Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of (...) the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

The paper argues first that, by not rescuing innocents in certain ways , God violates a weak Bad Samaritan principle that few would deny. This ‘Bad Samaritan argument’ appears to block the traditional free will defense to the problem of evil, since respecting the principle does not violate or show lack of respect for free will. Second, the paper articulates a version of the traditional argument from evil, the ‘Aftertaste argument’, that appears to close some of the traditional loopholes in (...) the argument from evil, such as the ‘greater good from evil’ defense. (shrink)

Public health policies often require individuals to make personal sacrifices for the sake of protecting other individuals or the community at large. Such requirements can be more or less demanding for individuals. This paper examines the implications of demandingness for public health ethics and policy. It focuses on three possible public health policies that pose requirements that are differently demanding: vaccination policies, policy to contain antimicrobial resistance, and quarantine and isolation policies. Assuming the validity of the ‘demandingness objection’ in ethics, (...) we argue that states should try to pose requirements that individuals would have an independent moral obligation to fulfil, and therefore that are not too demanding. In such cases, coercive measures are ethically justified, especially if the interventions also entail some benefits to the individuals; this is, for example, the case of vaccination policies. When public health policies need to require individuals to do something that is too demanding to constitute an independent moral obligation, states have an obligation to either provide incentives to give individuals non-moral reasons to fulfil a certain requirement – as in the case of policies that limit antibiotic prescriptions – or to compensate individuals for being forced to do something that is too demanding to constitute an independent moral obligation – as in the case of quarantine and isolation policies. (shrink)

It has traditionally been assumed that organ donation must be altruistic, though the necessity of altruistic motivations has recently been questioned. Few, however, have questioned whether altruism is always a good motive. This paper considers the possibility that excessive altruism, or self-abnegation, may be intrinsically bad. How this may be so is illustrated with reference to Tom Hurka’s account of the value of attitudes, which suggests that disproportionate love of one’s own good—either excessive or deficient—is intrinsically bad. Whether or not (...) we accept the details of this account, recognising that altruistic motivations may be intrinsically bad has important implications for organ procurement. One possible response is to say that we should take further measures to ensure that donors have good motives—that they are altruistic is no longer enough. An alternative is to say that, since altruistic donation need not be intrinsically good, we have less reason to object to other motivations. (shrink)

In this article, we defend two claims about the precautionary principle. The first is that there is no ‘core’ precautionary principle that unifies all its different versions. It is more plausible to think of the different versions as being related to each other by way of family resemblances. So although precautionary principle x may have much in common with precautionary principle y, and y with z, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that unify all versions of the (...) principle. Our second claim is that it is sometimes appropriate to think of the precautionary principle as a midlevel principle in the sense proposed by Beauchamp and Childress in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics, i.e. as a non-rigid moral principle. We argue that if the precautionary principle is conceived as a non-rigid principle that needs to be balanced against other principles before a moral verdict can be reached, then this enables us to address some standard objections to the principle. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Peter Singer suggests that some interesting new findings in experimental moral psychology support what he has contended all along—namely that intuitions should play little or no role in adequate justifications of normative ethical positions. Not only this but, according to Singer, these findings point to a central flaw in the method (or epistemological theory) of reflective equilibrium used by many contemporary moral philosophers. In this paper, we try to defend reflective equilibrium from Singer’s attack and, in (...) part, we do this by discussing Singer’s own favoured moral methodology as outlined in his Practical Ethics . Although basing ethics solely on (certain kinds of) intuitions certainly is problematic, we argue, basing it solely on ‘reason’ gives rise to similar problems. The best solution would arguably be one which could strike a balance between the two—but, we suggest, this is precisely what reflective equilibrium is all about. (shrink)

I will argue that Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s faith-based virtue ethics are crucially different from Aristotle’s virtue ethics, in that their ethics hinges on the theological notion of heaven, which is constitutively independent of the ethical life of the agent. As a result, their faith-based virtue ethics is objectionable. Moreover, I will also argue that the notion of heaven that Avicenna and Aquinas deploy in their moral philosophy is problematic; for it can rationally permit believers to commit morally horrendous actions. Finally, (...) I will present a Kantian notion of heaven which is immune to the aforementioned moral objection. The Kantian notion of heaven, nevertheless, cannot ground any view of ethics as it is constitutively dependent on the ethical life of the agent. (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)

Is health care “special”? That is, do we have moral reason to treat health care differently from how we treat other sorts of social goods? Intuitively, perhaps, we might think the proper response is “yes.” However, to date, philosophers have often struggled to justify this idea—known as the “specialness thesis about health care” or STHC. In this article, I offer a new justification of STHC, one I take to be immune from objections that have undercut other defenses. Notably, unlike previous (...) utility- and opportunity-based theories, I argue that we can find normative justification for STHC in what I term our special duty to assist those unable to help themselves. It is this duty, I argue, that ultimately gives us reason to treat health care differently from other sorts of goods and to distribute it independently of individuals’ ability to pay. (shrink)

The debate about global distributive justice is characterized by an often stark opposition between universalistic approaches, advocating an egalitarian global redistribution of wealth (Beitz, Pogge, Barry, Tan), and particularistic positions, aiming to justify a restriction of redistribution to the domestic community (D. Miller, R. Miller, Blake, Nagel, Rawls). I argue that an approach starting from the deliberative model of democracy (Habermas) can overcome this opposition. On the one hand, the increasingly global scope of economic interactions implies that the range of (...) individuals concerned with the redistribution of wealth should also be increasingly universal. On the other hand, the need for democratic deliberation refers to the fact that demands of justice should be contextual and should take into account the particular circumstances, needs and values of the people concerned. Both concerns can be realized simultaneously only within a multi-layered democratic system in which redistribution is a concern at the domestic, the international and the global level. (shrink)

Clinicians and health researchers frequently encounter opportunities to rescue people. Rescue cases can generate a moral duty to aid those in peril. As such, bioethicists have leveraged a duty to rescue for a variety of purposes. Yet, despite its broad application, the duty to rescue is under-analyzed. In this paper, we assess the state of theorizing about the duty to rescue. There are large gaps in bioethicists’ understanding of the force, scope, and justification of the two most cited duties to (...) rescue—the individual duty of easy rescue and the institutional rule of rescue. We argue that the duty of easy rescue faces unresolved challenges regarding its force and scope, and the rule of rescue is indefensible. If the duty to rescue is to help solve ethical problems, these theoretical gaps must be addressed. We identify two further conceptions of the duty to rescue that have received less attention—an institutional duty of easy rescue and the professional duty to rescue. Both provide guidance in addressing force and scope concerns and, thereby, traction in answering the outstanding problems with the duty to rescue. We conclude by proposing and propose research priorities for developing accounts of duties to rescue in bioethics. (shrink)

While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) as an issue of national security, human security, human rights, and global public goods. The global health governance literature is essentially untethered to a theorized framework to illuminate or evaluate governance. This article ties global health justice and ethics to principles for governing the global health realm, developing a theoretical framework for global and domestic institutions and actors. (shrink)

We’re often unsure what morality requires, but we need to act anyway. There is a growing philosophical literature on how to navigate moral uncertainty. But much of it asks how to rationally pursue the goal of acting morally, using decision-theoretic models to address that question. I argue that using these popular approaches leaves some central and pressing questions about moral uncertainty unaddressed. To help us make sense of experiences of moral uncertainty, we should shift away from focusing on what it’s (...) rational to do when facing moral uncertainty, and instead look directly at what it’s moral to do about moral uncertainty—for example, how risk averse we morally ought to be, or which personal sacrifices we’re morally obligated to make in order to reduce our risk of moral wrongdoing. And orthodox, expectation-maximizing, decision-theoretic models aren’t well-suited to this task—in part because they presuppose the answers to some important moral questions. For example, if approaching moral uncertainty in a moral way requires us to “maximize expected moral rightness,” that’s, itself, a contentious claim about the demands of morality—one that requires significant moral argument, and that I ultimately suggest is mistaken. Of course, it’s possible to opt, instead, for a variety of alternative decision-theoretic models. But, in order to choose between proposed decision-theoretic models, and select one that is well-suited to handling these cases, we first would need to settle more foundational, moral questions—about, for example, what we should be willing to give up in order to reduce the risk that we’re acting wrongly. Decision theory may be able to formalize the conclusions of these deliberations, but it is not a substitute for them, and it won’t be able to settle the right answers in advance. For now, when we discuss moral uncertainty, we need to wade directly into moral debate, without the aid of decision theory’s formalism. (shrink)

Must a society aim indefinitely for continued economic growth? Proponents of economic growth advance three central challenges to the idea that a society, having attained high levels of income and wealth, may justly cease to pursue further economic growth: if environmentally sustainable and the gains fairly distributed, first, continued economic growth could make everyone within a society and globally, and especially the worst off, progressively better off; second, the pursuit of economic growth spurs ongoing innovation, which enhances people’s opportunities and (...) protects a society against future risks; and third, continued economic growth fosters attitudes of openness, tolerance, and generosity, which are essential to the functioning of a liberal democratic society. This article grants these challenges’ normative foundations, to show that, even if one accepts their underlying premises as requirements of justice, a society may still justly cease to aim for economic growth, so long as it continues to aim for and realize gains on other dimensions. I argue that, while continued economic growth might instrumentally serve valuable ends, it is not necessary for their realization, as a society can achieve these ends through other means. (shrink)

(2010). International Research and Positive Obligations: Are They “Transaction Specific”? The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 49-51.

Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how principles generate (...) normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophy’s traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements. (shrink)

Business Ethics is often regarded as a low priority in newly formed democracies, because it seems there are more urgent demands that have to be dealt with first. In this paper it is argued that this perception is not only wrong, but also dangerous. A lack of morality in business can undermine exactly those priorities that newly formed democracies regard as most urgent.It starts by indicating why morality in business is a precondition for the legitimacy of a market economy as (...) well as for excellence in a global market economy. It continues to argue that ethics in business is also a precondition for establishing a legitimate political democracy. Once the necessity of moral business behaviour has been argued, the focus shifts to the main stumbling blocks that impede the development of moral business culture in newly formed democracies such as South Africa. (shrink)

Resumen La historia ocupa un papel marginal en las teorías actuales de la globalización. Esto no deja de sorprender, pues “globalización” es, en esencia, un concepto que describe un proceso de la historia. Menos aún se habla de la filosofía de la historia, sobre todo porque ha caído en descrédito. Sin embargo, casi todas las argumentaciones emplean modelos de interpretación propios de la filosofía de la historia. Se conjetura qué tendencias generales le son inherentes a la globalización y si apuntan (...) a un “progreso” o a una “decadencia” de la civilización humana. Por último, el problema ético de la justicia global debe tomar en consideración el desarrollo de la historia acontecida. Estos temas dejan claro que el recurso a la historia con implicaciones filosóficas es imprescindible para resolver los problemas de la globalización.Contemporary theories of globalisation seldom mention history. This is surprising, because “globalisation” is essentially a term describing an historical process. There is still less mention of the philosophy of history, especially due to the discredit cast upon it. And yet nearly all of the relevant arguments operate with patterns of interpretation borrowed from the philosophy of history. The authors speculate on which general tendencies are inherent to globalisation and whether they are more indicative of the “progress” or of the “downfall” of human civilisation. Finally, the ethical problem of global justice requires us to take into account the course of history thus far. These topics underline that resorting to history with all of its philosophical implications is essential if we are to resolve the problems caused by globalisation. (shrink)

This article provides an explanatory account of a central class of moral rights; their normative grounding, the conditions for their possession and forfeiture, and their moral stringency. It argues that interpersonal rights against harm and rights to assistance are best understood as arising from reciprocity relations between moral agents. The account has significant advantages compared with rivals such as the interest theory of rights. By explaining the differential enforceability of rights against harm and rights to assistance, the reciprocity theory helps (...) to refute an argument made by Cecile Fabre that the poor may have a justification for engaging in war against the affluent to compel them to fulfil their duties of assistance to the poor. (shrink)

My essay ‘Weakening the ethical distinction between euthanasia, palliative opioid use and palliative sedation’ has recently generated some critique which I will attempt to address in this response. Regarding the empirical question of whether palliative opioid and sedative use shorten survival time, Schofield et al raise the three concerns that my literature review contains a cherry-picking bias through focusing solely on the palliative care population, that continuous deep palliative sedation falls beyond the scope of routine palliative care, and that my (...) research may contribute to opiophobia and be harmful to palliative care provision globally. Materstvedt argues that euthanasia ‘ends’ rather than ‘relieves’ suffering and is not a treatment, and that the arguments in my essay are therefore predicated on a ‘category mistake’ and are a non-starter. Symons and Giebel both raise the concern that my Kantian and Millian interpretation of the Doctrine of Double Effect is anachronistic, and that when interpreted from the contemporaneous perspective of Aquinas it is a sound ethical principle. Giebel also argues that palliative opioid and sedative use do meet the Doctrine of Double Effect’s four criteria on this Thomistic account, and that it does not contradict the Doctrine of the Sanctity of Human Life. In this response I will explore and defend against most of these claims, in doing so clarifying my original argument that the empirical and ethical differences between palliative opioid/sedative use and euthanasia may not be as significant as often believed, thereby advancing the case for euthanasia. (shrink)

The idea that research with human participants should benefit society has become firmly entrenched in various regulations, policies, and guidelines, but there has been little in-depth analysis of this ethical principle in the bioethics literature. In this paper, I distinguish between strong and weak versions and the social benefits principle and examine six arguments for it. I argue that while it is always ethically desirable for research with human subjects to offer important benefits to society, the reasonable expectation of substantial (...) public benefit should be a necessary condition for regarding research as ethical only when it imposes more than minimal risks on non-consenting subjects; or it is supported by public resources. (shrink)

Do we violate human rights when we cooperate with and impose a global institutional order that engenders extreme poverty? Thomas Pogge argues that by shaping and enforcing the social conditions that foreseeably and avoidably cause global poverty we are violating the negative duty not to cooperate in the imposition of a coercive institutional order that avoidably leaves human rights unfulfilled. This article argues that Pogge's argument fails to distinguish between harms caused by the global institutions themselves and harms caused by (...) the domestic policies of particular states and collective action problems for which collective responsibility cannot be assigned. The article also argues that his position relies on questionable factual and theoretical claims about the impact of global institutions on poverty, and about the benefits and harms of certain features of these institutions. Participation in, and benefit from, global institutions is unlikely to constitute a violation of our negative duties towards the poor. Key Words: justice • international regimes • institutions • human rights • trade. (shrink)

How does morality allocate responsibility for what it requires? I am concerned here with one fundamental part of this question, namely, how morality determines responsibility when multiple agents are capable of contributing to or completing a moral task, and special relationships capable of generating duties with respect to the task are non-existent, insufficient as a moral response, or partly indeterminate. On one view, responsibility falls to the agents who can bear it with the least burden. I show why this is (...) initially attractive and mistaken. Instead, I defend an equity-based approach that accommodates the intuitions that both support and trouble the least-cost principle. One upshot is that sometimes we ought prefer a distribution of responsibility that is more expensive and less local than needed to complete the task. I illustrate the practical significance of the argument in terms of the human rights of refugees. (shrink)

In the first section, I characterize skeptical theism more fully. This is necessary in order to address some important misconceptions and mischaracterizations that appear in the essays by Maitzen, Wilks, and O’Connor. In the second section, I describe the most important objections they raise and group them into four “families” so as to facilitate an orderly series of responses. In the four sections that follow, I respond to the objections.

In this paper I argue that cosmopolitanism prohibits war and requires a global approach to criminal justice. My argument proceeds by drawing out some implications of the core cosmopolitan intuition that every human being has a moral status which constrains how they may be treated. In the first part of this paper, I describe cosmopolitanism. In the second part, Cosmopolitanism and War, I analyse violence, consider the standards cosmopolitanism sets for its justification, and argue that war fails to meet them. (...) In the third part, Cosmopolitanism and Criminal Justice, I argue that cosmopolitanism implies a moral obligation to deal justly with human wrongdoing wherever it occurs. Cosmopolitan pacifism follows: war is prohibited, and a consistent global criminal justice system is required. In the fourth part, Why No Cosmopolitan Pacifists?, I consider why cosmopolitans tend not to identify as pacifists, and in the final part, Objections, I discuss some objections. (shrink)

Faced with the ongoing tragedy of poverty, ethicists call for effective measures of global justice to set up just institutional structures. Their arguments for a transnational obligation to help however remain contested, one of the main reasons for that being the lack of motivational support for trans-national visions of global justice. This articles suggests that the debate will gain new and helpful insights if it studies the motivational mechanisms at work in the dominant religious and cultural traditions, asking: How do (...) these particular traditions conceive of social justice; how do they motivate their adherents to extend solidarity? And how can the similarities surfacing in their motivational strategies be informative for the quest to devise a motivationally saturated account of global justice? The article demonstrates the potential of such an concrete-universal discourse in an exemplary manner by staging a dialogue between public Christian Social Ethics and African Ubuntu Ethics. (shrink)

Während im Oktober 2016 etwa 765.000.000 Menschen Hunger leiden, leben in anderen Teilen der Welt viele Menschen im Überfluss. Angesichts ähnlicher Verhältnisse hatte der Präferenzutilitarist Peter Singer schon 1972 eine individuelle Hilfspflicht für die Bessergestellten dieser Welt behauptet. Der Essay wird die alten Debatten zu dieser Pflicht nicht wieder aufgreifen. Er wird stattdessen davon ausgehen, dass es die individuelle Hilfspflicht gibt, um die weiterführenden Fragen zu stellen, ob diese Pflicht eine Grenze haben und wo diese Grenze ggfs. liegen sollte? Diese (...) Fragen stellen sich, weil die individuelle Hilfspflicht angesichts der ungeheuren Ausmaße des Welthungerproblems ebenfalls ungeheure Ausmaße annehmen könnte. Das würde viele der Bessergestellten überfordern und unglücklich machen, was aus präferenzutilitaristischer Sicht ein Problem wäre. Insofern wurde hier schon früh die Möglichkeit einer Grenzziehung zwischen individueller Hilfspflicht und freiwilligem supererogativen Handeln jenseits der Pflicht im Bereich der Welthungerhilfe diskutiert. Ein erster Teil rekonstruiert die präferenzutilitaristischen Positionen von P. Singer und R.M. Hare. Im zweiten Teil wird ein alternativer Vorschlag zur Diskussion gestellt, der nicht zwei Arten von moralischen Akteuren, sondern zwei Arten von Supererogationen unterscheidet. Insgesamt soll der Essay am Beispiel des Welthungerproblems das interessante Anwendungspotential der moralphilosophischen Kategorie der ‚Supererogation’ aufzeigen. (shrink)

This paper defends the Famine Relief Argument against Having Children, which goes as follows: conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral. It is named after Peter Singer’s Famine Relief Argument because it might be a special case of Singer’s argument and because it exposes the main practical implication of Singer’s argument—namely, that we should not become parents. I answer five (...) objections: that disaster would ensue if nobody had children; that having children cannot be wrong because it is so natural for human beings; that the argument demands too much of us; that my child might be a great benefactor to the world; and that we should raise our children frugally and give them the right values rather than not have them. Previous arguments against procreation have appealed either to a pessimism about human life, or to the environmental impact of overpopulation, or to the fact that we cannot obtain the consent of the non-existent. The argument proposed here appeals to the severe opportunity costs of parenting. (shrink)

Global justice or the lack thereof has internal connections with global poverty. Global justice is an ideal pursuit of cosmopolitanism, which regards basic human needs as its rightful object. The right to life, from the point of view of global justice, is the most fundamental in the list of Human Rights. International anarchy and the current international economic order, however, cast a utopian shadow on the realization of this right when we consider the de facto institutions and the ostensible goal (...) of impartial love for everyone. Humanitarian aid is another approach to the problem of contemporary global poverty. Its difficulty lies first in people’s different conceptions of obligation and donation. They consider the former as duty while the latter is seen to lie beyond the call of duty. Second, in terms of a correlation between right and duty, since everyone has the right to life, the duty falls accordingly upon organizations or individuals. Meanwhile, donation as duty is not perfect obligation, thus is not compulsory either. Finally, international humanitarian aid is constrained by nationalism and partial love. Hence, in the light of either government or individual, the humanitarian aid approach is beset with challenges. Global justice has gained academic importance worldwide since John Rawls’ later works. By contrast to domestic justice, it is a theory of justice that proposes to include all human beings. Global justice stands for a kind of utopian justice in regard to both the institutional path and the humanitarian aid approach. I shall examine the theory of global justice under these two aspects. (shrink)

Fiona Woollard argues that when one is personally involved in an emergency, one has a moral requirement to make substantial sacrifices to aid others that one would not otherwise have. She holds that there are three ways in which one could be personally involved in an emergency: by being physically proximate to the victims of the emergency; by being the only person who can help the victims; or by having a personal encounter with the victims. Each of these factors is (...) claimed to be defeasibly sufficient to ground personal involvement, and thus a requirement of substantial sacrifice to aid. Woollard defends this view on the basis of a number of cases. We show that Woollard’s cases contain various confounding factors. In view of the more precisely drawn cases offered here, it is clear that neither proximity nor uniqueness nor personal encounter is intuitively defeasibly sufficient in the way Woollard claims. (shrink)

Effective altruists recommend that we give large sums to charity, but by far their more central message is that we give effectively, i.e., to whatever charities would do the most good per dollar donated. In this paper, I’ll assume that it’s not wrong not to give bigger, but will explore to what extent it may well nonetheless be wrong not to give better. The main claim I’ll argue for here is that in many cases it would be wrong of you (...) to give a sum of money to charities that do less good than others you could have given to instead, even if it would not have been wrong of you not to give the money to any charity at all. I assume that all the charities under discussion here do positive good overall, do not cause harm, do not infringe rights, etc. What makes my main claim here particularly interesting is that it is inconsistent with what appears to be a fairly common assumption in the ethics of giving, according to which if it is not wrong of you to keep some sum of money for yourself, then it is likewise not wrong of you to donate it to any particular charity you choose. Roughly: if it’s up to you whether to donate the money, it’s also up to you where to donate the money. I challenge this common assumption. (shrink)

In 2008 a young man committed suicide while his webcam was running. 1,500 people apparently watched as the young man lay dying: when people finally made an effort to call the police, it was too late. This closely resembles the case of Kitty Genovese in 1964, where 39 neighbours supposedly watched an attacker assault and did not call until it was too late. This paper examines the role of internet mediation in cases where people may or may not have been (...) good Samaritans and what their responsibilities were. The method is an intuitive one: intuitions on the various potentially morally relevant differences when it comes to responsibility between offline and online situations are examined. The number of onlookers, their physical nearness and their anonymity have no moral relevance when it comes to holding them responsible. Their perceived reality of the situation and ability to act do have an effect on whether we can hold people responsible, but this doesn’t seem to be unique to internet mediation. However the way in which those factors are intrinsically connected to internet mediation does seem to have a diminishing effect on responsibility in online situations. (shrink)

Professor Thomas Pogge, Professorial Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy, LPO Box 8260, Canberra. Tel.: +61 261255485; Email: tp6{at}columbia.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract I would pay three million to go into space, says the banker to his attorney. — I wouldn't go if you paid me, the latter laughs, for me the French Riviera is quite exciting enough. Ah, I would pay a million for an extra year of life , the elderly tourist effusively (...) tells his lover. — We have never had even a hundred dollars , the Cambodian teenager replies, we are a large family. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the metaphysical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas captures some essential moral intuitions that are central to health care. However, there is an ongoing discussion about the relevance of ethical metaphysics for normative ethics and in particular on the question of the relationship between justice and individualized care. In this paper I take part in this debate and I argue that Levinas' idea of an ethics of the Other that guides politics and justice can shed important (...) light on issues that are central to priorities in health care. In fact, the ethics of Levinas in seeking the foundation of normativity itself, captures the ethical coreand central values of health care. (shrink)

BackgroundHealth data holds great potential for improved treatments. Big data research and machine learning models have been shown to hold great promise for improved diagnostics and treatment planning. The potential is tied, however, to the availability of personal health data. In recent years, it has been argued that data from health records should be available for health research, and that individuals have a duty to make the data available for such research. A central point of debate is whether such secondary (...) use of health data requires informed consent.Main bodyIn response to recent writings this paper argues that a requirement of informed consent for health record research must be upheld. It does so by exploring different contrasting notions of the duty of easy rescue and arguing that none of them entail aperfectduty to participate in health record research. In part because the costs of participation cannot be limited to 1) the threat of privacy breaches, but includes 2) the risk of reduced trust and 3) suboptimal treatment, 4) stigmatization and 5) medicalisation, 6) further stratification of solidarity and 7) increased inequality in access to treatment and medicine. And finally, it defends the requirement of informed consent by arguing that the mere possibility of consent bias provides a rather weak reason for making research participation mandatory, and that there are strong, independent reasons for making.ConclusionArguments from the duty of easy rescue in combination with claims about little risk of harm and potential consent bias fail to establish not only aperfectduty to participate in health record research, but also that participation in such research should be mandatory. On the contrary, an analysis of these arguments indicates that the duty to participate in research is most adequately construed as animperfectduty, and reveals a number of strong reasons for insisting that participation in health records research is based on informed consent. (shrink)

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people's behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects' responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability (...) of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded capacities when this is the best explanation of a change in patterns of responses. With this approach in hand, I then argue that subjects in many of the situationist experiments are (mostly) excused for their actions. (shrink)

The vast majority of health research resources are used to study conditions that affect a small, advantaged portion of the global population. This distribution has been widely criticized as inequitable and threatens to exacerbate health disparities. However, there has been little systematic work on what individual health research funders ought to do in response. In this article, we analyze the general and special duties of research funders to the different populations that might benefit from health research. We assess how these (...) duties apply to governmental, multilateral, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. We thereby derive a framework for how different types of funders should take the beneficiaries of research into account when they allocate scarce research resources. (shrink)

One of the central theses of egalitarian liberals in the domain of distributive justice is that talented individuals should not be allowed to keep their entire market-income even if it flows solely from their greater abilities. This claim is usually supported by one of several arguments or some mixture of them, but in the present paper, I want to concentrate on the version that invokes equality of opportunity as its starting point. Namely, it is claimed that every human being should (...) enjoy an equal starting point in the life-race but that this is not secured insofar as some have greater natural talents than others. Therefore, egalitarians hold that results that arise from such an unfair situation are unjust and should be corrected by a redistributive taxation. I want to criticize this argument by hoping to show that it presupposes an untenable view about identity of persons. (shrink)

I introduce a new formulation of rule consequentialism, defended as an improvement on traditional formulations. My new formulation cleanly avoids what Parfit calls “ideal world” objections. I suggest that those objections arise because traditional formulations incorporate counterfactual comparisons about how things could go differently. My new formulation eliminates those counterfactual comparisons. Part of the interest of the new formulation is as a model of how to reformulate structurally similar views, including various kinds of contractualism.

Can the global poor wage a just redistributive war against the global rich? The moral norms governing the use of force are usually considered to be very strict. Nonetheless, some philosophers have recently argued that violating duties of global justicecanbe a just cause for war. This paper discusses redistributive wars. It shows that the strength of these arguments is contingent on the underlying account of global distributive justice. The paper focuses on the “doing harm argument,” under the assumption that the (...) alternative “allowing harm argument” is a more difficult route to justify redistributive wars. After highlighting several preliminary problems, the paper breaks down and assesses in depth the “doing harm argument”: the empirical premise, the rights violation that constitutes the wrong, liability and degrees of responsibility, and the conditions for justified self-defense. By drawing on principles reflected in criminal law, this paper argues that a general “doing harm argument” for redistributive wars is unconvincing, while a reinterpretation of that argument could theoretically give rise to a just cause for war. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has left zoos especially vulnerable to bankruptcy, and the precarity of their financial situation threatens the lives and well-being of the animals who live in them. In this paper, we argue that while we and our governments have a responsibility to ensure the protection of animals in struggling zoos, it is morally impermissible to make private donations or state subsidies to zoos because such actions serve to perpetuate an unjust institution. In order to protect zoo animals without (...) perpetrating further injustice, governments should subsidize the transformation of zoos into sanctuaries and then facilitate the gradual closure of most of these sanctuaries. (shrink)

Many contemporary ethicists use case-based reasoning to reach consistent beliefs about ethical matters. The idea is that particular cases elicit moral intuitions, which provide defeasible reasons to believe in their content. However, most proponents of case-based moral reasoning are not very explicit about how they resolve inconsistencies and how they abstract principles from judgments about particular cases. The aim of this article is to outline a methodology—called Consistency Reasoning Casuistry—for case-based reasoning in ethics. This methodology draws on Richmond Campbell and (...) Victor Kumar’s naturalistic model for the resolution of inconsistencies between the content of intuitions about particular cases. I argue that reasons similar to those that motivate their model also support a more abstract form of moral reasoning that goes beyond mere resolutions of inconsistencies between case judgments and demands the formulation of more abstract moral norms. Consistency Reasoning Casuistry, it is argued, is a good candidate for a methodology for case-based moral reasoning that is in harmony with paradigms of contemporary moral psychology and that can accommodate the methodology implicit in the work of many contemporary ethicists. (shrink)

There are increasing calls for rejecting the ‘dead donor’ rule and permitting ‘organ donation euthanasia’ in organ transplantation. I argue that the fundamental problem with this proposal is that it would bestow more worth on the organs than the donor who has them. What is at stake is the basis of human equality, which, I argue, should be based on an ineliminable dignity that each of us has in virtue of having a rational nature. To allow mortal harvesting would be (...) to make our worth contingent upon variable quality of life of judgments that can only be based on properties that come in degrees. Thus, rejecting the ‘dead donor’ rule comes at the expense of our egalitarian principles with respect to the value each individual human life has in relation to the protections against killing. (shrink)

Most moral philosophers who have recently expressed sympathy with feminist or ‘care-based’ perspectives on ethical theory have thought that such perspectives can make valuable contributions to more comprehensive ethical theories. Few have thought that an ethics of care can offer a complete normative theory. However, Michael Slote is one of the ambitious few. In his recent book, The Ethics of Care and Empathy, he seeks to show that a care-based perspective can do a lot of service in first-order moral and (...) political theory as well as in metaethics. Here is a quick overview of the book's content: In Chapter 1, Slote explicates the notion of empathy that is central in his ethics of care, which he locates within the sentimentalist paradigm, stemming from philosophers such as Hume and Hutcheson. Slote's account of empathy and moral development draws substantially on work by the psychologist Martin Hoffman. Chapter 2 discusses care ethics and our obligation to help others, including both the near and the distant needy. Chapter 3 aims to show how the notion of empathy can further the case for deontology in ethics. Chapters 4 through 6 discuss the relation of care ethics to pivotal issues in political philosophy, such as autonomy, liberalism, social justice and rights. Slote maintains that autonomy …. (shrink)