If elective abortion is publicly funded, then the government is obligated to take active measures designed to reduce its prevalence. I present two arguments for that conclusion. The first argument is directed at those pro-choice thinkers who hold that while some or all elective abortions are morally wrong, they still ought to be legally permitted and publicly subsidized. The second argument is directed at pro-choice thinkers who hold that there is nothing morally wrong with elective abortion and that it should (...) be both legally permitted and publicly subsidized. The second argument employs premises that generalize beyond the abortion debate and that may serve to shed light on broader questions concerning conscience and the requirements of political compromise in a democracy. (shrink)

I first provide an analysis of Joel Feinberg’s anti-paternalism in terms of invalidation of reasons. Invalidation is the blocking of reasons from influencing the moral status of actions, in this case the blocking of personal good reasons from supporting liberty-limiting actions. Invalidation is shown to be distinct from moral side constraints and lexical ordering of values and reasons. I then go on to argue that anti-paternalism as invalidation is morally unreasonable on at least four grounds, none of which presuppose that (...) people can be mistaken about their own good: First, the doctrine entails that we should sometimes allow people to unintentionally severely harm or kill themselves though we could easily stop them. Second, it entails that we should sometimes allow perfectly informed and rational people to risk the lives of themselves and others, though they are in perfect agreement with us on what reasons we have to stop them for their own good. Third, the doctrine leaves unexplained why we may benevolently coerce less competent but substantially autonomous people, such as young teens, but not adults. Last, it entails that there are peculiar jumps in justifiability between very similar actions. I conclude that as liberals we should reject anti-paternalism and focus our efforts on explicating important liberal values, thereby showing why liberty reasons sometimes override strong personal good reasons, though never by making them invalid. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Rights to compensation are much invoked and much disputed in recent liberal debates. The disputes are generally about supposed fundamental rights to compensation, whose recognition and legal enactment would transform some lives. For example, special treatment in education or employment are claimed as compensation for past denials of equal opportunity; special consideration for Third World countries in aid and trade terms is claimed as compensation for the injustices of the colonial past. We can make ready sense of the idea of (...) legal rights to compensation. Legal rights to compensation guarantee recompense for damage suffered. The damage for which compensation is given may or may not be produced by wrongdoing; it may also be negligent or accidental or due to natural causes. In law, compensation is not always contingent upon the victim having suffered injury as well as harm, nor upon saddling a wrong-doer with the costs of compensation. Insurance policies standardly cover damage due to accident and neglect. Legal rights to compensation may provide for payments to victims of violent crime, to those whose property is requisitioned or damaged, to victims of libel or malpractice, and even to victims of natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. Legal rights to compensation are a standard way of dealing with the predicament of those who become victims, whether of others' action, of their own negligence, or of natural catastrophe. None of this shows that there are fundamental rights to compensation. Legal rights to compensation may lack moral grounding: and if they are morally grounded, they may rest not on fundamental rights to compensation, but on background positions in which rights are derivative or inessential. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article tries to show that commonplace economic, ethico-religious, anti-racist,and logical-consistency objections to public funding of abortions and abortion counseling for poor women are quite weak. By contrast, arguments appealing to basic human rights to freedom of speech, informed consent, protection from great harm, justice and equal protection under the law, strongly support public funding. Thus, refusing to provide abortions at public expense for women who cannot afford them is morally unacceptable and rationally unjustifiable, despite the opinions of former Presidents (...) Reagan and Bush, the more conservative members of the Supreme Court of the United States, the current Congress, and the majority of the American people. (shrink)

Compromise is surprisingly common in the context of religious freedom. In Holt v. Hobbs, for example, a Muslim prison inmate challenged his prison’s no-beards policy on religious freedom grounds. He proposed, and was eventually granted, a compromise that allowed him to grow a half-inch beard rather than the full beard normally required by his beliefs. Some have argued that such a compromise is inconsistent with the purpose of religious freedom, which is to guard against interference with an individual’s religious practices. (...) Accepting a compromise, after all, may require a significant modification to one’s default practices. But this paper argues that compromise can be appropriate if the purpose of religious freedom is to foster the inclusion and acceptance of all people in a diverse political community. Moreover, the benefits of compromise may lend support to the inclusion-based conception of religious freedom as against the more traditional non-interference conception. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between compromise and fairness, and considers in particular why, if a fair outcome to a conflict is available, the conflict should still be subject to compromise. It sets out the defining features of compromise and explains how fair compromise differs from both principled and pragmatic compromise. The fairness relating to compromise can be of two types: procedural or end-state. It is the coherence of end-state fairness with compromise that proves the more puzzling case. We offer (...) reasons why people should be allowed to resolve conflicting or competing claims through compromise, even if compromise comes at the expense of end-state fairness, but we resist the suggestion that the primary rationale for compromise is to be found in non-ideal circumstances. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.