Philosophers have recently expressed interest in the question as to whether there is a right to sex, a right whose justification is motivated by the existence of sexually excluded people—people who suffer from involuntary long-term sexual deprivation (owing, say, to a chronic medical condition). This paper, after offering preliminary remarks about what a right to sex and its objects might be and who might have this right, surveys seven justifications for the right: linkage arguments, need, well-being, a minimally decent life, (...) sexual activity being a basic good, injustice, and relationships. The paper argues that a right to sex does not likely exist because none of the justifications is convincing. The paper then argues that despite the lack of justification, and because sexual exclusion is a problem worthy of attention, people’s sexual needs can be addressed through the lens of goals instead of rights. This not only takes sexual exclusion seriously enough, it also avoids the crucial problems associated with rights-talk, especially that of sexual coercion. (shrink)

A central feature of experimental development economics is the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the effectiveness of prospective socioeconomic interventions. The use of RCTs in development economics raises a host of ethical issues which are just beginning to be explored. In this article, I address one ethical issue in particular: the routine use of the status quo as a control when designing and conducting a development RCT. Drawing on the literature on the principle of standard care in (...) medical research ethics, as well as considerations of distributive justice in non-ideal circumstances, I argue that the practice of using the status quo as a control is ethically justifiable. However, I add an important qualification based on the natural duty of rescue to address the concern that my account is overly permissive. (shrink)

Some argue that robots could never be sentient, and thus could never have intrinsic moral status. Others disagree, believing that robots indeed will be sentient and thus will have moral status. But a third group thinks that, even if robots could never have moral status, we still have a strong moral reason to treat some robots as if they do. Drawing on a Kantian argument for indirect animal rights, a number of technology ethicists contend that our treatment of anthropomorphic or (...) even animal-like robots could condition our treatment of humans: treat these robots well, as we would treat humans, or else risk eroding good moral behavior toward humans. But then, this argument also seems to justify giving rights to robots, even if robots lack intrinsic moral status. In recent years, however, this indirect argument in support of robot rights has drawn a number of objections. In this paper I have three goals. First, I will formulate and explicate the Kant-inspired indirect argument meant to support robot rights, making clearer than before its empirical commitments and philosophical presuppositions. Second, I will defend the argument against a number of objections. The result is the fullest explication and defense to date of this well-known and influential but often criticized argument. Third, however, I myself will raise a new concern about the argument’s use as a justification for robot rights. This concern is answerable to some extent, but it cannot be dismissed fully. It shows that, surprisingly, the argument’s advocates have reason to resist, at least somewhat, producing the sorts of robots that, on their view, ought to receive rights. (shrink)

Is it wrong to distract? Is it wrong to direct others’ attention in ways they otherwise would not choose? If so, what are the grounds of this wrong – and, in expounding them, do we have to at once condemn large chunks of contemporary digital commerce (also known as the attention economy)? In what follows, I attempt to cast light on these questions. Specifically, I argue – following the pioneering work of Jasper Tran and Anuj Puri – that there is (...) a right to attention, and that its existence underlies some of our claims regarding the wrongness of distractions. However, I depart from both these authors in two respects: first, I present a new way of deriving the right to attention, grounding it in the more fundamental right to mental integrity. Second, I remain agnostic on whether the contemporary business practices of capturing attention in exchange for a variety of digital products and services are plagued by routine violations of the right. (shrink)

Socio-technical systems (STS) have become prominent platforms for online social interactions. Yet, they are still struggling to incorporate basic social ideas for many different and new online activities. This has resulted in unintended exposure of users’ personal data and a rise in online threats as users have now become a desirable target for malicious activities. To address such challenges, various researchers have argued that STS should support user-oriented configurations to protect their users from online social abuse. Some methodologies have also (...) been proposed to appreciate the integration of social values in the design of information systems, but they often lack an application mechanism. This paper presents a framework for the application of the socio-technical design methodology to incorporate social standards in the design of STS. The proposed framework exemplifies the socio-technical design approach by considering a list of social standards, followed by their mapping onto corresponding technical specifications. Based on these two sets, the framework highlights various individual, inter-group, and intra-group interactions and their supporting tools for STS governance. A conversation about the integration of social standards in STS is already materializing, therefore, a comprehensive framework to apply these standards in STS is entailed. (shrink)

Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.

Many people think that the moral reason against doing harm is stronger than the moral reason against allowing harm. What should these people think about doing and allowing good? I address this question by distinguishing two ways of understanding the doing/allowing distinction. The agency view implies that the moral reason for doing good is stronger than the moral reason for allowing good. The imposition view implies that the moral reason against preventing good is stronger than the moral reason against failing (...) to do good. I defend the imposition view and explore its implications for the comparative strength of harm-based and benefit-based reasons. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century education has been recognized as a human right in several international conventions, and the UN also holds that “Education shall be free” and that “Elementary education shall be compulsory” (UN, 1948, Article 26). The education-as-a-human right-project could be viewed as a good intention of global inclusion in recognizing that all individuals have a right to education in virtue of being humans, and the idea of education as a human right thus has a (...) tremendous global significance. However, if we look at this more critically, the education-as-a-human right-project, may not only be grounded in altruistic good intensions for the disadvantaged. The term “elementary education”, or sometimes “primary education”, which is used in several human rights-documents seems to suggest that it is some sort of formalized education. It would be useful however to make a distinction between formal and informal education, as well as between teaching, learning, education and schooling, in the discussion of the right to education and specifically in the discussion concerning education as a “human right”. There is obviously a difference between the right to teach, the right to learn, the right to education and the right to schooling. And how are these rights related to compulsory schooling, compulsory education and the supposed duty to teach and duty to learn? A further concern is what makes this a human right rather than for example a juridical right as a citizen. By addressing these questions within a theoretical framework of social ontology and ameliorative conceptual analysis I believe that we can find new ways of dealing with fundamental problems within philosophy of education such as the nature, purpose and aims of education as well as the right to education. (shrink)

In a characteristically iconoclastic essay, “Does the State Have a Monopoly to Punish Crime?”, Douglas Husak argues that the state’s moral right to punish crime is all but self-evident while its supposed monopoly on punishment is a fiction. Husak draws this bracing conclusion from a modest, quasi-Lockean premise – that persons and other entities have a right to impose stigmatizing deprivations on those who wrong them. This premise evokes John Locke’s far stronger claim that everyone enjoys a natural right to (...) inflict potentially severe sanctions on any wrongdoer. The quasi-Lockean premise also evokes the familiar idea that all criminal wrongdoing is an attack on the broader community, and that law-breakers consequently owe a debt to society that they can repay through punishment. In this essay, I argue that the inferences Husak draws from the quasi-Lockean premise are unsound, but for reasons that reveal important lessons about the state’s right to punish crime and about the limits of what we can extract from the venerable idea that a central victim of criminal wrongdoing is the community as a whole. In Part II, I argue that the quasi-Lockean premise does not ground the state’s right to punish the kind of wrongs traditionally thought central to the criminal law, namely, wrongs perpetrated on individual human victims. In Part III, I answer Husak’s implicit challenge to describe a kind of stigmatizing deprivation – a kind of punishment – that the state alone has a right to inflict. I suggest that no entity but the state may inflict sanctions that constitute prima facie invasions of moral rights. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the growing problem of unwanted sexual interactions in virtual environments. It reviews the available evidence regarding the prevalence and severity of this problem. It then argues that due to the potential harms of such interactions, as well as their nonconsensual nature, there is a good prima facie argument for viewing them as serious moral wrongs. Does this prima facie argument hold up to scrutiny? After considering three major objections – the ‘it’s not real’ objection; the ‘it’s just (...) a game’ objection; and the ‘unrestricted consent’ objection – this chapter argues that it does. The chapter closes by reviewing some of the policy options available to us in addressing the problem of virtual sexual assault. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...) are not persons with human rights, on these accounts. It is consequently unclear how we ought to treat these subjects. This is the problem of marginal cases. I argue that we cannot resolve the problem of marginal cases if we accept a unitary, binary view of personhood. Instead, I develop a new non-binary personhood account of human rights, and defend two main claims. First, there are many, scalar properties, the having of which are conducive to personhood. Second, different subjects have different human rights depending on which of these properties they have, and what threats apply to them. On my view, and contra most existing accounts, most marginal cases have some degree of personhood and are entitled to some human rights. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a conceptual model to improve moral sensitivity in human resource development (HRD) to assist human resource (HR) practitioners in contending with moral challenges in HRD. The literature on the relationship between ethics and HRD suggests that the organizational and employee development discipline deals with ethical issues at three different levels: Individual, organizational and communal, and international levels. In section I, we elaborate on moral challenges facing HRD. In section II, we conceptualize moral sensitive HRD, proposing (...) a conceptual model in virtue of some essential ethical theories and concepts that assist HRD in grappling with those problems. We will show how each theory and concept can help HRD to deal with relevant problems. In section III, we elaborate on practical approaches to implement moral sensitivity in HRD. We put forward some strategies that help HRD bring those theories and concepts to bear on the ethical problems facing this discipline. Finally, we discuss moral education through learning theories to cultivate moral concepts and ethical dimensions in HRD education. (shrink)

This chapter explores the foundation and content of the duty to respect persons. The authors argue that it is best understood as a duty to recognize people’s rights. Respect for persons therefore has specific implications for how competent and non-competent persons ought to be treated in research. For competent persons it underlies the obligation to obtain consent to many research procedures. The chapter gives an analysis of the requirements for obtaining valid consent. It then considers respect for persons as it (...) relates to four common topics: the therapeutic misconception, research with children and adolescents, the use of deception in research, and research on competent adults without their consent. (shrink)

The field of AI ethics during the current and previous decade is receiving an increasing amount of attention from all involved stakeholders: the public, science, philosophy, religious organizations, enterprises, governments, and various organizations. However, this field currently lacks consensus on scope, ethico-philosophical foundations, or common methodology. This thesis aims to contribute towards filling this gap by providing an answer to the two main research questions: first, what theory can explain moral scenarios in which AI entities are participants?; and second, what (...) theory can explain the process of moral reasoning, decision and action, for AI entities in virtual, simulated and real-life moral scenarios? This thesis answers these two research questions with its two main contributions to the field of AI ethics, a substantial and a methodological contribution. The substantial contribution is a coherent and novel theory named Ethics of Systems Framework, as well as a possible inception of a new field of study: ethics of systems. The methodological contribution is the creation of its main methodological tool, the Ethics of Systems Interface. The second part of the research effort was focused on testing and demonstrating the capacities of the Ethics of Systems Framework and Interface in modeling and managing moral scenarios in which AI and other entities participate. Further work can focus on building on top of the foundations of the Framework provided here, increasing the scope of moral theories and simulated scenarios, improving the level of detail and parameters to reflect real-life situations, and field-testing the Framework on actual AI systems. (shrink)

Semantic relativism is the view that the truth-value of some types of statements can vary depending on factors besides possible worlds and times, without any change in their propositional content. It has grown increasingly popular as a semantic theory of several types of statements, including statements that attribute knowledge of a proposition to a subject (knowledge attributions). The ways of knowing claim is the view that perception logically implies knowledge. In my “Semantic Relativism and Ways of Knowing” (2019) I argued (...) that a relativist semantics for knowledge attributions is incompatible with the ways of knowing claim. I suggested that this incompatibility depends on some basic features of the logic of relativist semantics, and therefore can be shown to generalise beyond the discussion of knowledge attributions to semantic relativism more broadly. Here I make this generalisation. I demonstrate that for any proposition p expressed by a statement that does not have a relativist semantics, and for any proposition q expressed by a statement that does have a relativist semantics, p fails to logically imply q. I explain why this happens, discuss some of its philosophical consequences, and consider a way to modify relativist semantics to avoid it. I conclude that semantic relativism raises interesting philosophical questions that have gone largely unnoticed in discussions of this view until now. (shrink)

The Northern Irish footballer James McClean chooses not to take part in the practice of wearing a plastic red poppy to commemorate those who have died fighting for the British Armed Forces. Each year he faces abuse, including occasional death threats, for his choice. This forms part of a wider trend towards ‘poppy enforcement’, the pressuring of people, particularly public figures, to wear the poppy. This enforcement seems wrong in part because, at least in some cases, it involves abuse. But (...) is there anything else wrong with it? We will consider the various ways the existing literature on the ethics of commemoration might help us understand what is wrong with poppy enforcement. We will argue that this cannot provide a complete account of what is wrong with poppy enforcement. We then argue that such pressure can constitute two distinct forms of affective injustice, which are wrongs done to people specifically in their capacity as affective beings. In McClean’s case, we argue first that poppy enforcement is a violation of affective rights and second that he faces a particular type of affective injustice that we call emotional imperialism. (shrink)

This article develops an intuitive idea of proportionality as a placeholder for a substantive conception of equality, and contrasts it with Ripstein’s ideas, as presented in an annual guest lecture to the Society of Applied Philosophy in 2016. It uses a discussion of racial profiling to illustrate the conceptual and normative differences between the two. The brief conclusion spells out my concern that talk of ‘proportionality’, though often helpful and, sometimes, necessary for moral reasoning, can end up concealing, rather than (...) illuminating, people’s claims to be treated as equals. (shrink)

It is often held that people have a moral right to believe and say whatever they want. For instance, one might claim that they have a right to believe racist things as long as they keep those thoughts to themselves. Or, one might claim that they have a right to pursue any philosophical question they want as long as they do so with a civil tone. In this paper I object to those claims and argue that no one has such (...) unlimited moral rights. In Part 1 I explore the value of the freedoms of thought and expression. In Part 2 I argue against the unlimited moral right to free expression, focusing in particular on the special obligations and moral constraints that obtain for academics. In Part 3 I argue against the unlimited moral right to free thought. (shrink)

The dissertation investigates whether virtue ethics can provide the normative ground for the justification of rights. Most justificatory accounts of rights consist in different explanations of the function of rights. On the view I will defend, rights have a plurality of functions and one of the main functions of rights is to make the right-holder more virtuous. The idea that the possession of rights leads to the development of virtues, called the function of virtue acquisition, is the core of a (...) virtue-based justification of rights elaborated in this dissertation. Based on Leif Wenar’s Kind-Desire Theory of rights and Nancy E. Snow’s Minimal Virtue of the Folk, I argue that there are two general types of rights, enabling rights and protective rights, and that both types are essential to the development of virtues. Enabling rights have the function of virtue acquisition because they allow the right-holder to strive for approximation of ideal role models while performing duties and other tasks. Such models are called heuristic models of virtues for they define what virtues are and how these virtues should be expressed in action. Some protective rights, namely promissory rights and the power-right to promise, behave like enabling rights when it comes to their ability to develop virtues. Other protective rights, especially children’s rights, make right-holders more virtuous via protecting their essential needs. The dissertation succeeds in elaborating the virtue-based justification of many rights, hence it suggests that people hold and should have rights because rights make them better people. (shrink)

In this article, I use the expanded hohfeldian model presented by Wenar to argue that, according to Aristotle's theory of friendship, every bond of friendship that is based on utility or virtue creates duties and hohfeldian incidents between those who are friends. In section 1, I provide a quick presentation of Hohfeld's work and of Wenar's hohfeldian model. In section 2, I present my thesis about the creation of certain hohfeldian incidents and certain duties in virtue and utility friendships as (...) conceived by Aristotle. In section 3, I give a broad characterization of Aristotle's theory of friendship and of the three great kinds of friendship that he recognizes. In section 4, I defend the thesis that it is only in virtue and utility friendships that duties are created. In section 5, I specify what are the hohfeldian incidents created by these two kinds of friendship. In section 6, I specify the two ways in which, according to Aristotle, these incidents and duties might be created. In section 7, I conclude with a brief recapitulation of the argument. En este artículo utilizo el modelo hohfeldiano extendido, presentado por Wenar, para argumentar que, según la teoría de la amistad de Aristóteles, todo lazo de amistad basado en la utilidad o la virtud crea deberes e incidentes hohfeldianos entre aquellos que son amigos. En la sección 1 proporciono una presentación rápida de la obra de Hohfeld y del modelo hohfeldiano de Wenar. En la sección 2 presento mi tesis sobre la creación de ciertos incidentes hohfeldianos y ciertos deberes en las amistades basadas en la virtud y la utilidad tal como fueron concebidos por Aristóteles. En la sección 3 ofrezco una caracterización general de la teoría de la amistad de Aristóteles y de los tres grandes tipos de amistad que reconoce. En la sección 4 defiendo la tesis de que los deberes se crean solamente en las amistades basadas en la virtud y la utilidad. En la sección 5 especifico cuáles son los incidentes hohfeldianos creados por estos dos tipos de amistad. En la sección 6 especifico las dos maneras en que, según Aristóteles, podrían crearse estos incidentes y deberes. En la sección 7 concluyo con una breve recapitulación de la argumentación. (shrink)

Unlike other kinds of theories of justice, reparatory justice can only be negatively defined, in non-ideal contexts in which initial wrongs had already been committed. For one, what counts and what does not count as wrongdoing or as an unjust state of affairs resulted from that wrongdoing depends on the normative framework upon which a theorist relies. Furthermore, the measures undertaken for alleviating historical injustices can be assessed only from the vantage point of other, independent normative considerations. In the present (...) paper I argue that this lack of substance is a feature that, far from being problematic, is what makes reparatory justice attractive. The specific example that I put forward is that of a reparatory justice account which seeks to instantiate the desiderata of a sufficientarian theory of justice. At first, distributive justice fills the content of reparatory justice, specifying up to what level reparations in-kind or compensatory measure should go. Afterwards, reparatory justice clarifies and provides epistemic inputs for distributive justice. Reparatory justice thus becomes an epistemic source for distributive justice, in that it provides the means for assessing whether someone’s level of well-being can be traced to her choice or to a wider, historically-sensitive operationalization of her “circumstances”. (shrink)

The normative power of consent plays a central role in enabling individuals to permissibly interact with one another. However, in the philosophical literature, the relationship between consent and permissible action is not always well understood. In this article I outline an account of the normative effect of valid consent, in order to clarify this relationship. I first argue that consent’s primary moral significance lies in its effect upon our interpersonal moral relationships. Specifically, I argue that valid consent serves to cancel (...) a directed duty owed to the consenter. Other things being equal, this equips the consentee with a directed permission: they will no longer wrong the consenter by acting in the consented to manner. However, this account does not yet explain how consent impacts upon the all things considered permissibility of an action. On the assumption that all things considered permissibility is a function of an agent’s reasons for action, we require an account of consent’s effect on those reasons. I consider, and then reject, Michelle Dempsey’s recent suggestion that consent affects a consentee’s reasons for action by granting them an exclusionary permission. I propose that we should instead understand consent to function as a cancelling permission. (shrink)

This paper comes out of a panel honoring the work of Anne Donchin (1940-2014), which took place at the 2016 Congress of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) in Edinburgh. My general aim is to highlight the contributions Anne made to feminist bioethics, and to feminist reproductive ethics in particular. My more specific aim, however, is to have a kind of conversation with Anne, through her work, about whether reproductive justice could demand insurance coverage for in vitro (...) fertilization. I quote liberally from Anne’s work for this purpose, but also to shower the reader with her words, reminding those of us who knew her well what a wonderful colleague she was. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. To facilitate a (...) meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematize moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights. (shrink)

I suggest a new role for authority and interest in the theory of right: Rights can be explicated as sets of prohibitions, permissions and commands, and they must be justified by interests. I argue as follows: (1) The two dominant theories of right—“Will Theory” and “Interest Theory”—have certain standard problems. (2) These problems are systematic: Will Theory’s criterion of the ability to enforce a duty is either false or empty outside of its original legal context, whereas Interest Theory includes in (...) the definition of a right what actually belongs to the justification of the practice within which that right is assigned. (3) I recast the connection between authority, interests and rights in a way that avoids each theory’s standard problem. (4) The resulting theory also has three further advantages: It analyzes rights in terms of very basic and familiar concepts; it mirrors the understanding of rights in actual public discourse, and it is compatible with a wide selection of moral theories. Since its core is about a specific use of modal auxiliary verbs, I call this new theory the “Modal Theory of Right.”. (shrink)

A communitarian perspective, which is characteristic of African normative thought, accords some kind of primacy to society or a group, whereas human rights are by definition duties that others have to treat individuals in certain ways, even when not doing so would be better for others. Is there any place for human rights in an Afro-communitarian political and legal philosophy, and, if so, what is it? I seek to answer these questions, in part by critically exploring one of the most (...) influential theoretical works on human rights in a sub-Saharan setting, namely, Claude Ake’s ‘The African Context of Human Rights’. Ake famously maintains that a typically Western approach to rights is inappropriate in the sub-Saharan region, in two major respects. First, Ake contends that although a human rights legal framework might be suitable for an ‘individualistic’ society, it is not for one of the sort common among traditional black peoples, for whom group rights are alone apt. Second, Ake maintains that, insofar as rights are relevant, rights to socio-economic goods are of much more importance in an African context than rights to civil liberties, due process and the like. Using Ake’s article as a foil, I draw on values salient in sub-Saharan moral worldviews to construct a unified philosophy of rights that not only provides reason to doubt his two claims, but also offers a promising way to reconcile a communitarian framework with a robust prizing of human rights alongside ones that are more collectively oriented. In short, I aim to provide a principled foundation for the core elements of the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights. (shrink)

This paper analyses the political discourse of Finnish national parks from a perspective of values and justice. By examining the historical and contemporary political processes for establishing parks, we study the definitions of social justice and values attached to nature. An examination of conservation discourse illustrates how the meaning of national parks has changed. Parks are no longer perceived as threats to economic activity; on the contrary, at present parks are considered to benefit the tourism industry. We also argue that (...) a precondition for a socially sustainable solution to political conflict is the definition of minimum rights accepted by all interest groups. (shrink)

It is a commonplace within philosophy that the ontology of institutions can be captured in terms of constitutive rules. What exactly such rules are, however, is not well understood. They are usually contrasted to regulative rules: constitutive rules (such as the rules of chess) make institutional actions possible, whereas regulative rules (such as the rules of etiquette) pertain to actions that can be performed independently of such rules. Some, however, maintain that the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules is merely (...) a linguistic one. In this paper I present the status account of constitutive rules in order to address this criticism. According to the status account constitutive rules pertain to institutional statuses and statuses are to be understood in terms of status rules. Status rules concern the enabling and constraining roles of institutions, and constitutive rules specify the preconditions that have to be met in order for them to play these roles. Even though I end up endorsing the claim that the distinction mentioned is a linguistic one, I go on to argue that there is an underlying reality that constitutive rules serve to make apparent. (shrink)

This paper argues, against the prevailing view, that consent to privacy policies that regular internet users usually give is largely unproblematic from the moral point of view. To substantiate this claim, we rely on the idea of the right not to know (RNTK), as developed by bioethicists. Defenders of the RNTK in bioethical literature on informed consent claim that patients generally have the right to refuse medically relevant information. In this article we extend the application of the RNTK to online (...) privacy. We then argue that if internet users can be thought of as exercising their RNTK before consenting to privacy policies, their consent ought to be considered free of the standard charges leveled against it by critics. (shrink)

Is it wrong to distract? Is it wrong to direct others’ attention in ways they otherwise would not choose? If so, what are the grounds of this wrong – and, in expounding them, do we have to at once condemn large chunks of contemporary digital commerce (also known as the attention economy)? In what follows, I attempt to cast light on these questions. Specifically, I argue – following the pioneering work of Jasper Tran and Anuj Puri – that there is (...) a right to attention, and that its existence underlies some of our claims regarding the wrongness of distractions. However, I depart from both these authors in two respects: first, I present a new way of deriving the right to attention, grounding it in the more fundamental right to mental integrity. Second, I remain agnostic on whether the contemporary business practices of capturing attention in exchange for a variety of digital products and services are plagued by routine violations of the right. (shrink)

Several commentators have tried to ground legal prohibitions of kidney sales in some form of Kant’s moral arguments against such sales. This paper reconsiders this approach to justifying laws and policies in light of Kant’s approach to law in his political philosophy. The author argues that Kant’s political philosophy requires that kidney sales be legally permitted, although contracts for such sales must remain unenforceable. The author further argues that Kant’s approach to laws, such as those governing kidney distribution, was formed (...) in part by considering and rejecting an assumption frequently employed in the bioethics literature, namely, that legal duties can be grounded directly in moral duties. The author explains some of Kant’s reasons for rejecting this assumption and concludes that arguments pertaining to the legality of kidney sales developed on the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy should no longer be considered tenable. (shrink)

The most prominent theories of rights, the Will Theory and the Interest Theory, notoriously fail to accommodate all and only rights-attributions that make sense to ordinary speakers. The Kind-Desire Theory, Leif Wenar’s recent contribution to the field, appears to fare better in this respect than any of its predecessors. The theory states that we attribute a right to an individual if she has a kind-based desire that a certain enforceable duty be fulfilled. A kind-based desire is a reason to want (...) something which one has simply in virtue of being a member of a certain kind. Rowan Cruft objects that this theory creates a puzzle about the relation between rights and respect. In particular, if rights are not grounded in aspects of the particular individuals whose rights they are, how can we sustain the intuitive notion that to violate a right is to disrespect the right-holder? I present a contractualist account of respect which reconciles the Kind-Desire Theory with the intuition that rights-violations are disrespectful. On this account, respect for a person is a matter of acknowledging her legitimate authority to make demands on the will and conduct of others. And I argue that kind-based desires authorize a person to make demands even if they do not correspond to that person’s well-being or other non-relational features. (shrink)

Post-mortem privacy is becoming a vital topic of public and scholarly legal concern. Post-mortem privacy is understood as the right of a person to preserve and control what becomes of his reputation and dignity after death. The assumption that the deceased does not qualify for privacy rights, because his bodily presence has been terminated, no longer holds in our networked society. In the digital age, the phenomenon of the digital legacy that an Internet user leaves behind after his demise, has (...) led to new challenges for the legal system. The deceased is no longer in a position to exercise human autonomy as an active agent. The article reconsiders the notion of human autonomy with regard to these digital representations. Taking the point of view that the control over personal information is essential in protecting one’s privacy in the antemortem life, the article explores whether this principle may have validity in the postmortem context. Legal philosophical arguments are advanced in a discourse about the quandary if digital personae of deceased persons can be bestowed with a legal basis of personality rights and concomitantly privacy rights. Therefore much attention is given to the problem of the subject, which does not seem to be functioning in the case of the absence of a living subject. Briefly referring to novel personae, it is argued that fundamental human rights need not be limited to the rights of living human beings. (shrink)

This paper scrutinizes the tension between individuals’ rights and paternalism. I will argue that no normative account that includes rights of individuals can justify hard paternalism since the infringement of a right can only be justified with the right or interest of another person, which is never the case in hard paternalism. Justifications of hard paternalistic actions generally include a deviation from the very idea of having rights. The paper first introduces Tom Beauchamp as the most famous contemporary hard paternalist (...) by outlining his moral theory (principlism) and showing why it, as it stands, has to allow for hard paternalism. Secondly, the paper focuses on the notion of rights within principlism. I will employ traditional theories of rights to make sense of rights in principlism. Unfortunately, this attempt fails. In the third part, then, I claim that rights can only be limited with reference to the rights or interests of others. This structure is the very point of rights, it is their bite. I will argue for this claim and show its implications. The most important implication is that not only principlism, but every normative theory that includes rights of individuals, has to abolish hard paternalism. (shrink)

This thesis takes up a rights-based perspective to discuss a number of issues related to the problem of permissible harm. It appeals to a person’s capacity to shape her life in accordance with her own ideas of the good to explain why her death can be bad for her, and why each of us should have primary say over what may be done to her. The thesis begins with an investigation of the badness of death for the person who dies. (...) If death is bad for us, this helps explain the wrongness of killing. The thesis defends the deprivation account—i.e. the idea that death is bad for us when and because it deprives us of good life—against two Epicurean challenges. It adds that death is also bad when and because it thwarts our agency. Next, the thesis deals with the logic of our moral rights to non-interference. It proposes a conception of rights according to which the stringency of our rights derives from and is justified by the rational aspect of our human nature. It argues that this conception of moral rights solves the paradox of deontology. While our rights to non-interference are stringent, they are not absolute. The thesis considers two possible exceptions to the general rule that it is impermissible to harm an innocent person against her consent. First, using an actual case from WWII, it investigates the circumstances under which a government may expose some parts of its population to an increased risk of harm in order to decrease the risk to others. Second, it considers the permissibility of self-defence against an innocent threat. It argues that the potential victim of an innocent threat has a justice-based reason to treat her own interests as on a par with those of the threat. (shrink)

DNA patents have been being granted since the 1970s. Patents are meant to act as incentives, encouraging innovation and dissemination in biotechnology by granting inventors exclusive economic control of their inventions for a set period of time. Governments in North America and Europe have therefore been using patents as a public policy tool to encourage the invention of health-related biotechnologies since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. However despite this laudable policy goal, there have also in recent decades been a number (...) of controversies related to patenting in biotechnology. Commentators are concerned that patents may in fact be having a detrimental effect on innovation of and access to health-related products and processes. While empirical evidence that has been collected to date in relation to these concerns remains inconclusive, the debate may be clarified through the articulation of the rights and responsibilities that are at stake. The scope and content of a human right to healthcare are ultimately society-dependent, but its articulation can clarify whether instrumental property rights granted to inventors are interfering with this right in an unacceptable way. Intellectual property rights in health-related biotechnologies cannot be justified from a theoretical perspective, and so more definitive empirical data elucidating the role that patents play in regards to innovation and dissemination of health-related biotechnology is needed. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame these interactions (...) as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

Hugh Lafollette’s theoretical justification of parental licensing hinges upon consideration of the harms associated with raising children. If we understand Lafollette’s stance as one in which the moral status of children is equal to that of other human beings, we must consider what such a commitment might require of social institutions such as the family. Unlike other licensing programs, I argue that Lafollette’s parental licensing program serves as a tool by which fair equality of opportunity can be acquired for those (...) living within a given society. I attempt to demonstrate how the normative views as to the sovereignty of parents serve to discount the moral status of children, thus limiting the protections offered against child maltreatment. I will show how Lafollette’s theoretical justifications align with concerns addressed in John Stuart Mill’s harm principle and Rawlsian views as to the importance of access to fair equality of opportunity. (shrink)

Hugh Lafollette’s theoretical justification of parental licensing hinges upon consideration of the harms associated with raising children. If we understand Lafollette’s stance as one in which the moral status of children is equal to that of other human beings, we must consider what such a commitment might require of social institutions such as the family. Unlike other licensing programs, I argue that Lafollette’s parental licensing program serves as a tool by which fair equality of opportunity can be acquired for those (...) living within a given society. I attempt to demonstrate how the normative views as to the sovereignty of parents serve to discount the moral status of children, thus limiting the protections offered against child maltreatment. I will show how Lafollette’s theoretical justifications align with concerns addressed in John Stuart Mill’s harm principle and Rawlsian views as to the importance of access to fair equality of opportunity. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy about justice, a contrast between empirical and transcendental approaches can be identified. Hillel Steiner represents an empirical approach: he argues for building an account of justice-as-rights out of the minimal inductive material of psychological linguistic and moral intuitions. From this opening, he ultimately concludes that persons have original rights to self-ownership and to an initially equal share of natural resources. Emmanuel Levinas represents a transcendental approach: he argues that justice arises from a transcendent ethical relation of responsibility-for-the-Other. (...) This relation underpins all subjective cognition, and makes rationality, reasoning, and rights possible.Analysis of each of these positions reveals certain problems. On the one hand, Steiner’s argument contains a number of latent methodological, conceptual, and structural presuppositions. These include the pretheoretical concepts of “person”, “equality”, and “consistency”. These presuppositions prefigure and condition the conclusions which Steiner reaches. On the other hand, Levinas fails to provide a convincing account of how the self comes to be an object of my own deliberations about morality and justice. This amounts to an annihilation of the subject which undermines his argument for the subject as a site of responsible action. As Steiner identifies, justice encompasses equal moral agents. Levinas’s hyperbolic description of the ethical relation’s asymmetry must therefore be revised.Nevertheless, what remains is the strength of Levinas’s argument for the priority of the ethical relation over thematization, rationality, and consciousness. The hidden presuppositions supporting Steiner’s work are evidence of Levinas’s plausibility in this respect. Steiner’s account of justice-as-rights requires a prior ethical relation in which we recognise one another as separate persons, each possessing an ethical status of their own; an attitude of justice motivates Steiner’s description of justice. This attitude is evident in language, which is communication before it is thought. In that individual rights can be conceived only on the basis of a relation of responsibility, rights are primordially the rights of the Other. (shrink)

The ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ (Principles) that provide guidance for the implementation of the United Nations’ ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ framework (Framework) will probably succeed in making human rights matters more customary in corporate management procedures. They are likely to contribute to higher levels of accountability and awareness within corporations in respect of the negative impact of business activities on human rights. However, we identify tensions between the idea that the respect of human rights is a perfect (...) moral duty for corporations and the Principle’s ‘human rights due diligence’ requirement. We argue that the effectiveness of the ‘human rights due diligence’ is in many respects dependent upon the moral commitment of corporations. The Principles leave room for an instrumental or strategic implementation of due diligence, which in some cases could result in a depreciation of the fundamental norms they seek to promote. We reveal some limits of pragmatic approaches to coping with business-related human rights abuses. As these limits become more apparent, not only does the case for further progress in international and extraterritorial human rights law become more compelling, but so too does the argument for a more forceful discussion on the moral foundations of human rights duties for corporations. (shrink)

The status quo on parental licensing in most Western jurisdictions is that licensing is required in the case of adoption but not in the case of assisted or unassisted biological reproduction. To have a child via adoption, one must fulfill licensing requirements, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. One is exempt from these requirements, however, if one has a child via biological reproduction, including assisted reproduction involving donor gametes or a contract pregnancy. In (...) an earlier paper, we challenged this system of parental licensing by showing that arguments in favour of it do not succeed. One argument we failed to consider, however, is that prospective biological parents have a right to reproduce that protects them against the sort of state interference that is involved in parental licensing. According to this argument, because prospective adoptive parents do not exercise a similar right when attempting to become parents, they are not similarly protected. In this paper, we argue that this reproductive rights argument, like other arguments in favour of the status quo on parental licensing, is flawed. We also question whether people in fact have a right to reproduce, and in doing so distinguish this right from others that we think are legitimate, including a right to become a parent and a right to bodily autonomy. (shrink)

Technology is a practically indispensible means for satisfying one’s basic interests in all central areas of human life including nutrition, habitation, health care, entertainment, transportation, and social interaction. It is impossible for any one person, even a well-trained scientist or engineer, to know enough about how technology works in these different areas to make a calculated choice about whether to rely on the vast majority of the technologies she/he in fact relies upon. Yet, there are substantial risks, uncertainties, and unforeseen (...) practical consequences associated with the use of technological artifacts and systems. The salience of technological failure (both catastrophic and mundane), as well as technology’s sometimes unforeseeable influence on our behavior, makes it relevant to wonder whether we are really justified as individuals in our practical reliance on technology. Of course, even if we are not justified, we might nonetheless continue in our technological reliance, since the alternatives might not be attractive or feasible. In this chapter I argue that a conception of trust in technological artifacts and systems is plausible and helps us understand what is at stake philosophically in our reliance on technology. Such an account also helps us understand the relationship between trust and technological risk and the ethical obligations of those who design, manufacture, and deploy technological artifacts. (shrink)

Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently most of their reach is limited to pornography, and they are also used to discredit people. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers. Our goal is to help set an agenda around these matters, to make sure this technology can help realize (...) epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. Our project is exploratory in nature, and we do not aim to offer conclusive answers at this early stage. There is a need to remain vigilant to make sure the downsides do not outweigh the upsides, and that will be a tall order. (shrink)

Besides the task of conveying information, methods and skills to their pupils, teachers are also expected to mediate certain basic values. In this paper we are interested in the educational task of mediating such values in societies imbued with individualist values and attitudes. As a background we use the results from the recurring "World Values Survey" (WVS) which maps the evaluative profile of citizens in about 80 different countries worldwide. The results from WVS reveal that Swedes in general stand out (...) as remarkably individualist with respect to their reported value judgements. Hence, Sweden constitutes our example of an individualist society, i.e., a society whose members to a large extent share an individualist evaluative profile. One important feature of such an individualist evaluative profile is a tendency to regard questions of value as largely a private matter and to downplay the importance of ethics in general. Against this background we investigated the evaluative outlook of 134 Swedish teacher students, using questions from WVS as a point of departure. The results indicate that these students do not differ to any significant degree from the Swedish population in general as regards their evaluative outlook, and yet they are supposed to mediate both individualist and social basic values in their coming profession. The purpose of this paper is to make visible and problematize the tension between an individualist evaluative profile and the educational task of mediating a set of basic values. This tension, it is argued, poses special challenges for teachers and the teacher education in societies on the individualist side of the scale. (shrink)