The connection between health and human rights continues to play a prominent role within global health law. In particular, a number of theorists rely on the claim that there is a relation of interdependence between health and human rights. The nature and extent of this relation, however, is rarely defined, developed or defended in a conceptually robust way. This paper seeks to explore the source, scope and strength of this putative relation and what role it might play in developing a (...) global health law framework. (shrink)

Any complete theory of “what we owe to each other” must be able to adequately accommodate directed or bipolar obligations, that is, those obligations that are owed to a particular individual and in virtue of which another individual stands to be wronged. Bipolar obligations receive their moral importance from their intimate connection to a particular form of recognition respect that we owe to each other: respect of another as a source of valid claims to whom in particular we owe certain (...) treatment and, at the very least, an apology if we fail to accord that treatment. While some of the most prominent accounts of interpersonal morality fail to adequately accommodate bipolar obligations, I here investigate a recent proposal that explicitly seeks to improve on these accounts—Stephen Darwall’s second-personal theory of morality. Ultimately, I object to Darwall’s theory on the grounds that his second-personal theory normatively ties bipolar obligations too closely to non-directed moral obligations or those that we are under, period. The problem for Darwall’s account is that any obligations that at first appear to be bipolar and owed to someone in particular turn out to be instances of non-directed moral obligations period that have their normative source in the representative authority of the moral community. Adequately accommodating bipolar obligations requires taking seriously a novel second-personal approach, according to which we locate the normative sources of our interpersonal obligations in the claims and demands particular persons and deliberate from what I call the pairwise or bipolar standpoint. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify what kind of normativity characterizes a convention. First, we argue that conventions have normative consequences because they always involve a form of trust and reliance. We contend that it is by reference to a moral principle impinging on these aspects (i.e. the principle of Reliability) that interpersonal obligations and rights originate from conventional regularities. Second, we argue that the system of mutual expectations presupposed by conventions is a source of agreements. Agreements stemming (...) from conventions are “tacit” in the sense that they are implicated by what agents do (or forbear from doing) and without that any communication between them is necessary. To justify this conclusion, we assume that: (1) there is a salient interpretation, in some contexts, of everyone’s silence as confirmatory of the others’ expectations (an epistemic assumption), and (2) the participating agents share a value of not being motivated by hostile attitudes (a motivational assumption). By clarifying the relation between conventions and agreements, the peculiar normativity of conventions is analyzed. (shrink)

The philosophical literature on state legitimacy has recently seen a significant conceptual revision. Several philosophers have argued that the state's right to rule is better characterized not as a claim right to obedience, but as a power right. There have been few attempts to show that traditional justifications for the claim right might also be used to justify a power right, and there have been no such attempts involving the principle of fair play, which is widely regarded as the most (...) promising basis for a claim right to obedience. William Edmundson argues that the principle of fair play cannot generate power rights, and so any attempt at a fair play account of legitimacy must fail. I explain how fair play could generate a power right, owing to its stipulation that the rules of a cooperative scheme specify the form of participants' repayment. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus among political philosophers that state legitimacy involves something more than—or perhaps other than—political obligation. Yet the principle of fair play, which many take to be a promising basis for political obligation, has been largely absent from discussions of the revised conception of legitimacy. This paper shows how the principle of fair play can generate legitimate political authority by drawing on a neglected feature of the principle—its stipulation that members of a cooperative scheme must reciprocate specifically (...) by submitting to the scheme's rules. (shrink)

Much has been written about climate change from an ethical view in general, but less has been written about it from a libertarian point of view in particular. In this paper, I apply the libertarian moral theory to the problem of climate change. I focus on libertarianism’s implications for our individual emissions. I argue that even if our individual emissions cause no harm to others, these emissions cross other people’s boundaries, although the boundary-crossings that are due to our ‘subsistence emissions’ (...) are implicitly consented to by others, there is no such consent to our ‘non-subsistence emissions’, and there is no independent justification for these emissions. Although offsetting would provide such a justification, most emitters do not offset their non-subsistence emissions. Therefore, these emissions violate people’s rights, which means that they are impermissible according to libertarianism’s non-aggression principle. (shrink)

Conventionalists about promising believe that it is wrong to break a promise because the promisor takes advantage of a useful social convention only to fail to do his part in maintaining it. Anti-conventionalists claim that the wrong of breaking a promise has nothing essentially to do with a social convention. Anti-conventionalists are right that the social convention is not necessary to explain the wrong of breaking most promises. But conventionalists are right that the convention plays an essential role in any (...) satisfactory account of promising. A new conventionalism can explain this by appealing to special features of social conventions. Two of these special features have important implications for any moral requirements they mediate, such as the requirement to keep one's promises and the moral requirements attached to social or occupational roles. First, these requirements will not depend on features of a situation that are inaccessible to typical participants in the convention. Second, these requirements often cannot be tailored to fit the overly unusual circumstances of participants. (shrink)

When, in spite of our good intentions, we fail to meet our obligations to others, it is important that we have the correct theoretical description of what has happened so that mutual understanding and the right sort of social repair can occur. Consider an agent who promises to help pick a friend up from the airport. She takes the freeway, forgetting that it is under construction. After a long wait, the friend takes an expensive taxi ride home. Most theorists and (...) non-theorists react to such cases by either judging the agent's action as a violation of her obligation to help or as having satisfied the only obligation she really had, namely to try to help. However, as I show, there are serious difficulties that arise from categorizing this agent's action as satisfying or violating her obligation – difficulties that are avoided if we instead add “mere moral failures” to the basic categories for moral evaluation. An agent merely fails when she neither satisfies nor violates her obligation. She is responsible fo.. (shrink)

In “Moral Luck” Bernard Williams describes a lorry driver who, through no fault of his own, runs over a child, and feels “agent-regret.” I believe that the driver’s feeling is moral since the thought associated with this feeling is a negative moral evaluation of his action. I demonstrate that his action is not morally inadequate with respect his moral obligations. However, I show that his negative evaluation is nevertheless justified since he acted in way that does not live up to (...) his moral values. I then use this distinctive negative moral evaluation to distinguish agent-regret from guilt and mere regret. (shrink)

The article begins with a review of the structural differences between act consequentialist theories and human rights theories, as illustrated by Amartya Sen's paradox of the Paretian liberal and Robert Nozick's utilitarianism of rights. It discusses attempts to resolve those structural differences by moving to a second-order or indirect consequentialism, illustrated by J.S. Mill and Derek Parfit. It presents consequentialist (though not utilitarian) interpretations of the contractualist theories of Jürgen Habermas and the early John Rawls (Theory of Justice) and of (...) the capability theories of Sen and Martha Nussbaum. It also discusses two roles that well-being or a surrogate for well-being typically plays in theories of human rights: (a) well-being plays a role in the justification of at least some exceptions to human rights principles; and (b) some human rights seem to be best understood as rights to some level of well-being or expected well-being (or of a surrogate for one of them). It reviews two consequentialist challenges to the moral adequacy of non-consequentialist accounts of human rights, one based on a duty to relieve suffering and the other generated by Parfit's Non-Identity Problem, and concludes with a contrast between two ways of looking at the history of the development and implementation of human rights conventions and laws. Video abstract (click to view). (shrink)

: The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional "informed desire" tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional “informed desire” tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

Many people object to genetically engineerehd (GE) food because they believe that it is unnatural or that its creation amounts to playing God. These objections are often referred to as intrinsic objections, and they have been widely criticized in the agricultural bioethics literature as being unsound, incompatible with modern science, religious, inchoate, and based on emotion instead of reason. Many of their critics also argue that even if these objections did have some merit as ethicalobjections, their quasi-religious nature means that (...) they are entirely irrelevant when interpreted aspolitical objections regarding what public policy ought to be. In this paper, we argue that this widespread view is false. Intrinsic objections have much more political import than has previously been recognized, and indeed the requirements of political liberalism and its associated idea of liberal neutrality, once properly understood, protect intrinsic objections from many of the most common objections. That is, policy-makers may not legitimately base public policy on grounds that are inconsistent with intrinsic objections, even when they believe those objections to be flawed in the ways mentioned above. This means that in the context of a political debate about GE food, the discussion should not center on the substantive merits of the intrinsic objections themselves but rather on the appropriate political norms for achieving democratically legitimate policy on issues that touch people’s deepest religious and moral beliefs. (shrink)

Breaking a promise is generally taken to involve committing a certain kind of moral wrong, but what (if anything) explains this wrong? According to one influential theory that has been championed most recently by T.M. Scanlon, the wrong involved in breaking a promise is a matter of violating an obligation that one incurs to a promisee in virtue of giving her assurance that one will perform or refrain from performing certain acts. In this paper, we argue that the “Assurance View”, (...) as we call it, is susceptible to two kinds of counterexamples. The first show that giving assurance is not sufficient for incurring the kind of obligation of fulfillment that one violates in breaking a promise. The second show that giving assurance is not necessary. Having shown that the Assurance View fails in these ways, we then very briefly sketch the outline of what we take to be a better view—a view that we claim is not only attractive in its own right and that avoids the earlier counterexamples, but that also affords us a deeper explanation of why the Assurance View seems initially plausible, yet nonetheless turns out to be ultimately inadequate. (shrink)

This article provides a critical introduction to contractualism as a moral or ethical theory, that is, as a theory of the rightness and wrongness of individual conduct – focusing specifically on the influential 'Kantian' version of contractualism due to T. M. Scanlon. I begin by elucidating the key features of Scanlon's contractualism: justifiability to others; reasonable rejectability; the individualist restriction; and mutual recognition. I then turn to discuss both its appeal and the main objections that have been raised to it (...) – objections concerning our duties to the cognitively limited and impaired, aggregation, demandingness, normativity and explanatory adequacy. I conclude by mentioning some contractualist alternatives to Scanlon's theory. (shrink)

This paper examines accounts of the moral wrongness of killing persons in addition to determining what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the morality of killing persons about the equality of persons, and vice versa. I will argue that a plausible way of thinking about the moral wrongness of killing implies that the permissibility of killing innocent, nonthreatening persons depends on a person’s age. I address objections to this conclusion and discuss some potential implications of the view.

May lethal autonomous weapons systems—‘killer robots ’—be used in war? The majority of writers argue against their use, and those who have argued in favour have done so on a consequentialist basis. We defend the moral permissibility of killer robots, but on the basis of the non-aggregative structure of right assumed by Just War theory. This is necessary because the most important argument against killer robots, the responsibility trilemma proposed by Rob Sparrow, makes the same assumptions. We show that the (...) crucial moral question is not one of responsibility. Rather, it is whether the technology can satisfy the requirements of fairness in the re-distribution of risk. Not only is this possible in principle, but some killer robots will actually satisfy these requirements. An implication of our argument is that there is a public responsibility to regulate killer robots ’ design and manufacture. (shrink)

Sidgwick gives various tests for highest certainty. When he applies these tests to commonsense morality, he finds nothing of highest certainty. In contrast, when he applies these tests to his own axioms, he finds these axioms to have highest certainty. The axioms culminate in Benevolence: “Each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable (...) or attainable by him.” The axioms face challenges from two sides.First, one test requires that a claim not be denied by someone of whom one has no more reason to suspect of error than oneself. For Sidgwick, then, the egoist must not deny the axioms. But it would seem that an egoist would reject benevolence. Second, Sidgwick thinks he must show that the commonsense moralist agrees to the axioms. Benevolence seems to say that the only reason for departing from being bound to treat others like oneself is that more good would be produced. But the commonsense moralist will not agree that this is the only reason. In reply to the threat of an egoist's disagreement, this essay argues that many of the axioms should be read as having as their antecedent “from the point of view of the universe.” The essay replies to the objection that this makes these axioms analytic. In reply to the threat of a commonsense moralist's disagreement, this essay argues that each axiom states, in effect, a prima facie duty. The argument against the commonsense moralist concerns not benevolence but whether there are further duties that pass the tests. The essay raises the worry that here Sidgwick is unfair since sometimes he criticizes all-things-considered versions of commonsense duties; such criticisms would count against benevolence as well. (shrink)

Most ethical discussions about diet are focused on the justification of specific kinds of products rather than an individual assessment of the moral footprint of eating products of certain animal species. This way of thinking is represented in the typical division of four dietary attitudes. There are vegans, vegetarians, welfarists and ordinary meat -eaters. However, the common “all or nothing” discussions between meat -eaters, vegans and vegetarians bypass very important factors in assessing dietary habits. I argue that if we want (...) to discover a properly assessed moral footprint of animal products, we should take into consideration not only life quality of animals during farming or violation of their rights—as is typically done—but, most of all, their body weight, life time in farms and time efficiency in animal products acquisition. Without these factors, an assessment of animal products is much too simplified. If we assume some easily accepted premises, we can justify a thesis that, regardless of the treatment of animals during farming and slaughtering, for example, eating chicken can be 163 times morally worse than eating beef, drinking milk can be 58 times morally better than eating eggs, and eating some types of fish can be even 501 times worse than eating beef. In order to justify such a thesis there is no need to reform common morality by, for example, criticizing its speciesism. The thesis that some animal products are much worse than others can be justified on common moral grounds. (shrink)

For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’, making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the (...) traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to provide an effective counterexample to consequentialism. I assume that traditional counterexamples, such as Transplant (A doctor should kill one person and transplant her organs to five terminal patients, thereby saving their lives) and Judge (A judge should sentence to death an innocent person if he knows that an outraged mob will otherwise kill many innocent persons), are not effective, for two reasons: first, they make unrealistic assumptions and, second, they do not pass the (...) rule‐consequentialist institutional test. My example (The Moral Murderer), instead, assumes a realistic empirical framework and the relevant action does not undermine basic social institutions. On the contrary, it reinforces them. In The Moral Murderer, Tom (an adult male) is morally allowed to murder a person (preferably a woman) in order to be punished to death. (shrink)

Most people (and philosophers) distinguish between performing a morally wrong action and being blameworthy for having performed that action, and believe that an individual can be fully excused for having performed a wrong action. My purpose is to reject this claim. More precisely, I defend what I call the “Dependence Claim”: A's doing X is wrong only if A is blameworthy for having done X. I consider three cases in which, according to the traditional view, a wrong action could be (...) excused: duress, mental illness, and mistake. I try to show that the reasons for excusing in either case are not relevantly distinguishable from the reasons for claiming that the prima facie wrong action is not wrong all things considered. (shrink)

Claims to rights and negotiation about their shape are pervasive in our public and private culture. Rights consciousness is surely desirable and is part and parcel of the transition toward a more democratic world. In this essay I consider the proper placement of moral rights in moral theory. In a famous essay, "Taking Rights Seriously," Ronald Dworkin argues that if it is accepted that individuals have moral rights against their government, that implies serious constraints on the conduct of government and (...) the freedom of a political majority to enforce its wishes through law. I endorse the thesis that individuals have such moral rights and support taking rights seriously in Dworkin's sense. My focus is elsewhere. In this essay I shall argue that moral rights do not and should not figure in our fundamental moral principles; rights enter at the level of subordinate principles. In a very broad way, to take this stand is to side with utilitarians and consequentialists, who see rights as instruments for achieving other values, not moral goals in their own right. (shrink)

Alston, Searle, and Williamson advocate the restrictive model of assertion , according to which certain constitutive assertoric norms restrict which propositions one may assert. Sellars and Brandom advocate the dialectical model of assertion , which treats assertion as constituted by its role in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Sellars and Brandom develop a restrictive version of the dialectical model. I explore a non-restrictive version of the dialectical model. On such a view, constitutive assertoric norms constrain how one (...) must react if an interlocutor challenges one's assertion, but they do not constrain what one should assert in the first place. I argue that the non-restrictive dialectical perspective can accommodate various linguistic phenomena commonly taken to support the restrictive model. 1. (shrink)

Provided that traditional jus ad bellum principles are fulfilled, military humanitarian intervention to stop large scale violations of human rights (such as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes) is widely regarded as morally permissible. In cases of “supreme humanitarian emergency”, not only are the victims morally permitted to rebel, but other states are also permitted to militarily intervene. Things are different if the human rights violations in question fall short of supreme humanitarian emergency. Because of the importance of respecting (...) political self‐determination, in cases of “ordinary oppression”, we normally think that rebellion might be permissible, but not military humanitarian intervention. Thus, according to the received view, the conditions for the permissibility of intervention coincide with the conditions for the permissibility of revolution in cases of supreme humanitarian emergency, but not in cases of ordinary oppression. In cases of ordinary oppression there is an asymmetry between the conditions for the permissibility of revolution and intervention (call this the Asymmetry View). Should we accept the Asymmetry View? I answer this question by outlining an account of political self‐determination and by illustrating the complex role that this notion should play in discussing the morality of revolution and intervention. (shrink)

I offer a new account of fair-play obligations for non-excludable benefits received from the state. Firstly, I argue that non-acceptance of these benefits frees recipients of fairness obligations only when a counterfactual condition is met; i.e. when non-acceptance would hold up in the closest possible world in which recipients do not hold motivationally-biased beliefs triggered by a desire to free-ride. Secondly, I argue that because of common mechanisms of self-deception there will be recipients who reject these benefits without meeting the (...) counterfactual condition. For this reason, I suggest that those who reject non-excludable benefits provided by the state have a duty to support their rejection with adequate reasons. Failing that, they can be permissibly treated as if they had fair-play obligations (although in fact they might not have them). Thus, I claim that there is a distinction, largely unappreciated, between the question of whether we have a duty of fairness to obey the law and the question of whether we can be permissibly treated as if we had one. (shrink)

Some philosophers defend the fact-relative view of moral rights against harm:Whether B infringes A's right not to be harmed by ϕ-ing depends on what will in fact occur if B ϕs. B's knowledge of, or evidence about, the exact consequences of her ϕ-ing are irrelevant to the question of whether her ϕ-ing constitutes an infringement of A's right not to be harmed by B.In this paper I argue that the fact-relative view of moral rights is mistaken, and I argue for (...) an alternative view whereby our rights against harm depend on what we can reasonably demand of others. I illustrate the importance of this conclusion with a discussion of liability to defensive harm. (shrink)

This paper asks whether (human) rights enforcement is permissible given that it may entail infringing on the rights of innocent bystanders. I consider two strategies that adopt a rights-sensitive consequentialist framework and offer a positive answer to this question, namely Amartya Sen’s and Hillel Steiner’s. Against Sen, I argue that trade-offs between rights are problematic since they contradict the purpose of rights, which is to provide a pluralist solution to disagreement about values, i.e. to allow agents to act in accordance (...) with their values. I further argue that Steiner’s compensation strategy does not succeed in avoiding trade-offs so it falls prey to the same criticism. I propose a non-trade-off solution that is implicit in the accounts discussed and is more consistent with the meta-ethical framework advocated by Sen. This solution relies on an enforceable duty to share in the costs of rights enforcement hence it entails a degree of redistribution for enforcement purposes. (shrink)

This paper argues that a putative conflict between negative rights and positive rights is not a genuine conflict. The thought that they might conflict presupposes, I argue, that the two rights are valid. This is the first assumption of my argument. The second is that general rights impose duties on everyone, not just the party who faces a conflict of correlative duties. These two assumptions yield the conclusion that positive rights impose enforceable duties on the holder of the negative right; (...) no right is thus infringed if this duty is enforced so no conflict occurs. If this is correct, it means that we can include welfare or socio-economic rights in a set of general rights without generating conflicts with negative rights to non-interference; this might clear some space for arguments that favour egalitarian redistribution although it does not show that general positive rights do exist. (shrink)

I attempt to rebut the following standard objections against cultural relativism: 1. It is self-defeating for a cultural relativist to take the principle of tolerance as absolute; 2. There are universal moral rules, contrary to what cultural relativism claims; 3. If cultural relativism were true, Hitler’s genocidal actions would be right, social reformers would be wrong to go against their own culture, moral progress would be impossible, and an atrocious crime could be made moral by forming a culture which approves (...) of it; 4. Cultural relativism is silent about how large a group must be in order to be a culture, and which culture we should follow when we belong to two cultures with conflicting moralities. (shrink)

In our thinking about what to do, we consider reasons which count for or against various courses of action. That having a glass of wine with dinner would be pleasant and make me sociable recommends the wine. That it will disturb my sleep and inhibit this evening’s work counts against it. I determine what I ought to do by weighing these considerations and deciding what would be best all things considered. A practical reason makes sense of a course of action (...) by recommending it, by highlighting some good or desirable feature of it which could move a reasonable agent to perform it. When thinking about what to do, we also attend to our obligations. Perhaps I have promised to remain clearheaded this evening. Given this I am obliged not to drink. How should this consideration affect my deliberations? According to Davidson, the fact that an action would be a breach of a promise ‘is a count against the action, to be weighed along with other reasons for the action’ (Davidson 2004: 177). This suggests that obligations are a sub-set of our reasons, they are one input into the process of determining what action would be reasonable or justified all things considered. One can see why Davidson might say this. After all, having carefully considered the matter, I may decide not to keep my promise. Furthermore this may be the right thing to do, the most reasonable course of action available to me in the light of all the relevant factors. Nevertheless this description seems to miss something important about a promise. The fact that I promised not to drink does not merely recommend not drinking as does the prospect of a restless night; it places a demand on me. Drinking would not be just inadvisable; it would now be a wrong. And even if such a wrong might on the whole be justified, even if committing this wrong is the right thing to do, in drinking I refuse a demand, I don’t just reject a recommendation. It is widely held that a promise provides you with a moral reason to fulfill it, whereas the fact that drinking would make you lose sleep does not, typically, constitute such a reason.. (shrink)

'Moral luck' refers to the phenomenon whereby one's degree of blameworthiness for what one has done varies on account of factors beyond one's control. Applying concepts of Dworkin's from the domain of distributive justice, I draw a distinction between 'option moral luck,' which is that to which one has exposed oneself as the result of one's voluntary choices, and 'brute moral luck,' which is that which is unchosen and unavoidable. I argue that option moral luck is not ruled out on (...) grounds of unfairness. I also offer a non-fairness-based rejection of brute moral luck and defense of option moral luck. (shrink)

To most of us – believers and non-believers alike – the possibility of a perfect God co-existing with the kinds of evil that we see calls out for explanation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the belief that God must have justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see has been a perennial feature of theistic thought. Recently, however, a growing number of authors have argued that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with the existence of gratuitous (...) evil. Given powerful, millenia-long sensibilities about power and love and justice, it isn’t hard to find that suggestion simply incredible. Nonetheless, in this paper I will argue that the most prominent theistic alternatives to what has seemed incredible to most of us throughout most of history are themselves patently unacceptable for the theist as well. On any of the most widely accepted accounts of how God could have justifying reasons for permitting some evils, God’s existence means that we have justifying reasons for perpetrating and allowing every evil that we see. That's hard to swallow too. If I’m right about all of this, then two competing outcomes seem to present themselves as a possible result. On the one hand, for the theist, the apparently outrageous suggestion that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with gratuitous evil no longer looks like it faces a formidable, hard-to-resist alternative. On the other hand, some like me might think that my arguments go no distance at all towards dispelling the incredibility of the gratuitous evil nouvelle vague. On this line, theism may seem now to be between the rock and the hard place: it seems hard to make sense of the existence of a perfect God whether or not He has justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see. (shrink)

The union of contemporary philosophy and tort law has never been better. Perhaps the most dynamic current in contemporary tort theory concerns the increasingly sophisticated inquires into the doctrinal elements of the law of torts, with the tort of negligence in particular garnering the most attention from theorists. In this article, I examine philosophically rich issues revolving around each of the elements constituting the tort of negligence: compensable injury, duty, breach, actual cause, and proximate cause.

It seems that we should want to avoid becoming intellectually disabled. It is common for philosophers to infer from this that those of us without intellectual disabilities are intrinsically better off than individuals with intellectual disabilities, and that there are consequently stronger moral reasons for others to preserve our lives than to preserve the lives of intellectually disabled individuals. In this article, I argue against this inference from what states we should prefer for ourselves to how much moral reason others (...) have to maintain these states on our behalves. I argue that there is an important sense in which an outcome contributes to our well-being to a certain degree, namely the extent to which others should want it out of care for us, which plays a central role in determining the moral priority of ensuring the outcome for us over ensuring distinct outcomes for others. But an outcome's contribution to our well-being in this sense can come apart from the extent to which we should prefer it for ourselves. (shrink)

This paper advances a new criterion of a vulnerable population in research. According to this criterion, there are consent-based and fairness-based reasons for calling a group vulnerable. The criterion is then applied to the case of people with serious illnesses. It is argued that people with serious illnesses meet this criterion for reasons related to consent. Seriously ill people have a susceptibility to “enticing offers” that hold out the prospect of removing or alleviating illness, and this susceptibility reduces their ability (...) to safeguard their own interests. This explains the inclusion of people with serious illnesses in the Belmont Report’s list of populations needing special protections, and supports the claim that vulnerability is the rule, rather than the exception, in biomedical research. (shrink)

Philosophers have long argued that duties to oneself are paradoxical, as they seem to entail an incoherent power to release oneself from obligations. I argue that self-release is possible, both as a matter of deontic logic and of metaethics.

Deontologists believe in two key exceptions to the duty to promote the good: restrictions forbid us from harming others, and prerogatives permit us not to harm ourselves. How are restrictions and prerogatives related? A promising answer is that they share a source in rights. I argue that prerogatives cannot be grounded in familiar kinds of rights, only in something much stranger: waivable rights against oneself.