Ultimately this book provides a theory of intergenerational justice that is both intellectually robust and practical with wide applicability to law and policy.

has become an honorific title used by researchers to commend their work, or the particular approach they adopt. Conversely, the work of others is often dismissed on the grounds that it is "uncritical". However, there are important questions about what the term critical means, about what we should be critical of, and about the form that criticism ought to take. These questions are addressed here in relation to both the role of the social researcher itself and that of researchers operating (...) as public intellectuals. It is argued that the distinction between these roles is an important one, and has implications for what can legitimately be criticised, on what grounds, and in what way. In each case, there are proper limits to criticism, albeit different ones. Like anything else, criticism is not always a good thing. Key Words: critical social research • scientific criticism • social criticism • public intellectuals. (shrink)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, (...) we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

Perhaps the most salient feature of Rawls's theory of justice which at once attracts supporters and repels critics is its apparent egalitarian conclusion as to how economic goods are to be distributed. Indeed, many of Rawls's sympathizers may find this result intuitively appealing, and regard it as Rawls's enduring contribution to the topic of economic justice, despite technical deficiencies in Rawls's contractarian, decision-theoretic argument for it which occupy the bulk of the critical literature. Rawls himself, having proposed a “coherence” theory (...) of justification in metaethics, must regard the claim that his distributive criterion “is a strongly egalitarian conception” as independently a part of the overarching moral argument. The alleged egalitarian impact of Rawls's theory is crucial again in normative ethics where Rawls is thought to have developed a major counter-theory to utilitarianism, one of the most popular criticisms of which has been its alleged inadequacy in handling questions of distributive justice. Utilitarians can argue, however, as Brandt recently has, that the diminishing marginal utility of money, along with ignorance of income-welfare curves, would require a utility-maximizing distribution to be substantially egalitarian. The challenge is therefore for Rawls to show that his theory yields an ethically preferable degree of equality. (shrink)

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the domain of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scholars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from (...) both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work avail able to an international audience, but it also encourages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, although some edited volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of internationally renowed scholars. Legal philosophy should not be considered a narrowly circumscribed field. (shrink)

Desire', 'preference', 'utility', '(utility-aggregating) moral desirability' are terms that build on each other in this order. The article follows this definitional structure and presents these terms and their justifications. The aim is to present welfare-ethical criteria of the common good that define 'moral desirability' as an aggregation, e.g. addition, of individual utility: utilitarianism, utility egalitarianism, leximin, prioritarianism.

a This is an outline of a coherence theory of law. Its basic ideas are: reasonable support and weighing of reasons. All the rest is commentary.a (TM) These words at the beginning of the preface of this book perfectly indicate what On Law and Reason is about. It is a theory about the nature of the law which emphasises the role of reason in the law and which refuses to limit the role of reason to the application of deductive logic. (...) In 1989, when the first edition of On Law and Reason appeared, this book was ground breaking for several reasons. It provided a rationalistic theory of the law in the language of analytic philosophy and based on a thorough understanding of the results, including technical ones, of analytic philosophy. That was not an obvious combination at the time of the booka (TM)s first appearance and still is not. The result is an analytical rigor that is usually associated with positivist theories of the law, combined with a philosophical position that is not natural law in a strict sense, but which shares with it the emphasis on the role of reason in determining what the law is. If only for this rare combination, On Law and Reason still deserves careful study. On Law and Reason also foreshadowed and influenced a development in the field of Legal Logic that would take place in the nineties of the 20th century, namely the development of non-monotonic (a defeasiblea (TM)) logics for the analysis of legal reasoning. In the new Introduction to this second edition, this aspect is explored in some more detail. (shrink)

Many open networks, distributed computing systems, and infrastructure management systems face a common problem: how to distribute a collectivised set of resources amongst a set of autonomous agents of heterogenous provenance. One approach is for the agents themselves to self-organise the allocation of resources with respect to a set of agreed conventional rules; but given an allocation scheme which maps resources to those agents and a set of rules for determining that allocation scheme, some natural questions arise—Is this allocation fair? (...) Is the allocation method effective? Is it efficient? Are the decision makers accountable? In this paper, we argue that some answers to these questions can be found in the formal characterisation of different aspects of ‘justice’ and that these different aspects need a principled operationalisation as policies for system management. We present a formal model and some experimental results, concluding that the different aspects are all inter-connected and that what is required is a comprehensive research programme in computational justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Utilitarianism is commonly defined in very different ways, sometimes in a single text. There is wide agreement that it mandates maximizing some kind of good, but many formulations also require a pattern of distribution. The most common of these take utilitarianism to characterize right acts as those that achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number.” This paper shows important ambiguities in this formulation and contrasts it (on any plausible interpretation of it) with the kinds of utilitarian views actually defended (...) by major proponents of utilitarianism. The aim is not to defend any of these views but to formulate them in a way that facilitates using them—or, more likely, some revised version suggested by the paper—in guiding decisions in business. The analysis provided here should also facilitate appraisal of utilitarianism, contribute to clarity in discussions of business ethics, and suggest a range of ethical standards that merit consideration for certain kinds of decision. If the results of the analysis are correct, a distributive reading of utilitarianism is at best misleading as a representation of its central thrust; it should not be described as the view that ethics calls for achieving “the greatest good for the greatest number”; and, understood as its major proponents take it, utilitarianism differs more from Kantian ethics than distributive readings imply and is more difficult to defend than it appears to be when viewed as intrinsically distributive. (shrink)

This paper will in good part concern six arguments taken as making up what is called the New Retributivism. It will also have to do with a seventh retributivist argument, and with the unexamined idea that reflection on punishment can lead a life of its own, independently of political philosophy. Both that idea and the arguments bear on the main question of whether punishment in our societies is right or wrong. It is a question not worn to a frazzle, as (...) is the one of how it is that punishment is right, which piously presupposes that it is. My answer to the impious question gets very little wear in this reactionary and, as it sometimes seems, vengeful time. For a particular reason, it will have to go undefended here. (shrink)

Just about all political philosophy of the recommending kind is factless and presumptuous. That it has an honest intellectual use, which it does, and which of course is different from its use as reassurance and the like, is only to be explained by the want of something better.

While there exist extensive literatures on both distributive justice and senior executive pay, and a number of authors (notably the French economist Thomas Piketty) have addressed the implications of high pay for distributive justice, the existing literature fails to address what senior executives themselves think about distributive justice and whether they consider high income inequalities to be morally acceptable. We address this gap by analysing a unique dataset comprising the views of over 1000 senior executives from across the world, which (...) was constructed using a survey instrument designed by the authors based on a thought experiment resembling John Rawls’s original position. We report four main findings. First, executives conceptualise distributive justice in a pluralistic manner, endorsing different and sometimes apparently conflicting philosophical principles: to explain how this plurality can be accounted for we propose a novel field-theory framework for conceptualising beliefs about distributive justice. Second, executives support similar philosophical approaches at both society and company levels of analysis, thus countering the idea that companies should leave matters of distributive justice exclusively for governments to deal with via the tax system. Third, executives believe that they live in societies and work for companies that fall short of desirable distributive justice outcomes. Fourth, the distributive justice views of the executives in our sample fall into four distinct clusters that are correlated with certain socio-demographic markers. Finally, we note the distinction between distributive justice beliefs and behaviours, from which we derive a number of managerial and public policy implications. (shrink)

It is now more than ten years since the EU FET project ALFEBIITE finished, during which its researchers made original and distinctive contributions to (inter alia) formal models of trust, model-checking, and action logics. ALFEBIITE was also a highly inter-disciplinary project, with partners from computer science, philosophy, cognitive science and law. In this paper, we reflect on the interaction between computer scientists and information and IT lawyers on the idea of the ‘open agent society’. This inspired a programme of research (...) whose investigation into conceptual challenges has carried it from the logical specification of agent societies and dynamic norm-governed systems to self-organising electronic institutions, while developing several technologies for agent-based modelling and complex event recognition. The outcomes of this inter-disciplinary collaboration have also influenced current research into using the open agent society as a platform for socio-technical systems, and other collective adaptive systems. We present a number of research challenges, including the ideas of computational justice and polycentric governance, and explore a number of ethical, legal and social implications. We contend that, in order to address these issues and challenges, the continued inter-disciplinary collaboration between computer science and IT lawyers is critical. (shrink)