I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

I critically discuss two claims which Hannah Ginsborg makes on behalf of her account of meaning in terms of ‘primitive normativity’: first, that it avoids the sceptical regress articulated by Kripke's Wittgenstein; second, that it makes sense of the thought—central to Kripke's Wittgenstein—that ‘meaning is normative’, in a way which shows this thought not only to be immune from recent criticisms but also to undermine reductively naturalistic theories of content. In the course of the discussion, I consider and attempt to (...) shed light on a number of issues: the structure of the sceptical regress; the content of the thought that ‘meaning is normative’, and its force against reductive theories; the connection between meaning and justification; and the notion of ‘primitive normativity’. (shrink)

An utterer may convey a message to her intended audience by means of an explicit statement; or by a non‐conventionally mediated one‐off signal from which the audience is able to work out the intended message; or by conversational implicature. I investigate whether the last two are equivalent to explicit testifying, as communicative act and epistemic source. I find that there are important differences between explicit statement and insinuation; only with the first does the utterer assume full responsibility for the truth (...) of what she communicates to her audience. (shrink)

This discussion piece critically examines some of the key ideology that figures in Elizabeth Fricker's ‘Stating and Insinuating’, raises a number of queries about the details of Fricker's argumentation, and develops some ideas about the normative structure of testimony that relate to the themes of that paper.

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. This problem is solvable, despite its magnitude.

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

In recent years there has been growing scholarly interest in the relationship between bioethics and human rights. The majority of this work has proposed that the normative and institutional frameworks of human rights can usefully be employed to address those bioethical controversies that have a global reach: in particular, to the genetic modification of human beings, and to the issue of access to healthcare. In response, a number of critics have urged for a degree of caution about applying human rights (...) to such controversies. In particular, they have claimed that human rights have unresolved distributive and foundational problems. Interestingly, however, some of these critics have gone on to suggest that it might be possible to draw on certain bioethical insights to remedy these problems with human rights. This paper evaluates these recent attempts to apply insights from bioethics to the theory and practice of human rights. It argues that while these insights do not constitute an entirely new and original contribution to human rights thinking, they do force human rights scholars and campaigners to reflect on some key issues. First of all, they force us to question the prevalent idea that human rights are always ‘inviolable trumps’. Secondly, they demand that we pay close attention to the ‘fairness’ of the institutions we charge with determining our concrete rights. And finally, and perhaps most radically, these insights challenge the notion that human rights are held exclusively by members of the human species. (shrink)

The authors of this book engage in essay form in a lively debate over the fundamental characteristics of legal and moral rights. They examine whether rights fundamentally protect individuals' interests or whether they instead fundamentally enable individuals to make choices. In the course of this debate the authors address many questions through which they clarify, though not finally resolve, a number of controversial present-day political debates, including those over abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights.

This paper considers whether Rawls' theory of justice as fairness may be used to justify a human right to health care. Though Rawls himself does not discuss health care, other writers have applied Rawls' theory to the provision of health care. Ronald Green argues that contractors in the original position would establish a basic right to health care. Green's proposal, however, requires considerable relaxation of the constraints Rawls places on the original position and thus jeopardizes Rawls' arguments for the two (...) principles of justice. Norman Daniels claims that health care is best understood as a means for helping to achieve Rawls' goal of equality of fair opportunity. Daniels acknowledges, however, that his interpretation cannot justify a basic right to health care; rather, it would at best require that certain kinds of care be made available to certain kinds of individuals. Finally, in place of the notion of health care is a human right, it is suggested that the provision of health care is a social ideal which may inspire the creation of specific legal rights. On this view, social provision of health care may properly vary significantly from culture to culture. Despite this variability, social systems may still be criticized on moral grounds. Keywords: justice, right to health care, equality, fair opportunity. (shrink)

A societal goal to which more and more people in the United States appear to be committed--at least officially--is the assurance of comprehensive health services for every person irrespective of income or geographic location. This paper offers one possible moral justification of the goal. It does so by attempting to apply various standard conceptions of social justice to considerations about health care and to reflect about the reasons why some of the conceptions seem more relevant than others. Several institutional implications (...) are also identified. (shrink)

On the grounds of the fundamental value of the human rights, which is the human dignity, this article describes a basis of the right to health care in terms of quality, discloses its concept, reviews the spheres of health system in which this right is exercised: health care and public health. The right to health care is stressed as one of the fundamental rights, without which the person will not able to enjoy other rights: economic, political and social rights. It (...) comprises the right to enjoy the best physical and mental health. The right to health care is not absolute in itself: efficiency of its implementation depends upon both ability of administrative and institutional systems, which were created by the state, to properly implement the assigned functions and upon the individual, its state of health and lifestyle. (shrink)

In this discussion, we will consider arguments against the view that one person is entitled to medical care at the expense of another person, just because the one person might be able to extend it to the other. We all accept the view that we are entitled to nonviolence from each other, which in the medical case is roughly that we are entitled to other people not making us sick, at least insofar as this is something they can readily avoid. (...) But how are we also entitled to their help in making us well when we are sick? Few of us think that we are entitled to other people's new cars, or half of their incomes for our general use. Why, then, are we entitled to a hefty fraction of that income to pay our medical bills? (shrink)

I discuss how modern cosmology illustrates underdetermination of theoretical hypotheses by data, in ways that are different from most philosophical discussions. I confine the discussion to the history of the observable universe from about one second after the Big Bang, as described by the mainstream cosmological model: in effect, what cosmologists in the early 1970s dubbed the ‘standard model’, as elaborated since then. Or rather, the discussion is confined to a (very!) few aspects of that history. I emphasize that despite (...) the underdetermination, a scientific realist can, and should, endorse this description. (shrink)

The human right to health has been established in international law since 1976. However, philosophers have often regarded human rights doctrine as a marginal contribution to political philosophy, or have attempted to distinguish ‘human rights proper’ from ‘aspirations’, with the human right to health often considered as falling into the latter category. Here the human right to health is defended as an attractive approach to global health, and responses are offered to a series of criticisms concerning its demandingness.

Do we have a legal and moral right to health care against others? There are international conventions and institutions that say emphatically yes, and they summarize this in the expression of “the right to health,” which is an established part of the international human rights canon. The International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights outlines this as “the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,” but declarations such as this remain tragically (...) unfulfilled. According to recent figures, roughly two billion people lack access to essential drugs or to primary health care. Millions are afflicted by infections and illnesses that are easily avoidable or treatable. In the developing world many children die or grow stunted and damaged for lack of available treatments. Tropical diseases receive little or no attention by the major pharmaceutical companies’ research departments. Is this a massive violation of the right to health? And if so, why does it attract so little attention? Is it because our supposed commitment to human rights and the rule of law is hypocritical and hollow? Or is it because the right to health is a special case of a right, so that these tragedies are no violation at all? Jennifer Prah Ruger summarized this puzzle when she wrote: “one would be hard pressed to find a more controversial or nebulous human right than the right to health.” In this essay I discuss three different theories of a right to health care. I conclude by offering my own reconstruction of one such theory. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an increase in the turn to rights discourse within the context of access to health and specifically health care. Developments took place at both the national and global levels, with a significant increase in right to health litigation around the world1 and developments at the international level, such as the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health and the adoption of a “General Comment” on the topic by the UN Committee on Economic, Social (...) and Cultural Rights. (shrink)

There are two discourses that are used in connection with the provision of good healthcare: a rights discourse and a beneficial design discourse. Although the logical force of these two discourses overlaps, they have distinct and incompatible implications for practical reasoning about health policy. The language of rights can be interpreted as the ground of a well-designed healthcare system stressing the values of equality and inclusion, but it has less application when dealing with questions of cost-effectiveness. This difference reflects the (...) distinction between the deontological status of rights claims and a teleological approach presupposed in the language of beneficial design. However, the value of the separateness of persons contained in the discourse of rights can impose constraints on the adoption of a simple maximizing principle when thinking about the allocation of healthcare resources within a social contract for health. Throughout these issues are discussed by reference to the work of Peter Jones. (shrink)

A just social arrangement must guarantee a right to health care for all. This right should be understood as a positive right to basic human functional capabilities. The present article aims to delineate the right to health care as part of an account of distributive justice in health care in terms of the sufficiency of basic human functional capabilities. According to the proposed account, every individual currently living beneath the sufficiency threshold or in jeopardy of falling beneath the threshold has (...) a legitimate claim to justice. People's entitlements to health care should not be determined on the basis of brute luck and their efforts to maintain healthy lifestyles. The prioritization of competing claim-rights of individuals is guided by two allocation principles: number and benefit-size weighted sufficiency (among people beneath the threshold) and need-weighted utilitarianism (among people above the threshold). (shrink)

Feinberg is one of the leading philosophers of law of the last forty years. This volume collects recent articles, both published and unpublished, on what he terms "basic questions" about the law, particularly in regard to the relationship to morality. Accessibly and elegantly written, this volume's audience will reflect the diverse nature of Feinberg's own interests: scholars in philosophy of law, legal theory, and ethical and moral theory.

There are striking structural similarities between Freud's ego and Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, which for Kant grounds our use of ‘I’ in ‘I think’. There are also striking similarities between Freud's superego and Kant's account of the mental structure that grounds our use of ‘I’ in the moral ‘I ought to’. The paper explores these similarities on three main points: the conflict of motivations internal to the mind, the relation between discursive and pre‐discursive representation of moral motivation, and the (...) unconscious character of moral motivation. The suggestion is that Freud offers resources for a naturalized account of just those features of our moral motivation that, according to Kant, seem to make it least amenable to a naturalistic explanation. How much of a revision of Kant's analysis of moral justification is thereby entailed is beyond the purview of the paper. (shrink)

Drawing upon a conception of the metaphysics of conscious states and of first-person content, we can argue that Descartes's transition ‘Cogito ergo sum’ is both sound and one he is entitled to make. We can nevertheless formulate a version of Lichtenberg's objection that can still be raised after Bernard Williams's discussion. I argue that this form of Lichtenberg's revenge can also be undermined. In doing so it helps to compare the metaphysics of subjects, worlds and times. The arguments also apply (...) to Descartes's ‘second Cogito’, that it is one and the same subject that thinks, wills, imagines. (shrink)

There are many good reasons for a merger between bioethics and human rights. First, though, significant philosophical groundwork must be done to clarify what a human right to health would be and—if we accept that it exists—exactly how it might influence the practical decisions we face about who gets what in very different contexts.