criticised by Robert Nozick who, in turn, attracted an influential critique from GA Cohen. The story […]
‘Block on Defamation’
I’ve always been against defamation law (libel, slander, etc). I assumed it was the plumbline libertarian position, even though many libertarians and most Objectivists seem to favor reputation rights. As I wrote in ‘Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property’: … (more) [StephanKinsella.com, 14 July 2025]
Steven Douglas Smith, ‘The Collapse of Consent’
ABSTRACT Perhaps no concept is as important in modern political-moral thinking as ‘consent’. The ‘consent of the governed’ is thought to be the necessary and prima facie sufficient condition of political authority. Consent is also deemed to be an or even the most important desideratum in a host of other fields and contexts – contracts, […]
Avihay Dorfman, ‘Choosing and Having to be Loyal’
ABSTRACT The distinction between voluntary and law-based obligations is one of private law’s signature features. No less important is the distinction’s underlying normative question, namely, what obligations should be grounded in our choice and what obligations should arise by operation of law. The ambition of this Essay is to introduce a liberal-egalitarian framework – that […]
Elissa Philip Gentry, ‘Disrupting the Risk Ratchets’
ABSTRACT The ‘ratchet’ effect – a phenomenon in which stopping or reversing course becomes impossible – has been largely ignored by the doctrine of informed consent. Health contexts like fertility treatment are particularly vulnerable to such effects: patients may temporarily be willing to accept increasing risks and costs when focusing on the risks and costs […]
Meier, Wylie and Laham, ‘Who’s to Blame? Blame Attribution in Autonomous Human-Machine Interactions’
ABSTRACT As artificial intelligence (AI) systems gain autonomy, they increasingly operate alongside humans in high-stakes domains such as transportation, healthcare, and military operations. This raises critical questions about how people assign blame when both human and machine agents independently contribute to harmful outcomes. While prior research has examined blame attribution in single-agent scenarios or in […]
Calderón Gómez, Talisse and Weymark, ‘Bruni and Sugden on Market Virtues’
ABSTRACT According to classical liberalism, markets are instruments for the mutually advantageous voluntary exchange of goods and services among individuals who have conflicting interests. Some critics have used a virtue ethics understanding of behavior in markets to call for moral limits to markets because this classical view does not respect the internal value of human […]