What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a genuine human right? This chapter offers a new answer: human beings have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life are certain goods, capacities, and options that human beings qua human beings need whatever else they qua individuals might need in order to pursue a characteristically good human life. This chapter explains how this Fundamental Conditions Approach is (...) better than James Griffin’s Agency Approach as well as Martha Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities Approach. It also shows how it can be compatible with the increasingly popular Political Conceptions of human rights defended by John Rawls, Charles Beitz, and Joseph Raz. (shrink)

(2012). A need is not a right. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 359-362. doi: 10.1080/13698230.2012.679423.

Advances in reproductive genetic engineering have the potential to transform human lives. Not only do they promise to allow us to select children free of diseases, they can also enable us to select children with desirable traits. In this paper, I consider two clusters of arguments for the moral permissibility of reproductive genetic engineering, what I call the Perfectionist View and the Libertarian View; and two clusters of arguments against reproductive genetic engineering, what I call the Human Nature View and (...) the Motivation View. I argue that an adequate theory of the ethics of reproductive genetic engineering should take into account insights gained from these views. (shrink)

abstract In this paper, we examine issues raised by the possibility of regulating emotions through pharmacological means. We argue that emotions induced through these means can be authentic phenomenologically, and that the manner of inducing them need not make them any less our own than emotions arising 'naturally'. We recognize that in taking drugs to induce emotions, one may lose opportunities for self-knowledge; act narcissistically; or treat oneself as a mere means. But we propose that there are circumstances in which (...) none of these concerns arise. Finally, we consider how the possibility of drug-regulation might affect duties to feel emotions. (shrink)

Around the world, millions of children are in need of parental care. In response to this global crisis, some philosophers defend a moral duty for prospective parents to adopt children rather than procreate. Challenges to the duty focus almost exclusively on parents’ desires to have biological children. However, reasons deriving primarily from one’s membership in a social group that favour procreation over adoption or oppose transracial adoptions are largely overlooked. In this dissertation, I examine whether group-based reasons could justifiably override (...) a duty to adopt for prospective parents who are members of racially oppressed groups. I ultimately argue that group-based interests cannot outweigh the needs of existing children for parental care, and thus provide further support for the duty to adopt. My thesis is divided into four chapters. In Chapter 1, I introduce a duty to adopt and argue that it is resilient against a series of proposed defeating conditions and foundational challenges. In Chapter 2, I develop three group-based reasons in favour of procreation that challenge the duty: reparative justice, racial solidarity, and cultural preservation. In Chapter 3, I argue that these reasons do not definitively support procreation over adoption and, instead, seem to favour adopting children either within or outside one’s racial group. I then identify remaining challenges to the duty that take issue with transracial adoptions and place a high value on children’s belonging in same-race families or in their communities of origin. In Chapter 4, I argue that the needs of individual children to receive timely parental care should not be compromised by groups’ interests and that children’s relationships with their communities of origin can be maintained in transracial or extra-communal adoptive placements. (shrink)

This article examines the nature of the child´s right to be loved. In particular, it argues that besides reasons for ensuring that children are affectively cared for by their parents, we have strong reasons for why children should be loved unconditionally -that is, loved independently of their morally irrelevant features. The article defends this claim by engaging closely with an argument recently formulated by Samantha Brennan and Colin Macleod, according to which the child´s right to be loved would be violated (...) by strongly homophobic parents. I argue that Brennan’s and Macleod’s argument needs to be revised because, while it generates a convincing conclusion in the case of homophobic parents, it fails to do so in other cases. This problem calls for a reconsideration of the nature of the right to be loved. Drawing on Philip Pettit’s analysis of robust goods, I argue that this right is a right to be loved unconditionally and an appeal to unconditional love allows us to accommodate the conviction that strongly racist as well as homophobic parents wrong their children by failing to love them (unconditionally). (shrink)

Offers a conception of love and why it is meaningful.

ABSTRACTThe Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.

A life without liberty and material resources is not a good life. Equally, a life devoid of meaningful social relationships—such as friendships, family attachments, and romances—is not a good life. From this it is tempting to conclude that just as individuals have rights to liberty and material resources, they also have rights to access meaningful social relationships. I argue that this conclusion can be defended only in a narrow set of cases. ‘Pure’ social relationship deprivation—that is, deprivation that is not (...) caused, or accompanied, by deficits in liberties and material resources— mostly generates demands of private beneficence. I suggest that social relationship deprivation is unjust, hence a rights violation, only when it is due to factors—such as one’s race—that are irrelevant to one’s being a good participant in social relationships. I thus conclude that access to meaningful social relationships is not a fundamental concern for theories of justice. (shrink)

Child poverty is one of the biggest challenges of today, harming millions of children. In this book, it is investigated from a philosophical social justice perspective, primarily in the context of modern welfare states. Based on both normative theory (particularly the capability approach) and empirical evidence, the authors identify the injustices of child poverty, showing how it negatively affects the well-being of children as well as their whole life course. But child poverty is not 'given by nature'. It is avoidable (...) and there is certainly the moral duty to alleviate it. Therefore, Graf and Schweiger develop a normative theory of responsibilities, which clarifies the moral role of different agents in the poor child's environment: the family, the state and many others, that have so far been neglected in philosophical theories. They conclude their book by sketching how their theory can be extended to global child poverty and what it means to show equal respect and concern for every child - no matter where and in which context they were born. (shrink)

It is often stated in international and domestic legal documents that children have a right to be loved. Yet there is very little explanation of why this right exists or what it entails. Matthew Liao has recently sought to provide such an explanation by arguing that children have a right to be loved as a human right. I will examine Liao?s explanation and in turn argue that children do not have a right to be loved. The first part of the (...) paper will be concerned with showing that Liao cannot support his empirical claims. I will then argue that loving cannot be a duty, and that even if we were willing to concede that it is, love is not always accompanied by loving treatment. Finally, I consider two alternative interpretations of the right to be loved and argue that even given these, children do not have a right to be loved. (shrink)

Participants in some clinical trials are at risk of being harmed and sometimes are seriously harmed as a result of not being provided with available, relevant risk information. We argue that this situation is unacceptable and that there is a moral duty to disclose all adverse clinical trial results to participants in clinical trials. This duty is grounded in the human right not to be placed at risk of harm without informed consent. We consider objections to disclosure grounded in considerations (...) of commercial interest, and we argue that these concerns are insufficient to override the moral duty to disclose adverse clinical trial results. However, we also develop a proposal that enables commercial interests to be protected, while promoting the duty to disclose adverse clinical trial results. (shrink)

By meeting needs for individualized love and relatedness, the care we receive deeply shapes our social and economic chances and therefore represents a form of luck. Hence, distributive justice requires a fair distribution of care in society. I look at different ways of ensuring this and argue that full redistribution of care is beyond our reach. I conclude that a strong individual morality informed by an ethics of care is a necessary complement of well-designed institutions.

It is intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming a false belief. It is especially intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming the false belief that you are their friend. Despite these intuitions, this article argues that in a surprising number of cases, deceiving people into believing you are their friend is not only permitted, but required. The article uses this result to make some important revisions and suggestions for the emergent social rights literature: (i) it shows that social rights (...) are feasible in a wider range of cases than previously thought, and (ii) it casts doubt on whether grounding such rights on the impersonal value of genuine intimate relationships is their most fruitful grounding. (shrink)

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (...) (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox. (shrink)

The story of Ashley, a nine-year-old from Seattle, has caused a good deal of controversy since it appeared in the Los Angeles Times on January 3, 2007.1 Ashley was born with a condition called static encephalopathy, a severe brain impairment that leaves her unable to walk, talk, eat, sit up, or roll over. According to her doctors, Ashley has reached, and will remain at, the developmental level of a three-month-old.

In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi presents a compelling account of the nature of grief. To further illustrate how fruitful the philosophical study of grief, and Cholbi’s account of it is, I present three sets of comments. The first regards the extent to which Cholbi’s account of grief also provides an account of vicarious grief. The second concerns the paradox of grief and the good of grief, and suggests one reason we may recommend grief is that grieving is healthy. (...) The final set of comments pertains to the duty to grieve, and whether this duty may extend to other emotionally rich activities, such as falling in love. (shrink)

In this article, I will explore the ethical concerns arising out of the use of preimplantation tissue typing to create saviour siblings. There are two main ethical concerns about the welfare of the child to be born as a result of PTT. The first is whether the child to be born is treated as a commodity, as simply a means to save the life of his or her sibling. The second is whether the child to be born will be harmed (...) as a result of PTT, either physically, psychologically or socially. These two ethical concerns reflect an individualistic approach to the welfare of the child, whose interests are treated as largely separate to the interests of other family members. I will argue that the welfare of the child born as a result of PTT should be conceived more broadly to include not only the child’s individual interests, but also the collective interests the child shares with his or her family. I base this broader conception of welfare on the notion of human flourishing, which recognises that the welfare of a child is inextricably connected to the welfare of the intimate collective that is his or her family. The collective interests of intimate family members are particularly relevant in the context of PTT, as the members are engaged in a shared journey to save the life of an ill child. (shrink)

Social interactions and personal relationships are essential for a minimally good life, and rights to such things – social rights – have been increasingly acknowledged in the literature. The question as to what extent social rights are feasible – and properly qualify as rights – however, remains. Can individuals reliably provide each other with love and friendship after trying, for instance? At first glance, this claim seems counterintuitive. This paper argues, contrary to our pre-theoretic intuitions, that individuals can reliably provide (...) each other with such relationships, rendering even “thick” social rights feasible. This conclusion challenges the assumption that such things cannot be reliably provided after trying, and suggests that a surprisingly wide class of social rights are feasible. Claiming relationships characterised by love or friendship as a matter of justice, therefore, is possible, and our theories of justice should appropriately widen to accommodate this fact where appropriate. (shrink)

Adolescence is a valuable phase of life, not just because it is the phase of learning in school and preparing for a working life. During the COVID-19 pandemic it became clear that the rights, experiences, and lifeworlds of adolescents are considered less important than the needs of school, work, and productivity. However, there is an ethical claim for people to have a good adolescence, and this means that the losses of social contact, experiences, time, and space demanded of adolescents, in (...) order to protect older and vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, should be taken seriously. A distinctive quality of adolescence is that it cannot be repeated, nor can these experiences be replicated as adults. First experiences of independence, friendship, love, informality, recklessness, and youthful exuberance are intrinsically valuable and cannot be substituted for later in life. It is therefore not surprising that adolescents have sought and found their own spaces during the pandemic, some of them forbidden, because lock downs and closed social spaces have relegated them to the confines of their childhood bedrooms. In this paper, I explore an ethic of a good adolescence, which was impacted on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and consider what can be learned from this situation. Adolescents are to be taken seriously, their experiences are no less valuable than those of adults, and the losses they have suffered for the benefit of others should be honored. As far as possible, young people should be supported to have a voice in public discourse and in finding spaces to be adolescents. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that criminalization creates a prudential reason to refrain from the criminalized conduct in order to avoid punishment, and prudence is the wrong reason to refrain from wrongdoing. According to Michael S. Moore, these facts should lead us to conclude that the criminalization of wrongful conduct corrupts motives by making some who would otherwise have refrained from wrongdoing for the right reason, refrain from wrongdoing only out of prudence. This paper argues that and provide no reason to (...) believe that criminalization corrupts motives, but should instead lead us to conclude that the criminalization of wrongful conduct obscures motives by making it harder to identify those who refrain from wrongdoing for the right reason. The paper then goes on to argue that the badness of obscuring motives is a pro tanto reason against criminalizing wrongdoing. (shrink)

Old age often brings with it chronic conditions that make it difficult to handle the activities of daily life. In the United States, unpaid family caregivers, predominantly women, provide most of this care. I explore why this situation has come about and persists and further ground my image of a dystopian future in neoliberalism, the policymaking process, and contemporary politics. I then offer an ethical and policy foundation for an alternative approach to providing needed long-term care services and make provisional (...) suggestions for actions that ought to be taken now and in the near future to avoid this dystopian future. (shrink)

People are often involuntarily laid off from their jobs through no fault of their own. Employees who are dismissed in this manner cannot always legitimately hold employers accountable for these miserable situations because the decision to implement layoffs is often the best possible outcome given the context—that is, layoffs in and of themselves may be “necessary evils.” Yet, even in circumstances in which layoffs qualify as “necessary evils,” morality demands that employers respect the dignity of those whose employment is involuntarily (...) terminated. In this paper I argue that to preserve the dignity of employees who are involuntarily terminated, in most cases employers have a substantial reason to offer a special kind of unemployment benefit, “severance pay.” To support my claim I draw and expand upon Bernard Williams’s analysis of “agent-regret,” which I believe greatly helps to address and articulate employers’ obligations in the context of involuntary termination. (shrink)

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from (...) the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest. (shrink)

I have argued elsewhere that children have a moral right to be loved. Mhairi Cowden challenges my arguments. Among other things, Cowden believes that children do not need to be loved. In this paper, I explain why Cowden’s arguments fail and offer additional evidence for why children need to be loved.

There is a tension between our need for associative control and our need for social connections. This tension creates ethical dilemmas that we can call each-we dilemmas of sociability. To resolve these dilemmas, we must prioritize either negative moral rights to dissociate or positive moral rights to social inclusion. This article shows that we must prioritize positive social rights. This has implications both for personal morality and for political theory. As persons, we must attend to each other's basic social needs. (...) As a society, we must adopt a sufficientarian approach to the regulation of social resources. (shrink)

The dominant philosophical view of gamete donation as morally permissible rests on two premises: parental obligations are triggered primarily by playing a causal role in procreation, not by genetic ties, and those obligations are transferable—that is, they are obligations to make adequate provision for the child’s needs, not necessarily to raise the child oneself. Thus while gamete donors are indeed agent causes of the children that their donation helps to bring into existence, most think that donors’ obligations are discharged insofar (...) as they know that competent others intend to care for those children. In this article, I call into question this dominant view by challenging both of its premises. Challenging the first premise, I argue that genetic parenthood is what primarily triggers parental obligations. Challenging the second premise, I claim that those obligations are non-transferable—i.e., that they are obligations not simply to ensure that someone will raise one’s genetic child, but to raise that child oneself . The implication of my argument is that gamete donation is inherently wrong insofar as it involves acquiring non-transferable obligations that one has no intention of fulfilling. (shrink)

Beschäftigt man sich systematisch mit der Konzeption von Gerechtigkeit für Kinder bzw. während der Kindheit, ist es hilfreich, drei verschiedene Fragen zu klären, die normalerweise in Hinblick auf Erwachsene diskutiert werden, doch auch für eine genauere Analyse der Ansprüche von Kindern relevant sind. Welche Güter sind für die Gerechtigkeitstheorie relevant? Nach welchen Prinzipien sollen diese Güter verteilt werden? Wer ist dafür verantwortlich, dass die angestrebte Güterverteilung verwirklicht wird? In dieser Einleitung umreißen wir kurz den gegenwärtigen Diskussionsstand, der in diesen drei (...) großen gerechtigkeitsrelevanten Themenfeldern hinsichtlich von Kindern besteht. Zunächst analysieren wir Ressourcen und Fähigkeiten als angemessene Metrik der Gerechtigkeit für Kinder. Hinsichtlich der Verteilungsprinzipien lassen sich vor allem egalitäre und suffizienztheoretische Herangehensweisen unterscheiden. Schließlich werden in Bezug auf die Frage nach den relevanten „Akteuren der Gerechtigkeit“ für Kinder hauptsächlich die Familie bzw. die Eltern und der Staat diskutiert. (shrink)