Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Joanna Langille, ‘The Constitutive Demands of Corrective Justice’
ABSTRACT Ernest Weinrib’s recent book, Reciprocal Freedom, considers the implications of his Kantian corrective justice account of private law for other aspects of the legal order (including distributive justice, constitutional rights and the rule of law). The book addresses an important ambiguity left open in Weinrib’s past work: whether corrective justice places any limits on […]
Rebecca Stone, ‘Private Rights: Artificial but Not Instrumental’
ABSTRACT Philosophers tend to be more skeptical of natural property rights than natural contractual rights, arguably reflecting core differences between the two types of right. By contracting parties define their rights together enabling them to reflect morality precisely, while the relations established by property are shaped without the participation of many of the parties to […]
Atilla Kasap, ‘Philosophical grounds for regulating the lawful operation of autonomous vehicles’
ABSTRACT The predictability of algorithms will allow us, for the first time in history, to determine in advance how autonomous vehicles (AVs) will respond to unavoidable traffic accidents. This article delves into consequentialism, including act and rule utilitarianism, and deontology to explore how algorithms should make decisions in various crash situations. As a solution, it […]
Sandy Steel, ‘Private Right and Public Right’
ABSTRACT This comment on Professor Weinrib’s Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right focuses on two intersections between private right and public right: (1) permissions to use another’s property in circumstances of necessity, (2) distributive justice. My overall claim is that the boundaries Weinrib deftly articulates between private right and public right should not be […]
Raul Madden, ‘Equity in Kantian Morality: Unmuting the “Divinity Who Cannot Be Heard”’
ABSTRACT The concept of equity is indispensable to Kantian morality. This claim is controversial given Kant’s labelling of equity as an unenforceable right and his reputed moral absolutism. A need for equity, however, can be elicited from within his writing. For Kant, human dignity constitutes the basis of duty. Conscience demands conformity with duty. Our […]
Vishnu Sridharan, ‘The Composition of Risk’
In this paper, I present a novel contractualist analysis of risk-imposing activities. According to most ex ante contractualists, there is a principled distinction to be made between permissible risk-imposing activities such as medical treatments and impermissible risk-imposing activities such as medical experimentation.Footnote1 After demonstrating that previous attempts to make this distinction are implausible, I argue […]
Adam Slavny, ‘Relational Fault and Unforeseeable Victims’
ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue against a widely held view about interpersonal moral relations inspired by Benjamin Cardozo’s landmark judgment in Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Company, which I call the Relational Fault Requirement. The requirement holds that in order for A to commit a directed wrong against B, A must be at fault […]
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 […]
Taimie Bryant, ‘What If Animals Are Moral Agents?’
In an essay titled ‘Should Animals Be Able to Sue People?’, Professor Sherry Colb considers Justice v Vercher, a lawsuit brought by Justice, a horse seeking damages for injuries resulting from his previous owner’s gross negligence. Gwendolyn Vercher had already been convicted of animal cruelty and paid the statutorily required restitution, but that restitution was […]
James Taylor, ‘Informed Consent, Autonomy, False Beliefs, and Ignorance’
ABSTRACT It is widely believed that health policy should take care to ensure that persons are informed about the expected risks as well as the anticipated advantages of medical procedures. This is often justified by a concern for the moral value of personal autonomy, as it is widely believed that to the extent that a […]