This paper aims, firstly, to bridge debates on human rights and Transnational Corporations within practical philosophy and those within the business and human rights literature and, secondly, to determine the extent to which human rights duties can be assigned to TNCs. To justifiably assign human rights duties to TNCs, it is argued that these duties need to be grounded in moral theory. Through assessment of two approaches from practical philosophy, it is argued that positive duties cannot be assigned to TNCs (...) because their bindingness cannot be grounded in moral theory. A positive argument is introduced to interpret TNCs’ human rights duties as corresponding to virtues rather than rights. Though such duties are indeterminate regarding what constitutes adequate performance, they can be made more determinate through legal instruments outside of positive human rights law. An approach is introduced exemplifying how such approaches can achieve the end of TNCs compliance with human rights norms. (shrink)

Claims about needs are a ubiquitous feature of everyday practical discourse. It is therefore unsurprising that needs have long been a topic of interest in moral philosophy, applied ethics, and political philosophy. Philosophers have devoted much time and energy to developing theories of the nature of human needs and the like. -/- Philosophers working on needs are typically committed to the idea that there are different kinds of needs and that within the different kinds of needs is a privileged class (...) of needs that is especially normatively significant. -/- Some philosophers go further and make rather grand claims about needs. They claim that needs are central or fundamental to moral thinking and that we must have a needs-centred moral theory or a general reorientation of moral philosophy around needs. -/- In this paper I aim to do two things. First, to show how applying recent work on modal terms can help us to understand thought and talk about needs. This is the positive part. I then use these ideas to cast doubt on the more ambitious claims about needs. Put briefly, a proper understanding of claims about needs undermines the idea that the concept of needs is fundamental in moral thought or in moral philosophy. Ambitious needs theory fails. (shrink)

Is there—or rather, ought there to be—a presumption of atheism, as Antony Flew so famously argued nearly half a century ago? It is time to revisit this issue. After clarifying the concept of a presumption of atheism, I take up the evaluative question of whether there ought to be a presumption of atheism, focusing on Flew’s arguments for an affirmative answer. I conclude that Flew’s arguments, one of which rests on an analogy with the presumption of innocence, fail.

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)

William Perm summarized theMagna Cartathus: “First, It assertsEnglishmento be free; that's Liberty. Secondly, they that have free-holds, that's Property.” Since at least the seventeenth century, liberals have not only understood liberty and property to be fundamental, but to be somehow intimately related or interwoven. Here, however, consensus ends; liberals present an array of competing accounts of the relation between liberty and property. Many, for instance, defend an essentially instrumental view, typically seeing private property as justified because it is necessary to (...) maintain or protect other, more basic, liberty rights. Important to our constitutional tradition has been the idea that “[t]he right to property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Along similar lines, it has been argued that only an economic system based on private property disperses power and resources, ensuring that private people in civil society have the resources to oppose the state and give effect to basic liberties. Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that only those with property develop the independent characters that are necessary to preserve a regime of liberty. But not only have liberals insisted that, property is a means of preserving liberty, they have often conceived of it as an embodiment of liberty, or as a type of liberty, or indeed as identical to liberty. This latter view is popular among contemporary libertarians or classical liberals. Jan Narveson, for instance, bluntly asserts that “Liberty is Property,” while John Gray insists that “[t]he connection between property and the basic liberties is constitutive and not just instrumental.”. (shrink)

Abstract:Extrapolating from Carroll’s four domains of corporate social responsibility (1979) and Pyramid of CSR (1991), an alternative approach to conceptualizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) is proposed. A three-domain approach is presented in which the three core domains of economic, legal, and ethical responsibilities are depicted in a Venn model framework. The Venn framework yields seven CSR categories resulting from the overlap of the three core domains. Corporate examples are suggested and classified according to the new model, followed by a discussion (...) of limitations and teaching and research implications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Increasingly, global businesses are confronted with the question of complicity in human rights violations committed by abusive host governments. This contribution specifically looks at silent complicity and the way it challenges conventional interpretations of corporate responsibility. Silent complicity implies that corporations have moral obligations that reach beyond the negative realm of doing no harm. Essentially, it implies that corporations have a moral responsibility to help protect human rights by putting pressure on perpetrating host governments involved in human rights abuses. This (...) is a controversial claim, which this contribution proposes to analyze with a view to understanding and determining the underlying conditions that need to be met in order for moral agents to be said to have such responsibilities in the category of the duty to protect human rights. (shrink)

Many maintain that if a beneficiary has a right to a benefit provided by his benefactor, then the former cannot owe the latter gratitude for that benefit. In this paper I argue against that view. I provide examples in which benefactors provide others with benefits to which they have a right even though most others are denying them that right. These benefactors are moral standouts; they do what is right when most similarly situated agents fail to do so. I then (...) spell out some of the features of these benefactors’ actions that make them worthy of gratitude. (shrink)

Instrumentalists about need believe that all needs are instrumental, i.e., ontologically dependent upon ends, goals or purposes. Absolutists view some needs as non-instrumental. The aims of this article are: clearly to characterize the instrumentalism/absolutism debate that is of concern (mainly §1); to establish that both positions have recent and current adherents (mainly §1); to bring what is, in comparison with prior literature, a relatively high level of precision to the debate, employing some hitherto neglected, but important, insights (passim); to show, (...) on grounds not previously to the fore in the literature, that insofar as instrumentalism’s advocates have provided arguments for the position, these are unsound (§2); to argue against instrumentalism using a new dilemma concerning whether ‘end’, ‘goal’ and ‘purpose’ are interpreted in a mentalistic manner (§3); to elucidate the implications of the needs/need-satisfiers and preconditions/means distinctions for the debate (§4). (shrink)

The discussion of the nature and value of dignity in and for bioethics concerns not only the importance of the concept but also the aims of bioethics itself. Here, I challenge the claim that the concept of dignity is useless by challenging the implicit conception of usefulness involved. I argue that the conception of usefulness that both opponents and proponents of dignity in bioethics adopt is rooted in a narrow understanding of the role of normative theory in practical ethical thinking. (...) I then offer an alternate understanding of the nature and value of dignity. I begin by recognizing that claims that one’s dignity has been violated point to an important difference between “respect for autonomy” and “respect for persons.” I then suggest three different conceptions of how dignity can be normatively guiding for bioethics, and conclude that, ultimately, understanding dignity as the cornerstone of a reflective perspective that frames moral reflection and deliberation is valuable for doing bioethics well. (shrink)

Connections between one's own welfare and that of others abound if we pause to look for them, although philosophical theories of selfhood have only very recently begun to incorporate these connections. This essay draws on recent work on need to argue that one of the strongest expressions of these connections is to be found in the relational needs that they can generate. While paying heed to needs that arise from the relational nature of selfhood at large, this essay pays particular (...) attention to what I call “transpersonal needs”: needs that occur when one's experience of the needs of others gives rise to certain needs of one's own. I argue that the best criterion for defining need is vulnerability to harm, but this does not mean that having a need is something that is purely harmful. Having certain needs can also enrich one's life. Further, while every need entails a corresponding vulnerability to harm, some of these potential harms are more detrimental to one's welfare than others, with some relational needs standing among those that can result in the greatest harm if unanswered. (shrink)

Feminist health activists and medical researchers frequently disagree on the adequacy of the informed consent processes in clinical trials. I argue for an informed consent process that reflects the central importance of patient-participant autonomy. Such a standard may raise concerns for medical researchers about their capacity to control the quantity and quality of the information they disclose to potential participants. These difficulties might be addressed by presenting potential participants with differently sized disclosure packages.

Evaluating the risks and anticipated benefits of medical, behavioral and, social research is a central function of institutional review boards. The calculation that IRBs undertake ultimately determines whether a particular research project involving human participants is permitted to proceed. In medical research the physical harms and even the anticipated benefits of a new procedure or drug are often apparent and quantifiable. In contrast, for social/behavioral research that may involve probing the most intimate feelings, thoughts, and actions of participants, the weighing (...) of risks and anticipated benefits, the calculation of possible harms and the acceptability of that harm require a more intense level of scrutiny.Even the early step of identifying and recruiting participants for a research endeavor may potentially cause harm, making participant selection a focus of IRB analysis. (shrink)

Estudio y guía didáctica sobre una ética aplicada: Ética para Psicología. -/- Applied Ethics study: Psychoethics .

This paper defends several highly revisionary theses about human rights. Section 1 shows that the phrase 'human rights' refers to two distinct types of moral claims. Sections 2 and 3 argue that several longstanding problems in human rights theory and practice can be solved if, and only if, the concept of a human right is replaced by two more exact concepts: (A) International human rights, which are moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic and international social protection; and (B) Domestic (...) human rights, which are moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic social protection but only non-coercive international action. Section 3 then argues that because coercion is central to both types of human rights, and coercion is a matter of justice, the traditional view of human rights -- that they are normative entitlements prior to and independent of substantive theories of justice -- is incorrect. Human rights must instead be seen as emerging from substantive theories of domestic and international justice. Finally, Section 4 uses this reconceptualization to show that only a few very minimal claims about international human rights are presently warranted. Because international human rights are rights of international justice, but theorists of international justice disagree widely about the demands of international justice, much more research on international justice is needed -- and much greater agreement about international justice should be reached -- before anything more than a very minimal list of international human rights can be justified. (shrink)

Abstract:In 2003, CEOs of the 365 largest U.S. corporations were paid on average $8 million, 301 times as much as factory workers. This paper asks whether CEOs get paid too much. Appealing to widely recognized moral values, I distinguish three views of justice in wages: the agreement view, the desert view, and the utility view. I argue that, no matter which view is correct, CEOs get paid too much. I conclude by offering two ways CEO pay might be reduced.

ABSTRACT:In a series of reports the United Nations Special Representative on the issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations has emphasized a tripartite framework regarding business and human rights that includes the state “duty to protect,” the TNC “responsibility to respect,” and “appropriate remedies” for human rights violations. This article examines the recent history of UN initiatives regarding business and human rights and places the tripartite framework in historical context. Three approaches to human rights are distinguished: moral, political, and legal. (...) It is argued that the tripartite framework’s grounding of the responsibility of TNCs to respect human rights is properly understood as moral and not merely as a political or legal duty. A moral account of the duty of TNCs to respect basic human rights is defended and contrasted with a merely strategic approach. The main conclusion of the article is that only a moral account of the basic human rights duties of TNCs provides a sufficiently deep justification of “the corporate responsibility to respect human rights” feature of the tripartite framework. (shrink)

Evaluating the risks and anticipated benefits of medical, behavioral and, social research is a central function of institutional review boards. The calculation that IRBs undertake ultimately determines whether a particular research project involving human participants is permitted to proceed. In medical research the physical harms and even the anticipated benefits of a new procedure or drug are often apparent and quantifiable. In contrast, for social/behavioral research that may involve probing the most intimate feelings, thoughts, and actions of participants, the weighing (...) of risks and anticipated benefits, the calculation of possible harms and the acceptability of that harm require a more intense level of scrutiny.Even the early step of identifying and recruiting participants for a research endeavor may potentially cause harm, making participant selection a focus of IRB analysis. (shrink)

Those objecting to human DNA patenting frequently do so on the grounds that the practice violates or threatens human dignity. For example, from 1993 to 1994, more than thirty organizations representing indigenous peoples approved formal declarations objecting to the National Institutes of Health's bid to patent viral DNA taken from subjects in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Although these were not patents on human DNA, the organizations argued that the patents could harm and exploit indigenous peoples and violate (...) their cultural values. NIH eventually dropped one of its patent applications.On May 18, 1995, 180 religious leaders, led by biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin, held a press conference objecting to DNA patenting in Washington, D.C. In their “Joint Appeal against Human and Animal Patenting,” these leaders decried any attempt to patent nature. Some of the more outspoken members of the Joint Appeal likened DNA patenting to slavery, while others objected to treating human beings as marketable commodities. In his recent book, The Biotech Century, Rifkin rehashed the objections to DNA patenting voiced by members of the Joint Appeal. (shrink)

Both moral and legal theory feature prominent talk about rights. Yet there is very little agreement about what rights are, about why we use rights in our moral or legal theories, or about what to do when there is a conflict between rights. This article surveys many of the popular theory for analysing rights and explaining their scope.

Desert plays a central role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice, but little or no role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice. This asymmetric treatment of desert is prima facie strange. I consider several popular arguments against the use of desert in distributive justice, and argue that none of them can be used to justify the asymmetry.

In her recent Counter-Reply to my views, Evelyn Pluhar defends her use of literature on nutrition and restates her argument for moral vegetarianism. In his Vegan Ideal article, Gary Varner claims that the nutrition literature does not show sufficient differences among women, men, and children to warrant concern about discrimination. In this response I show how Professor Pluhar continues to draw fallacious inferences: she begs the question on equality, avoids the main issue in my ethical arguments, argues from irrelevancies, misquotes (...) her sources, equivocates on context, confuses safety with morality, appeals to fear, confuses correlation with cause, fails to evaluate scientific studies, draws hasty conclusions from insufficient data, ignores a large amount of data which would call her views into question, does not follow good scientific or moral argumentation, objectionably exceeds the limits of her expertise, and resorts to scapegoating. I also argue that Professor Varner fails to make his case because he offers virtually no evidence from scientific studies on nutrition, relies on outdated and fallacious sources, makes unsupported claims, ignores evidence that would contravene his claims, draws hasty conclusions based on weakly supported hypotheses rather than facts, employs a double standard, appeals to ignorance, does not evaluate arguments from his sources, and makes anad hominem attack on a respected nutritionist when his focus should be on evaluating the evidence and arguments from the scientific studies themselves. Neither Varner nor Pluhar have responded sufficiently to the real issue in my arguments, that of discrimination and bias in the vegan ideal. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Does genetic relatedness define who is a mother or father and who incurs obligations towards or entitlements over children? While once the answer to this question may have been obvious, advances in reproductive technologies have complicated our understanding of what makes a parent. In a recent publication Bayne and Kolers argue for a pluralistic account of parenthood on the basis that genetic derivation, gestation, extended custody and sometimes intention to parent are sufficient (but not necessary) grounds for parenthood.1 Bayne (...) and Kolers further suggest that definitions of parenthood are underpinned by the assumption that ‘being causally implicated in the creation of a child is the key basis for being its parent’.2 This paper examines the claim that genetic relatedness is sufficient grounds for parenthood based on a causal connection between genetic parents and their offspring. I argue that parental obligations are about moral responsibility and not causal responsibility because we are not morally accountable for every consequence to which we causally contribute. My account includes the conditions generally held to apply to moral responsibility, i.e. freedom and foreseeability. I argue that parental responsibilities are generated whenever the birth of a child is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of voluntary actions. I consider the implications of this account for third parties involved in reproductive technologies. I argue that under some conditions the obligations generated by freely and foreseeably causing a child to exist can be justifiably transferred to others. (shrink)

This paper offers the first philosophical analysis of a form of artificial intelligence (AI) which the author calls facial profiling technology (FPT). FPT is a type of facial analysis technology designed to predict criminal behavior based solely on facial structure. Marketed for use by law enforcement, face classifiers generated by the program can supposedly identify murderers, thieves, pedophiles, and terrorists prior to the commission of crimes. At the time of this writing, an FPT company has a contract with the United (...) States federal government. After recounting how FPT resurrects the same moral problems associated with the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the author of this manuscript develops and defends the ‘Liberal Argument Against Facial Discrimination’ (LAAFD), which concludes that government use of FPT poses a significant risk of violating the classical liberal value of equality before the law by committing unjust discrimination against groups of people whose faces happen to match FPT classifiers. A key move in the argument suggests how a future scenario that results in widespread discrimination based solely on facial structure could be as unjustified and harmful, mutatis mutandis, as similar discrimination based solely on racial background. In the final section, the author of this paper develops prima facie policy proposals designed to protect classical liberal values if FPT is to be utilized by governments in liberal democratic societies. (shrink)

While much ink has been spilt over the political importance of speech, much less has been dedicated to the political importance of silence. This article seeks to fill that gap. We propose the need for a robust, democratic right to silence in public life and argue that there are politically salient epistemic reasons for recognising that right. We begin by defining what silence is and what a robust right to silence entails. We then argue that the right to silence offers (...) two politically salient epistemic benefits. The first is that, if the right to silence is maintained, we can avoid the epistemic harm that may be caused when an individual is compelled to lie in public. The second is that the right to silence can protect marginalised individuals against the epistemic injustices that may arise when others are likely to misconstrue their speech. (shrink)

This paper elucidates the rights violations caused by mass formal schooling systems and explores what students may do about them. Students have rights not to be harmed and rights to liberty (not to be oppressed), as well as attendant rights to (proportionately) defend their rights if necessary. For some time now, education has been dominated by mass formal schooling systems that harm and oppress many students. Such harm and oppression violate those students’ rights not to be harmed or oppressed, which (...) may justify student nonviolent defensive (or rights-protecting) action. (shrink)

Philosophers often identify needing something with requiring it to avoid harm. This view of need is roughly accurate, but no adequate analysis of the relevant sort of requirement has been given, and the relevant notion of harm has not been clarified. Further, the harm-avoidance picture must be broadened, because we also need what is required to reduce danger. I offer two analyses of need (one probabilistic) to address these shortcomings. The analyses are at a high level of generality and accommodate (...) our ordinary notion of need as well as narrower conceptions. I also explain why the only extant, detailed modal account of need, David Wiggins’s (1987/1998), is inadequate. My analyses imply that to have a need for something is to have the (expected) quality of one’s life depend counterfactually on it in a certain way. The analyses shed some light on need’s distinctive normative significance. (shrink)

What are the main conditions that any theory of human rights should satisfy to guide action? If agents must take action for a fairer world as human rights discourse suggests, this is a crucial question to reflect upon. In this paper, I make a proposal. I argue that any theory of (moral) human rights that guides action on the basis of correlative duties must satisfy three key conditions. The first condition is focused on the specification of act-types, the second concerns (...) the distribution of correlative duties, and the third is focused on the resolution of (resolvable) conflicts of human rights. I show that this proposal has substantive implications because it implies to reject, challenge and, in some cases, resist ideas that are commonly accepted in the literature on human rights. (shrink)

The word “privilege” has become a part of our everyday conversations. However, it is not evident whether the various interlocutors in discussions on privilege are using it in the same sense. While different instances of privilege like white, male, or caste privilege have been discussed in contemporary academic discourses, we believe there is a lack of clarity regarding the notion of privilege. We critically analyse existing accounts of privilege to show that they leave some room for improvement. We offer an (...) alternative account of privilege as “entitlements that fail to track deserts” that circumvents prevalent definitional ambiguities and emphasises the inherent undeserving nature of privilege. The hitherto underexplored links between privileges, deserts, entitlements, and rights can help us formulate a more accurate grasp of privilege. (shrink)

Antinatalism is an emerging philosophy and practice that challenges pronatalism, the prevailing philosophy and practice in reproductive matters. We explore justifications of antinatalism—the arguments from the quality of life, the risk of an intolerable life, the lack of consent, and the asymmetry of good and bad—and argue that none of them supports a concrete, understandable, and convincing moral case for not having children. We identify concentration on possible future individuals who may or may not come to be as the main (...) culprit for the failure and suggest that the focus should be shifted to people who already exist. Pronatalism’s hegemonic status in contemporary societies imposes upon us a lifestyle that we have not chosen yet find almost impossible to abandon. We explicate the nature of this imposition and consider the implications of its exposure to different stakeholders with varying stands on the practice of antinatalism. Imposition as a term has figured in reproductive debates before, but the argument from postnatal, mental, and cultural imposition we launch is new. It is the hitherto overlooked and underdeveloped justification of antinatalism that should be solid and comprehensible enough to be used even by activists in support of their work. (shrink)

A prominent concern in the literature on the ethics of human enhancement is that unequal access to future technology will exacerbate existing societal inequalities. The philosopher Daniel Wikler has argued that a futuristic cognitively enhanced majority would be justified in restricting the civil liberties of the unenhanced minority population for their own good in the same way that, mutatis mutandis, the cognitively normal majority are now justified in restricting the civil liberties of those deemed to be cognitively incompetent. Contrary to (...) this argument, the author of this manuscript presents and defends The Liberal Argument to Protect Cognitive ‘Normals’. According to this argument, while classical liberalism authorizes the cognitively competent to paternalistically restrict the civil liberties of the cognitively incompetent, classical liberalism does not authorize the cognitively enhanced to paternalistically restrict the civil liberties of the cognitively normal. Two additional arguments are developed in support of The Liberal Argument to Protect Cognitive ‘Normals’. The author of this manuscript concludes by suggesting that classical liberalism could be valuable for protecting the civil liberties of disenfranchised groups in a future in which enhancement technology could exacerbate existing societal inequalities. (shrink)

One prominent theory of fairness is John Broome's. This article identifies several problems with Broome's theory but defends Broome's claim that fairness requires the proportionate satisfaction of claims. This article also shows how Broome's conception of fairness is compatible with fairness as comparative desert.

In his invited essay for Business & Society’s 60th anniversary, Archie B. Carroll refers to human rights as “a topic that holds considerable promise for CSR [corporate social responsibility] researchers in the future.” The objective of this article is to unpack this promise. We discuss the momentum of business and human rights in international policy, national regulation, and corporate practice, review how and why BHR scholarship has been thriving, provide a conceptual framework to analyze how BHR and corporate social responsibility (...) relate to each other, and provide a research agenda outlining how BHR can expand business and society scholarship in general and one of its foundational constructs, CSR, in particular, beyond the current confines of the business and society field. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 38-54, March 2022.

This paper presents a novel philosophical analysis of the problem of law enforcement’s use of biased face recognition technology in liberal democracies. FRT programs used by law enforcement in identifying crime suspects are substantially more error-prone on facial images depicting darker skin tones and females as compared to facial images depicting Caucasian males. This bias can lead to citizens being wrongfully investigated by police along racial and gender lines. The author develops and defends “A Liberal Argument Against Biased FRT,” which (...) concludes that law enforcement use of biased FRT is inconsistent with the classical liberal requirement that government treat all citizens equally before the law. Two objections to this argument are considered and shown to be unsound. The author concludes by suggesting that equality before the law should be preserved while the problem of machine bias ought to be resolved before FRT and other types of artificial intelligence are deployed by governments in liberal democracies. (shrink)

Recent structural innovations in global commerce present difficult challenges for legacy understandings of responsibility. The rise of outsourcing, sub-contracting, and mobile app-based platforms have dramatically restructured relationships between and among economic actors. Though not entirely new, the remarkable rise in the prevalence of these “not-quite-arm’s-length” relationships present difficulties for conceptions of responsibility based on interrogating the past for specifiable actions by blameworthy actors. Iris Marion Young invites investigation of a “social connection model of responsibility” (SCMR) that is, in many ways, (...) better suited to this new commercial reality. Scholars working to understand corporate responsibility have invoked Young’s model to some good effect, though often superficially and uncritically. In this paper, we look closely at Young’s social connection model and its potential for helping us understand corporate responsibility in a radically networked world. (shrink)

Some meritocratic defenders of capitalism rely on the principle that cooperators should receive a share of the product commensurate with their contribution. However, such defences of capitalism fail due to a dilemma. Either they rely on an understanding of contribution that arguably will be reflected by the capital-labour split in suitably idealized capitalist economies, but cannot serve as a plausible standard of merit; or they rely on an interpretation of contribution that is a plausible standard of merit, but which won’t (...) tend to be reflected by the capital-labour split in capitalist economies. (shrink)

Using American football as a point of entry, I approach harmful sports from the perspective of fans’ roles and responsibilities. Given that sports’ profitability is a significant obstacle to reform...

Argues, against Anscombe, that Aristotle had the concept of morality as an interpersonal normative order: morality is justice in general. For an action to be wrong is not for it to warrant blame, or to wrong another person, but to be something one should not do that one has no right to do. In the absence of rights, morality makes no sense.

In this paper, I offer a solution to the Capacity/Equality Puzzle. The puzzle holds that an account of the franchise may adequately capture at most two of the following: (1) a political equality-based account of the franchise, (2) a capacity-based account of disenfranchising children, and (3) universal adult enfranchisement. To resolve the puzzle, I provide a complex liberal egalitarian justification of a moral requirement to disenfranchise children. I show that disenfranchising children is permitted by both the proper political liberal and (...) the proper political egalitarian understandings of the relationship between cognitive capacity and the franchise. Further, I argue, disenfranchising children is required by a minimalistic, procedural principle of collective competence in political decision-making. At the same time, I show that political equality requires the enfranchisement of all adults, regardless of cognitive capacities, and that the collective competence principle does not ground adult disenfranchisement. This justifies the progressive legal trend that holds the capacity-based disenfranchisement of adults to be incompatible with liberal democratic principles. (shrink)

This article presents philosophical-ethical arguments concerning the extent to which NCAA inter-collegiate football is a public good and some implausible implications of the claim that it constitutes a public good and ought to be publicly subsidized as part of a component of U.S. higher education generally as is currently the case. Underlying this main argument is one concerning who or what should have the responsibility for subsidizing the necessary costs of the sport, including its associated healthcare and medical costs.

One of the most prevalent rationales for public healthcare policies is a human right to healthcare. Governments are the typical duty-bearers, but they differ vastly in their capacity to help those vulnerable to serious health problems and those with severe disabilities. A right to healthcare is out of the reach of many developing economies that struggle to provide the most basic services to their citizens. If human rights to provision of such goods exist, then governments would be violating rights without (...) doing anything wrong. I argue that such variable ability to provide healthcare depends not only on financial resources, but on institutional capacity, and that the latter represents a more fundamental challenge to the existence of a human right to healthcare than previously recognized. This challenge does not imply that government has no obligations to protect and improve the health of their citizens, but that it is best to think of such obligations as generated by conventional rights, namely rights arising from local legal and social conventions, which require governments to pursue health-related moral goals such as reducing suffering, closing opportunity gaps for the disadvantaged, and preventing the spread of contagious diseases. We need not think of such moral goals in terms of human rights. (shrink)

We start from, and expand on, a basic insight in negative dialectic, namely, that our main concern should be with the absolute worst in political life. We then consider how this might have an impact on the way we understand the role and grounds of moral equality. Subsequently, we move on to explain the importance of decency in political morality. Finally, we take a closer look to basic data about global poverty and inequality and what these might tell us in (...) light of our analysis of the foundations of moral equality and its relationship to social cruelty. (shrink)

That there is a human right to subsistence is a basic assumption for most moral and political theorists interested in the problem of global poverty, but it is not one exempt from controversy. In this article, I examine four justifications for this right and suggest that it takes the form of a claim, that is, a right which creates correlative duties on others who are then taken to be the main agents in its fulfillment. I point to some criticisms made (...) against this conceptualization and offer an alternative approach that emphasizes the key importance of the moral and political agency of the needy. Two aspects of this approach are that the needy are seen as actors in their own right when it comes to poverty alleviation measures and their demands are no longer seen as demands for mere subsistence but ultimately for putting an end to their political marginalization and exclusion. Towards the end, I point to the complementarity of both views. (shrink)

The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its (...) basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly. (shrink)

Freedom is one of the most important moral and political ideals. Questions concerning degrees of overall freedom are therefore of the utmost moral and political concern. To answer these questions we need to know how to measure degrees of overall freedom. This paper offers a novel defence of the partly evaluative approach to freedom measurement against a recent critique of it. According to the partly evaluative approach, the question of how free one is depends partly on the specific value of (...) the freedoms one possesses and partly on their physical extension. According to the critique, because of its reference to freedoms’ specific value, the partly evaluative approach fails to capture freedoms’ non-specific value, which is what it should capture. In this paper I argue that this critique is unfounded, by showing that even measures of more mundane things, which nevertheless, like freedom, present us with a commensuration problem, sometimes involve evaluative considerations similar to the ones that the partly evaluative approach invokes. (shrink)