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  1. An Anatomy of Moral Responsibility.M. Braham & M. van Hees - 2012 - Mind 121 (483):601-634.
    This paper examines the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. A central feature of the analysis is a condition that we term the ‘avoidance potential’, which gives precision to the idea that moral responsibility implies a reasonable demand that an agent should have acted otherwise. We show how our theory can allocate moral responsibility to individuals in complex collective action problems, an issue that sometimes goes by the name of ‘the problem of many hands’. We also show how it allocates (...)
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  • “My Emissions Make No Difference”: Climate Change and the Argument from Inconsequentialism.Joakim Sandberg - 2011 - Environmental Ethics 33 (3):229-48.
    “Since the actions I perform as an individual only have an inconsequential effect on the threat of climate change,” a common argument goes, “it cannot be morally wrong for me to take my car to work everyday or refuse to recycle.” This argument has received a lot of scorn from philosophers over the years, but has actually been defended in some recent articles. A more systematic treatment of a central set of related issues shows how maneuvering around these issues is (...)
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  • Political liberty: Who needs it?Jason Brennan - 2012 - Social Philosophy and Policy 29 (1):1-27.
    Research Articles Jason Brennan, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.
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  • What is the Point of Political Equality?Daniel Wodak - 2024 - Philosophical Review 133 (4):367-413.
    Political egalitarians hold that there is a distinct ideal of political equality, which defines and justifies democracy. So what is political equality? The orthodox view says it is equality of opportunity for political influence, not equality of political influence. The first goal of this article is to argue against this view about the nature of political equality. From 1962 to 1983, Australia’s First Nations citizens had the right to vote, but unlike other citizens they did not have the duty to (...)
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  • Strategic collective action and the proportionality of reasons to expected benefits.Howard Leo Nye, Madeline Youngman & Avontay Williams - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-32.
    We argue that, in order to explain the relative strengths of our reasons to contribute to different collective endeavours, approaches to the ethics of collective action must understand the strengths of our reasons to make a given contribution as proportional to its expected benefits, or its chances of bringing about benefits in proportion to their magnitudes. The view that most clearly meets this proportionality requirement is the expected consequences approach, which identifies our reasons to perform an act with its expected (...)
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  • Evidence, Causality, and Collective Action.Samuel Fullhart - 2024 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (5-6):1-19.
    In collective action problems, large numbers of contributions together produce a good outcome, but any one contribution often makes no difference. Many philosophers think that act consequentialism implies that individuals should not contribute in these cases, given that their contributions cannot be expected to affect the outcome. Nearly everyone has assumed that the relevant expected effects of an action are those effects that are counterfactually dependent on what a given agent does. This assumption is at the heart of causal decision (...)
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  • Which Elections? A Dilemma for Proponents of the Duty to Vote.Andre Leo Rusavuk - 2024 - Res Publica 30 (3):547-565.
    Proponents of the duty to vote (DTV) argue that in normal circumstances, citizens have the moral duty to vote in political elections. Discussions about DTV analyze _what_ the duty is, _who_ has this duty, _when_ they have it, and _why_ they have it. Missing are answers to the Specification Question: to _which_ elections does DTV apply? A dilemma arises for some supporters of DTV—in this paper, I focus on Julia Maskivker’s work—because either answer is problematic. First, I argue that it (...)
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  • Charitable Matching and Moral Credit.Daniel Nolan - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):687-696.
    When charitable matching occurs, both the person initially offering the matching donation and the person taking up the offer may well feel they have done something better than if they had donated on their own without matching. They may well feel they deserve some credit for the matched donation as well as their own. Can they both be right? Natural assumptions about charitable matching lead to puzzles that are challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way.
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  • Is There a Duty to Read the News?Amy Berg - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (3-4):243-267.
    It seems as though we have a duty to read the news – that we’re doing something wrong when we refuse to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. But why? I argue that some plausible justifications for a duty to read the news fail to fully explain this duty: it cannot be justified only by reference to its consequences, or as a duty of democratic citizenship, or as a self-regarding duty. It can, however, be justified on the (...)
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  • Collective Actions, Individual Reasons, and the Metaphysics of Consequence.Samuel Lee - 2022 - Ethics 133 (1):72-105.
    I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter’s large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leading theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural principle about causation (...)
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  • Collective harm and the inefficacy problem.Julia Nefsky - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (4):e12587.
    This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...)
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  • Climate Change and Causal Inefficacy: Why Go Green When It Makes No Difference?James Garvey - 2011 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 69:157-174.
    Think of some environmentally unfriendly choices – taking the car instead of public transport or driving an SUV, just binning something recyclable, using lots of plastic bags, buying an enormous television, washing clothes in hot water, replacing something when you could make do with last year's model, heating rooms you don't use or leaving the heating high when you could put on another layer of clothing, flying for holidays, wasting food and water, eating a lot of beef, installing a patio (...)
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  • How you can help, without making a difference.Julia Nefsky - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (11):2743-2767.
    There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and (...)
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  • What does it mean to have an equal say?Zsolt Kapelner - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-15.
    Democracy is the form of government in which citizens have an equal say in political decision-making. But what does this mean precisely? Having an equal say is often defined either in terms of equal power to influence political decision-making or in terms of appropriate consideration, i.e., as a matter of attributing appropriate deliberative weight to citizens’ judgement in political decision-making. In this paper I argue that both accounts are incomplete. I offer an alternative view according to which having an equal (...)
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  • The State's Duty to Foster Voter Competence.Michele Giavazzi & Zsolt Kapelner - 2024 - Episteme 21 (3):719-732.
    In this paper we discuss an often-neglected topic in the literature on the ethics of voting. Our aim is to provide an account of what states are obligated to do, so that voters may fulfil their role as public decision-makers in an epistemically competent manner. We argue that the state ought to provide voters with what we call a substantive opportunity for competence. This entails that the state ought to actively foster the epistemic capabilities that are necessary to achieve competent (...)
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  • Indeterminacy in Causation.Eric Swanson - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268):606-624.
    I argue that there are some causal relata for which it is indeterminate whether one caused the other. Positing indeterminacy in causation helps us defend contested principles in the logic of causation and makes possible new ways of thinking about the theoretical impact of symmetric causal overdetermination. I close by discussing amendments of current theories of causation that would help explain causal indeterminacy.
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  • Complicity and the responsibility dilemma.Morten Højer Jensen - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (1):109-127.
    Jeff McMahan famously defends a moral inequality of combatants, where liability to be attacked and potentially killed in war, should be grounded in the individual combatant’s moral responsibility for posing an unjust threat. In a response, Seth Lazar shows that McMahan’s criterion for liability leads to an unacceptable dilemma between “contingent pacifism” and “total war”, i.e. between war being practically infeasible, or implausibly many civilians being legitimate targets. The problem is that McMahan grounds liability mainly in the individual’s causal responsibility (...)
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  • Causation and Responsibility.Michael S. Moore - 1999 - Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (2):1-51.
    In various areas of Anglo-American law, legal liability turns on causation. In torts and contracts, we are each liable only for those harms we havecausedby the actions that breach our legal duties. Such doctrines explicitly make causation an element of liability. In criminal law, sometimes the causal element for liability is equally explicit, as when a statute makes punishable any act that has “caused… abuse to the child….” More often, the causal element in criminal liability is more implicit, as when (...)
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  • Double Voting.Robert E. Goodin & Ana Tanasoca - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4):743-758.
    The democratic egalitarian ideal requires that everyone should enjoy equal power over the world through voting. If it is improper to vote twice in the same election, why should it be permissible for dual citizens to vote in two different places? Several possible excuses are considered and rejected.
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  • How to be responsible for something without causing it.Carolina Sartorio - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):315–336.
    What is the relationship between moral responsibility and causation? Plainly, we are not morally responsible for everything that we cause. For we cause a multitude of things, including things that we couldn't possibly foresee we would cause and with respect to which we cannot be assessed morally. Thus, it is clear that causing something does not entail being morally responsible for it. But, does the converse entailment hold? Does moral responsibility require causation? Intuitively, it does: intuitively, we can only be (...)
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  • What’s wrong with vote buying.Lachlan Montgomery Umbers - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):1-21.
    Almost everyone would agree that vote buying is morally wrong, and that prohibitions on vote buying are morally justified. Yet, recently, several philosophers have argued that vote buying is morally permissible, and that it should be legally permitted. This paper begins by examining and criticising arguments that have been offered in defence of vote buying. I then go on to consider existing attempts to explain the wrongness of vote buying, arguing that none is wholly successful. I then advance a novel (...)
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  • Four friendly critics: A response: Four friendly critics: A response.Michael S. Moore - 2012 - Legal Theory 18 (4):491-542.
    In this reply, I seek to summarize fairly the criticisms advanced by each of my four critics, Jonathan Schaffer, Gideon Yaffe, John Gardner, and Carolina Sartorio. That there is so little overlap either in the aspects of the book on which they focus or in the arguments they advance about those issues has forced me to reply to each of them separately. Schaffer focuses much of his criticisms on my view that absences cannot serve as causal relata and argues that (...)
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  • Actual Causation and Simple Voting Scenarios.Jonathan Livengood - 2011 - Noûs 47 (2):316-345.
    Several prominent, contemporary theories of actual causation maintain that in order for something to count as an actual cause (in the circumstances) of some known effect, the potential cause must be a difference-maker with respect to the effect in some restricted range of circumstances. Although the theories disagree about how to restrict the range of circumstances that must be considered in deciding whether something counts as an actual cause of a known effect, the theories agree that at least some counterfactual (...)
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  • Précis of Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency.Christian Barry - 2019 - Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1):5-7.
    In this article I respond to the eight critical essays in this issue that evaluate the claims in my book with Gerhard Øverland, Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency.
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  • What Is Democracy (and What Is Its Raison D’Etre)?Alvin I. Goldman - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2):233-256.
    This article aims to say what democracy is or what the predicate ‘democratic’ means, as opposed to saying what is good, right, or desirable about it. The basic idea—by no means a novel one—is that a democratic system is one that features substantial equality of political power. More distinctively it is argued that ‘democratic’ is a relative gradable adjective, the use of which permits different, contextually determined thresholds of democraticness. Thus, a system can be correctly called ‘democratic’ even if it (...)
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  • Making a positive difference: Criticality in groups.Tobias Gerstenberg, David A. Lagnado & Ro’I. Zultan - 2023 - Cognition 238 (C):105499.
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  • Democratic compatibilism.Peter J. Josse - 2021 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 24 (4):579-600.
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  • Structural Injustice and Individual Responsibility.Andrea Sangiovanni - 2018 - Journal of Social Philosophy 49 (3):461-483.
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  • Against Lottocracy.Lachlan Montgomery Umbers - 2018 - European Journal of Political Theory 20 (2):312-334.
    Dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has run high in recent years. Perhaps as a result, political theorists have begun to turn their attention to possible alternative modes of political dec...
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  • Common Knowledge: A New Problem for Standard Consequentialism.Fei Song - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2):299-314.
    This paper reveals a serious flaw in the consequentialist solution to the inefficacy problem in moral philosophy. The consequentialist solution is based on expected utility theory. In current philosophical literature, the debate focuses on the empirical plausibility of the solution. Most philosophers consider the cases of collective actions as of the same type as a horse-racing game, where expected utility theory is adequate to solve the choice problem. However, these cases should be considered as of the same type as a (...)
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  • Voting for Less than the Best.Michael Ridge - 2021 - Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (3):404-426.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Are Citizens Causally Responsible for Voting Outcomes?Christina Nick - 2021 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 121 (1):101-109.
    Can we hold citizens causally responsible for the outcomes of their voting decisions? They could stand in the causal relationship required for such responsibility either collectively or individually. Recent accounts ascribing responsibility to citizens have primarily taken the collective route because of a major obstacle to using an individualistic approach, namely, the problem of overdetermination: the actions of each citizen do not make an individual difference to, and therefore cannot be a cause of, the overall political outcome. I suggest, drawing (...)
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  • Harm, responsibility, and enforceability.Christian Barry - 2019 - Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1):76-97.
    In this article I respond to the eight critical essays in this issue that evaluate the claims in my book with Gerhard Øverland, Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency.
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  • Indeterminacy in Causation.Eric Swanson - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268):606–624.
    I argue that there are some causal relata for which it is indeterminate whether one caused the other. Positing indeterminacy in causation helps us defend contested principles in the logic of causation and makes possible new ways of thinking about the theoretical impact of symmetric causal overdetermination. I close by discussing amendments of current theories of causation that would help explain causal indeterminacy.
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  • Epistemic Barriers to Rational Voting: The Case of European Parliament Elections.Fabio Wolkenstein - 2020 - Social Epistemology 34 (3):294-308.
    Voting is often said to be irrational because of the incredibly small likelihood that an individual voter’s ballot will be pivotal in favour of her preferred candidate or party. A persuasive respon...
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  • A Hard Case for the Ethics of Supported Voting: Cognitive and Communicative Disabilities, and Incommunicability.Attila Mráz - 2023 - Contemporary Political Theory 22 (3):353–374.
    (OPEN ACCESS) In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting – respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not (...)
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