Most philosophers writing on the ethics of war endorse “reductivist individualism,” a view that holds both that killing in war is subject to the very same principles of ordinary morality ; and that morality concerns individuals and their rights, and does not treat collectives as having any special status. I argue that this commitment to individualism poses problems for this view in the case of national defense. More specifically, I argue that the main strategies for defending individualist approaches to national (...) defense either fail by their own lights or yield deeply counterintuitive implications. I then offer the foundations for a collectivist approach. I argue that such an approach must do justice to the collective goods that properly constituted states make possible and protect through certain acts of defensive war; and that any such picture of national defense must make room for some form of national partiality. (shrink)

Political liberals, following Rawls, believe that justice should be ‘political’ rather than ‘metaphysical.’ In other words, a conception of justice ought to be freestanding from first-order moral and metaethical views. The reason for this is to ensure that the state’s coercion be justified to citizens in terms that meet political liberalism’s principle of legitimacy. I suggest that privileging a political conception of justice involves costs—such as forgoing the opportunity for political theory to learn from other areas of philosophy. I argue (...) that it is not clear that it provides any benefit in return. Whether a political conception of justice more adequately satisfies the liberal principle of legitimacy than a metaphysical conception of justice is an open question. To show this, I describe three ways in which political conceptions of justice have been developed within the literature. I then argue that while each might be helpful in finding reasons that reasonable citizens can accept, all face challenges in satisfying the liberal principle of legitimacy. Political conceptions of justice confront the same set of justificatory problems as ‘metaphysical’ conceptions. The question of whether a political conception is preferable should receive greater scrutiny. (shrink)

This paper uses John Rawls' theory of justice to defend the patent system against charges that it has an unfair effect on access to medications, from the perspective of national and international justice. The paper argues that the patent system is fair in a national context because it respects intellectual property rights and it benefits the least advantaged members of society by providing incentives for inventors, investors, and entrepreneurs. The paper also argues that the patent system is fair in an (...) international context, provided that developed nations take steps to help disease-stricken countries secure internal justice. Fairness in a national or international context also requires that the patent system should include emergency exceptions to deal with short-term inequities. (shrink)

A free society requires a citizenry that is capable of taking personal responsibility for bettering their lot, and voluntarily promoting and protecting public goods such as education, health, public order, peace, and justice. Although the law backed by force can have some success at compelling people to make contributions to the public exchequer, refrain from criminal activity, honor legal contracts, and so on, an economically and politically free society cannot rely exclusively on the threat of coercion to induce in citizens (...) a sense of social responsibility. On the contrary, a free society depends on a well‐entrenched sense of responsibility that is internalized and actualized by citizens in their everyday lives. But any realistic attempt to frame an ideal of social responsibility must confront two serious challenges presented by the complexity and scale of modern societies, namely the challenge of knowing the content of our responsibilities and the challenge of finding the motivation to discharge them. With these challenges in view, this essay assesses the power of prevailing accounts of citizenship to generate an effective sense of social responsibility, and proposes some guiding principles to inform a broader theory of responsibility that might synthesize the strengths of political accounts while transcending some of their limitations. (shrink)

This study examines the issues associated with the disinvestment of U.S. interests from South Africa that took place in the mid-80s from the perspective of three dominant moral theories: utility, rights, and justice. By examining the issues in light of these three theories, the paper attempts to establish a decision framework from which managers and investors can evaluate similar decisions they are facing around the world today. Similarly, the reading may prove useful to educators who incorporate discussions of ethical decision (...) making into the classroom.Training in business ethics too often takes a strictly utilitarian perspective, or worse, a relativistic one. This study attempts to illustrate how utilitarian theory and related rights and justice issues can he interwoven into the heuristics associated with the contemporary concepts of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

After briefly surveying the mission and principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO), I argue that international trade may be assessed from the perspective of justice, and that the correct account of justice for these purposes is egalitarian in fundamental principle. I then consider the merits of the WTO's basic commitment to liberalized trade in the light of egalitarian considerations. Finally, I discuss the justice of several WTO policies. While noting the complexity of the empirical issues relating to the effects (...) of trade institutions and policies, I conclude that egalitarians have reasons to object to certain of the principles and policies of the WTO. (shrink)

This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is (...) likely to be an important source and sustainer of meaning in our present lives. The second is that the creation of artificial offspring provides a plausible and potentially better pathway to a collective afterlife than the traditional biological pathway. Both of these arguments are defended from a variety of objections and misunderstandings. (shrink)

Suppose we are about to enter an era of increasing technological unemployment. What implications does this have for society? Two distinct ethical/social issues would seem to arise. The first is one of distributive justice: how will the efficiency gains from automated labour be distributed through society? The second is one of personal fulfillment and meaning: if people no longer have to work, what will they do with their lives? In this article, I set aside the first issue and focus on (...) the second. In doing so, I make three arguments. First, I argue that there are good reasons to embrace non-work and that these reasons become more compelling in an era of technological unemployment. Second, I argue that the technological advances that make widespread technological unemployment possible could still threaten or undermine human flourishing and meaning, especially if they do not remain confined to the economic sphere. And third, I argue that this threat could be contained if we adopt an integrative approach to our relationship with technology. In advancing these arguments, I draw on three distinct literatures: the literature on technological unemployment and workplace automation; the antiwork critique—which I argue gives reasons to embrace technological unemployment; and the philosophical debate about the conditions for meaning in life—which I argue gives reasons for concern. (shrink)

Among the hardest cases in the ethics of killing are those in which one innocent person poses a lethal threat to another. I argue in favour of the intuition that lethal self-defence is permissible in these cases, despite the difficulties that some philosophers (e.g., Otsuka and McMahan) have raised about it. Philosophers writing in this area—including those sympathetic to the intuition (e.g. Thomson and Kamm)—have downplayed or ignored an essential and authoritative role for intuition per se (as against discursive general (...) principles): one based in moral sensibility and imagination rather than discursive argument or conceptual analysis. I am concerned to call attention to and rehabilitate this role for intuition. (shrink)

Can human life have value in a world in which humans are rendered obsolete by technological advances? This article answers this question by developing an extended analysis of the axiological impact of human obsolescence. In doing so, it makes four main arguments. First, it argues that human obsolescence is a complex phenomenon that can take on at least four distinct forms. Second, it argues that one of these forms of obsolescence is not a coherent concept and hence not a plausible (...) threat to human well-being. Third, it argues that existing fears of technologically-induced human obsolescence are less compelling than they first appear. Fourth, it argues that there are two reasons for embracing a world of widespread, technologically-induced human obsolescence. (shrink)

Although Friedman's The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits is widely read, the central argument is rarely identified. Stone's discussion of Friedman in Where the Law Ends, is often used as a companion piece. Stone claims that the most important argument in Friedman is the Polestar argument but never succeeds in explaining what it is. This paper shows that Friedman's position must be read in the context of his theory of political economy, and that at least four distinct (...) utilitarian arguments are required to account for his views. Specifically, Friedman relies upon what I describe as Realistic Rule Utilitarianism in which utility is understood in terms of actual preferences. The weaknesses of this theory are then explained. (shrink)

This paper analyses how security affects well-being. Security is understood as someone’s sureness of enjoying some good in the future; well-being is treated as a matter of human flourishing. Security can contribute to our well-being in various ways: if we are in fact bound to enjoy a good, in principle this is positive for our flourishing in the future; if we also believe that we will enjoy this good, we can be more efficient in pursuing our well-being; if we also (...) feel secure, this supports our enjoyment of our physical and mental capacities. For some of these benefits to obtain fully, however, it is important that our beliefs and feelings align with the facts. Furthermore, mirroring security’s upsides, there are also ways in which security can hamper our flourishing: it can obstruct the change, surprise, and pleasurable fear that are sometimes required for a good life too. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a theory of economic freedom. In this endeavor, we build our framework on the Hayekian notion of freedom because it explicitly embodies the obvious link between freedom and the state: freedom is an absence of state coercion except for that which enforces abstract, general rules known beforehand. We derive two propositions from this Hayekian thesis and elaborate on them, leading to a categorization of government actions from the viewpoint (...) of economic freedom in which the criterion against which coercive governmental actions must be evaluated is the rule of law, meaning a government’s reliance on general, abstract rules. As an implication, our framework allows us to argue for the imperative differentiation between “efficiency” and “economic freedom” as two separate criteria against which government actions can and must be evaluated. We also show that our framework may help explain the process through which economic freedom enhances growth. (shrink)

In debates about the moral foundations of intellectual property, one very popular strand concerns the role of labor as a moral basis for intellectual property rights. This idea has a great deal of intuitive plausibility; but is there a way to make it philosophically precise? That is, does labor provide strong reasons to grant intellectual property rights to intellectual laborers? In this paper, I argue that the answer to that question is “yes”. I offer a new view, different from existing (...) labor theories of intellectual property, which I call the productive capacities view. This view gives us a way to make sense of the idea of labor as the basis for intellectual property rights, as well as a tool for critically evaluating existing intellectual property institutions. (shrink)

Our project in this essay is to showcase nonnaturalistic moral realism’s resources for responding to metaphysical and epistemological objections by taking the view in some new directions. The central thesis we will argue for is that there is a battery of substantive moral propositions that are also nonnaturalistic conceptual truths. We call these propositions the moral fixed points. We will argue that they must find a place in any system of moral norms that applies to beings like us, in worlds (...) similar to our own. By committing themselves to true propositions of these sorts, nonnaturalists can fashion a view that is highly attractive in its own right, and resistant to the most prominent objections that have been pressed against it. (shrink)

To what extent can we as a community legitimately require individuals to contribute to producing public goods? Most of us think that, at least sometimes, refusing to pay for a public good that you have enjoyed can involve a kind of 'free riding' that makes it wrong. But what is less clear is under exactly which circumstances this is wrong. To work out the answer to that, we need to know why it is wrong. I argue that when free riding (...) is wrong, the reason is that it is unfair. That is not itself a very controversial claim. But spelling out why it is unfair allows us to see just which forms of free riding are wrong. Moreover, it supplies a basis from which some more controversial conclusions can be defended. Even if a public good is one that you have been given without asking for it or seeking it out, it can still be wrong not to be prepared to pay for it. It can be wrong not to be prepared to pay for public goods even when you do not receive them at all. And furthermore, it can be right to force you to do so. (shrink)

What constraints should be imposed on individual liberty for the sake of protecting our collective security? A helpful approach to answering this question is offered by a theory that grounds political obligation and authority in a moral requirement of fair contribution to mutually beneficial cooperative schemes. This approach encourages us to split the opening question into two—a question of correctness and a question of legitimacy—and generates a detailed set of answers to both subsidiary questions, with a nuanced and plausible set (...) of implications. The plausibility of its treatment of the issues surrounding liberty and security, I argue, helps to confer credibility on the fairness-based theory that carries these implications. (shrink)

Management scholars and social scientists investigate dynamics of subjective fairness perceptions in the workplace under the umbrella term “organizational justice.” Philosophers and ethicists, on the other hand, think of justice as a normative requirement in societal relationships with conflicting interests. Both ways of looking at justice have neither remained fully separated nor been clearly integrated. It seems that much could be gained and learned by more closely integrating the ethical and the empirical fields of justice. On the other hand, it (...) may simply not be possible to bridge the divide between the subjective empirical and the normative prescriptive justice as both fields pose different questions and rely on different assumptions and methods. In this paper, we propose a “reconciliation” model, as a third way of considering justice in the workplace, taking into account normative and psychological issues pertaining to justice. Through applying a reconciliation model, we provide a new way of looking at the interconnections between justice philosophy and organizational justice that could advance future research in both fields. Our model also implies that justice researchers can and should be concerned with the moral implications of their own subject of research. (shrink)

This paper aims to draw attention to an important but underappreciated aspect of the instrumental value of freedom: its diagnostic value. This is the value freedom has insofar as it makes it possible for us to discover ourselves and improve ourselves in our capacity to make value judgements. Diagnostic value, I argue, has an important role to play in explaining the value we attach to freedom. Accordingly, this paper is aimed at elucidating this concept, examining its relevance to our lives, (...) and defending an account of how to measure the diagnostic value of opportunities and sets of opportunities. (shrink)

The collapse of society is inevitable, even if it is in the distant future. When it collapses, it is likely to do so within the lifetimes of some people. These people will have matured in pre-collapse society, experience collapse, and then live the remainder of their lives in the post-collapse world. I argue that this group of people—the transitional generation—will be the worst off from societal collapse, far worse than subsequent generations. As the transitional generation, they will suffer disparately. This (...) intergenerational disparity in suffering is inequitable. Given that other disparities in suffering are worthy of remediation, this intergenerational disparity in suffering is worthy of remediation. However, the only way to do so is to target the mental states of the members of the transitional generation. (shrink)

In their recent books, National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007) and Intricate Ethics (2007), David Miller and Frances Kamm give two similar arguments aimed at preventing their favoured accounts of the moral justification of rights from justifying an excess of demanding assistance rights. Both arguments appeal to the fact that a proliferation of assistance rights would conflict with other rights. In this paper, I show that these arguments fail. As Miller recognises in a footnote, the failure of such arguments appears (...) to support an alternative holistic approach to the moral justification of rights. But I will show that, without significant further argument that Miller and Kamm do not provide, this holistic approach offers no better support for Miller's and Kamm's claim that there are few demanding assistance rights. (shrink)

In their recent books, National Responsibility and Global Justice and Intricate Ethics, David Miller and Frances Kamm give two similar arguments aimed at preventing their favoured accounts of the moral justification of rights from justifying an excess of demanding assistance rights. Both arguments appeal to the fact that a proliferation of assistance rights would conflict with other rights. In this paper, I show that these arguments fail. As Miller recognises in a footnote, the failure of such arguments appears to support (...) an alternative holistic approach to the moral justification of rights. But I will show that, without significant further argument that Miller and Kamm do not provide, this holistic approach offers no better support for Miller’s and Kamm’s claim that there are few demanding assistance rights. (shrink)

Few would disagree that contemporary society is characterized by ‘pluralism’, but what this means is widely disputed. Among the many senses of pluralism current in contemporary political theory, ‘value pluralism’ is one of the most keenly contested. The classic account is found in Isaiah Berlin, who sees basic human values as irreducibly multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes incommensurable with one another.Berlin’s pluralist views are scattered throughout his work, but major statements include the Introduction and last section of ‘Two Concepts of (...) Liberty’ in Berlin (2002), Berlin (1990), and Berlin (2000). Other accounts of pluralism influenced by Berlin include Raz (1986); Hampshire (1989); Stocker (1990); Nussbaum (1992) chapter 2; Kekes (1993); Gray (1995a, b); Chang (1997); Crowder (2002, 2004); Galston (2002, 2005). In the Continental tradition the concept of value pluralism is often traced to Max Weber (1948). Berlin seems in general to have believed that the pluralist outl .. (shrink)

Some writers suggest that corporations should act in ways which reflect a broad concern for the well-being of others, as opposed to a more narrow (Libertarian) conception of responsibility. But this Broad View of moral responsibility puts us on a collision course with our considered intuitions about paternalistic acts. This paper discusses several aspects of this issue: the neutrality of the Standard View of Paternalism, the nature of the defenses of paternalistic interventions allowed by the Standard View of Paternalism and (...) their reliance on consent; and the sort of position on paternalism the Board View would have to endorse in order to justify the benevolence-motivated orientation required by its conception of moral responsibility.The conclusion is that unless we are prepared to take a different, non-standard view of paternalism the Board View of corporate moral responsibility will be untenable. (shrink)

Natural law ethics holds that practical rationality consists in engaging in non-defective ways with a range of fundamental goods. These basic goods are characteristically presented as reflecting the natural properties of humans, but the details of this picture vary widely. This article argues that natural law ethics can usefully be understood as a type of dispositional theory of value, which identifies the basic goods with those objectives that humans are characteristically disposed to pursue and value for their own sake. Natural (...) law theories of practical rationality can then be understood as attempts to capture the principles that would govern engagement with the basic goods under ideal conditions. The article begins by offering an account of normative inclinations as human dispositions both to act in certain ways and to believe that the actions are worthwhile or required. It then explores the implications of this account for natural law ethics, discussing the role of the basic goods in practical rationality, whether the goods may change over time and the connection between the goods and human nature. (shrink)

The debate concerning the legitimacy of awarding reparations for historical injustices focuses on the issue of finding a proper moral justification for granting reparations to the descendants of the victims of injustices which took place in the remote past. Regarding the case of Romanian communism as a more recent injustice, and analyzing the moral problems entailed by this historical lapse, within this paper I argue that overcoming such a legacy cannot be carried out, as in the case of historical injustices (...) situated more remotely in time, through the means of selective reparations, such as restitutions or compensations. For, even though they are justified from the perspective of rectificatory justice, selective reparations do not fulfill the requirements of social justice. Rather, I argue that the fall of the Romanian communist regime should have been followed by an equal distribution of all properties illegitimately seized by the state, to all adult Romanian citizens at that time, in order to attain the imperative of equal distribution of property among all citizens. The equal distribution thesis is the only way through which the Romanian society could have complied, at that moment of political and social renewal, with the requirements of justice. I also aim at explaining why other principles of justice, which either have or could have been implemented, cannot be properly justified. Finally, I analyze two main objections which could be invoked against my thesis, namely the economic efficiency objection and the legal realist objection. (shrink)

This paper is a plea for hedonism to be taken more seriously. It begins by charting hedonism's decline, and suggests that this is a result of two major objections: the claim that hedonism is the 'philosophy of swine', reducing all value to a single common denominator, and Nozick's 'experience machine' objection. There follows some elucidation of the nature of hedonism, and of enjoyment in particular. Two types of theory of enjoyment are outlined-intemalism, according to which enjoyment has some special 'feeling (...) tone'. and externalism, according to which enjoyment is any kind of experience to which we take some special attitude, such as that of desire. lnternalism-the traditional view--is defended against current externalist orthodoxy. The paper ends with responses to the philosophy of swine and the experience machine objections. (shrink)

Este ensayo analiza la conjunción libertad/autoridad defendida por el republicanismo clásico. Como pensador moderno, Maquiavelo recupera esta síntesis clásica y define la autoridad como la condición de posibilidad de la libertad. Pero, como muestra Eric Nelson, el republicanismo de Maquiavelo es más ateniense que romano. El republicanismo de Michael Sandel tiene una orientación similar. Basado en la ontología social desarrollada por Arendt y Taylor, Sandel postula el valor intrínseco de las nociones de participación y soberanía popular. De este modo, él (...) puede refutar la objeción de Rorty y su interpretación idiosincrática de Dewey. Según Sandel, Dewey critica el rechazo liberal de la autoridad y es capaz de articular orgánicamente la autoridad democrática y la libertad. This essay analyzes the conjunction freedom/authority defended by classical republicanism. As a modern thinker, Machiavelli retrieves this classical synthesis and defines the authority of law as the condition of possibility for freedom. But, as Eric Neson shows, Machiavelli's republicanism is more Athenian than Roman. Michael Sandel's democratic republicanism has a similar orientation. Besed on the social ontology developed by Arendt and Taylor, Sandel postulates the intrinsic value of the notions of participation and popular sovereignty. In this way he can refute Rorty's objections and his idiosyncratic interpretation of Dewey. According to Sandel, Dewey criticizes liberalism's rejection of authority and is able organically to articulate democratic authority and freedom. (shrink)

Various writers in the Western liberal and libertarian tradition have challenged the argument that enforcement of law and protection of property rights are public goods that must be provided by governments. Many of these writers argue explicitly for the provision of law enforcement services through private market relations.

In this paper, I criticize two recent and influential arguments for no-platforming advanced by Robert Simpson and Amia Srinivasan and by Neil Levy, respectively. What both arguments have in common is their attempt to reconcile no-platforming with liberal values. For Simpson and Srinivasan, no-platforming does not contradict liberalism if grounded on the distinction between norms of free speech and norms of academic freedom; for Levy, those who defend the practice need not be accused of promoting paternalism. I argue that neither (...) view succeeds: these authors’ views are in strong tension with core tenets of liberalism. I proceed as follows: after introducing some basic liberal principles, I explain Simpson and Srinivasan’s argument in more detail and argue that it is too strong for some their stated purposes; then I proceed to show that both Simpson and Srinivasan and Levy’s arguments would justify extremely closed universities; finally, after arguing that Levy’s stance does not circumvent paternalism, I present some evidence that no-platforming would be captured by censors and probably threaten the very academic freedom that the authors want to protect. (shrink)

I argue that there are liberal reasons to reject what I call “Global Individualism”, which is the conjunction of two views strongly associated with liberalism: moral individualism and social individualism. According to the first view, all moral properties are reducible to individual moral properties. The second holds that the social world is composed only of individual agents. My argument has the following structure: after suggesting that Global Individualism does not misrepresent liberalism, I draw on some recent insights in social ontology (...) to show that it is inconsistent with the satisfaction of an important liberal principle related to the protection of individual rights over time. As I hold, to solve this problem we need to accept group agents acting as moral agents, which in turn commits us to the weaker notion of normative individualism (a view that is consistent with the existence of some group moral properties). I conclude with the suggestion that even this solution is costly for liberalism, for the conjunction of group moral agency and normative individualism makes the latter unstable and compels liberals to a much less individualistic stance than expected. (shrink)

The prominent burden-sharing principles in the emerging literature of the political theory of climate change fail to sufficiently tackle the task they set out to solve. This paper sets out properties that an alternative principle should aim to meet. Based on these properties, it develops a consequentialist moral principle – the wastefulness principle. This principle holds that it is wrong to waste a shared, scarce resource. The paper argues that this principle can be used to solve the question of who (...) should bear the burdens of anthropogenic climate change in a more suitable way than existing principles. After developing the wastefulness principle, this paper discusses in a non-exhaustive manner how it can be employed in the real world, which challenges it might meet, and how additional principles might solve them. (shrink)

We have controversial intuitions about the rightness of retributive punishment, keeping promises for its own sake, and pushing the heavy man off of the bridge in the footbridge trolley case. How do these intuitions relate to ethical theories? Should ethical theories aim to fit with and explain them? Or are only uncontroversial intuitions relevant to explanatory ethical theorising? I argue against several views that we might hold about the relationship between controversial intuitions and ethical theories. I then propose and defend (...) the view that ethical theories should only aim to fit with and explain the intuitions that almost all people (who minimally understand the relevant issues) share. I argue that this view has interesting and important implications for ethical theorising and theorising about justice and equality. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide some of the roles of philosophy in the field of academic ethics.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of philosophical discussion about the alleged moral right to die. If there is such a moral right, then it would seem to imply a moral duty on others to not interfere with the exercise of the right. And this might have important implications for public policy insofar as public policy ought to track what is morally right.

The concept of a society is central to several areas of philosophy, including social and political philosophy, philosophy of social science and moral philosophy. Yet little attention has been paid to the concept and we do not have an adequate philosophical account of it. It is a concept that is difficult to explain systematically, and it is subject to distortion or simple-minded attacks whenever it plays a major role in a philosophical theory. Methodological individualists have raised metaphysical or ontological concerns (...) about the idea that there are such things as societies, and other philosophers have found the concept of a society to be unacceptably vague. For these reasons, I believe it worthwhile to devote this essay to an attempt to explain the concept. (shrink)

No one would deny that sustainability is necessary for individual, business, and national survival. How this goal is to be accomplished is a matter of great debate. In this article I will show that the United States and other developed countries have a duty to create sustainable cities, even if that is against a notion of private property rights considered as an absolute. Through eminent domain and regulation, developed countries can fulfill their obligations to current and future generations. To do (...) so, the governments must reject perfectly competitive free market capitalism and the absolute right to private property, and more fully adopt social welfare capitalism as their economic system. The result will be a sustainable society that balances democracy, individual rights and individual flourishing with the community’s flourishing. (shrink)

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

The authors of the Target article, Shen and colleagues (2024) argue that there is a need for an ethical framework to help analyze when it is appropriate to return individualized research results (I...

This paper offers a conditional defence of a minimalist theory of appropriation. The conclusion of its main argument is that, if people do enjoy a natural right to appropriate unappropriated resources, then that right is best understood as a derivative right that stems from a more fundamental natural right to self-preservation. If this conclusion is correct, then insofar as people have a natural right to appropriation, it is much more limited than it is usually assumed, as the minimalist theory places (...) very stringent restrictions on both the amount of unappropriated resources each person has a right to appropriate and the use they can make of those appropriated resources. The conclusion of my argument can be either used as a premise in a modus tollens argument to be used against natural-right theories of property rights or as a premise in a modus ponens argument in favour of a broadly left-libertarian theory. (shrink)

The TRIPS agreement has been widely discussed. Critics have accused it to favour property rights at the cost of public health in AIDS-stricken development countries. In this article, the conflict between on the one hand Intellectual Property Rights and on the other a right to subsistence is analysed with the help of a method for specification. The rationalization of TRIPS and its amendments raises two questions for ethics, one normative and one meta-ethical. First, which right has priority: the right to (...) property or the right to subsistence? Second, how can conflicting rights be reconciled in a coherent ethical system. The aim of the article is to answer these two questions and in order to do that the method of specification developed by the philosopher Henry Richardson is applied. The result is a specified norm applicable for this kind of rights conflicts. (shrink)

Consider the following argument for school choice, based on an appeal to the virtues of the market: allowing parents some measure of choice over their particular children's education ultimately serves the interests of all children, because creating a market mechanism in state education will produce improvements through the same pressures that lead to greater efficiency and quality when markets are deployed in more familiar contexts. The argument fails, because it is committed to a principle of equal concern, which implies that (...) a market in education is acceptable only if it is right to hold children disadvantaged by their parents' poor market choices substantively responsible for the fact. Since that claim is untenable, the market‐based argument for school choice not only fails, but also turns out to rely on principles which in fact condemn the very policy it was supposed to support. (shrink)

Artikeln tar sin utgångspunkt i två aktuella exempel på krav på historisk rättvisa efter kolonialismen: forna Mau-Mau-kämpars krav på gottgörelse för britternas övergrepp på 1950-talet och hererofolkets krav till Tyskland på gottgörelse för det folkmord som ägde rum 1904–1907. Dessa exempel aktualiserar frågan om historisk rättvisa. Vad innebär historisk rättvisa? Vilka krav på historisk rättvisa är berättigade att ställa? Hur lång tid efter övergrepp och våld finns det skäl att kräva gottgörelse? Kan kraven ärvas till efterkommande generationer? Vem bör gottgöra (...) dem som drabbats? Dessa frågor måste besvaras för att man skall kunna ta ställning till krav på gottgörelse och rättvisa. Syftet med denna artikel är att identifiera och söka besvara en rad frågor som krav på gottgörande rättvisa efter kolonialismen ställer. Avslutningsvis diskuteras kraven från Mau-Mau-kämparna som var internerade i brittiska läger och hererofolkets krav på kompensation från Tyskland.Nyckelord: Gottgörande rättvisa, kompensation, kolonialism, herero, Mau-Mau, global rättvisa, historisk rättvisaEnglish summary: The Meaning of Historical Justice after ColonialismRecently, four Kikuyus and former Kenyan Mau-Mau fighters claimed compensation for castration, torture and rape committed in the British detention camps in the 1950s. Also recently, representatives of the Herero people went to Berlin to bring home skulls that Germans brought to Berlin after the genocide at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The detentions and abuses of Kikuyu and the genocide of the Herero people are just two examples of offenses carried out by European nations during colonialism. Do these offenses have any reverberations today? Should we simply forget about the deeds that happened such a long time ago or do they raise any legal or moral questions?The concept of justice has two dimensions, distributional and rectificatory. This article focuses on the meaning and implication of rectificatory justice for historical wrongs. The simple idea that if A is harming B, A has to correct her act, i.e. the basic idea of rectificatory justice, presupposes a line of complicated assumptions when it is applied to specific historical incidences, for example colonialism.A model provides a basis for an explication of rectificatory justice. It is then applied to a discussion of rectification after colonialism. The questions of who can rightly claim rectification and who owes rectification, if there are temporal limitations to rectification and what rectification after colonialism would imply are discussed. The article ends with an explication of the meaning of rectificatory justice, an argumentation for why rectificatory justice is commendable and an assessment of the demands of the Mau-Mau-fighters and the Herero. (shrink)

The essay argues that individual ethical judgment is a necessary ingredient in an organisation’s ethical performance. Attempts to systematise judgment, removing it from individual responsibility are not successful, and sometimes can even be counterproductive. Focus on systems of accountability can actually detract from the production of ethical behaviour. A number of examples are provided. Although it is much more difficult to produce, individual responsible decision-making and individual judgment should be the features that an organisation focuses on in its interest to (...) promote ethical performance. Accountability systems are important; but they have very limited application toward production of an ethically excellent environment. The essay argues that there has been too much attention paid to accountability systems within organisations, and much too little paid toward the development and cultivation of individual ethical decision making and responsible behaviour. (shrink)