25 found
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  1. Understanding Political Feasibility.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2012 - Journal of Political Philosophy 21 (3):243-259.
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  2. The Feasibility of Collectives' Actions.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):453-467.
    Does ?ought? imply ?can? for collectives' obligations? In this paper I want to establish two things. The first, what a collective obligation means for members of the collective. The second, how collective ability can be ascertained. I argue that there are four general kinds of obligation, which devolve from collectives to members in different ways, and I give an account of the distribution of obligation from collectives to members for each of these kinds. One implication of understanding collective obligation and (...)
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  3. Unethical Consumption & Obligations to Signal.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2015 - Ethics and International Affairs 29 (3):315-330.
    Many of the items that humans consume are produced in ways that involve serious harms to persons. Familiar examples include the harms involved in the extraction and trade of conflict minerals (e.g. coltan, diamonds), the acquisition and import of non- fair trade produce (e.g. coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice), and the manufacture of goods in sweatshops (e.g. clothing, sporting equipment). In addition, consumption of certain goods (significantly fossil fuels and the products of the agricultural industry) involves harm to the environment, to (...)
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  4. Difference-Making and Individuals' Climate-Related Obligations.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2016 - In Clare Heyward & Dominic Roser (eds.), Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 64-82.
    Climate change appears to be a classic aggregation problem, in which billions of individuals perform actions none of which seem to be morally wrong taken in isolation, and yet which combine to drive the global concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) ever higher toward environmental (and humanitarian) catastrophe. When an individual can choose between actions that will emit differing amounts of GHGs―such as to choose a vegan rather than carnivorous meal, to ride a bike to work rather than drive a car, (...)
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  5. We the People: Is the Polity the State?Stephanie Collins & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (1):78-97.
    When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...)
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  6. Collectives’ and individuals’ obligations: a parity argument.Stephanie Collins & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1):38-58.
    Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what (...)
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  7. Debate: Ideal Theory—A Reply to Valentini.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2009 - Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (3):357-368.
    In her ‘On the apparent paradox of ideal theory’, Laura Valentini combines three supposedly plausible premises to derive the paradoxical result that ideal theory is both unable to, and indispensable for, guiding action. Her strategy is to undermine one of the three premises by arguing that there are good and bad kinds of ideal theory, and only the bad kinds are vulnerable to the strongest version of their opponents’ attack. By undermining one of the three premises she releases ideal theorists (...)
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  8. Benefiting from Failures to Address Climate Change.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2014 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (4):392-404.
    The politics of climate change is marked by the fact that countries are dragging their heels in doing what they ought to do; namely, creating a binding global treaty, and fulfilling the duties assigned to each of them under it. Many different agents are culpable in this failure. But we can imagine a stylised version of the climate change case, in which no agents are culpable: if the bad effects of climate change were triggered only by crossing a particular threshold, (...)
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  9. Non-Ideal Accessibility.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3):653-669.
    What should we do when we won't do as we ought? Suppose it ought to be that the procrastinating professor accept the task of reviewing a book, and actually review the book. It seems clear that given he won't review it, he ought not to accept the task. That is a genuine moral obligation in light of less than perfect circumstances. I want to entertain the possibility that a set of such obligations form something like a 'practical morality'; that which (...)
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  10. (1 other version)Ending Sex-Based Oppression: Transitional Pathways.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (3):1021-1041.
    From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it comes (...)
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  11. (1 other version)The Transfer of Duties: From Individuals to States and Back Again.Stephanie Collins & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2016 - In Michael Brady & Miranda Fricker (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 150-172.
    Individuals sometimes pass their duties on to collectives, which is one way in which collectives can come to have duties. The collective discharges its duties by acting through its members, which involves distributing duties back out to individuals. Individuals put duties in and get (transformed) duties out. In this paper we consider whether (and if so, to what extent) this general account can make sense of states' duties. Do some of the duties we typically take states to have come from (...)
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  12. The Motivation Question: Arguments from Justice, and from Humanity.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2012 - British Journal of Political Science 42:661-678.
    Which of the two dominant arguments for duties to alleviate global poverty, supposing their premises were generally accepted, would be more likely to produce their desired outcome? I take Pogge's argument for obligations grounded in principles of justice, a "contribution" argument, and Campbell's argument for obligations grounded in principles of humanity, an "assistance" argument, to be prototypical. Were people to accept the premises of Campbell's argument, how likely would they be to support governmental reform in policies for international aid, or (...)
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  13. The Metaphysics of Intersectionality Revisited.Holly Lawford-Smith & Kate Phelan - 2021 - Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (2):166-187.
    ‘Intersectionality’ is one of the rare pieces of academic jargon to make it out of the university and into the mainstream. The message is clear and well-known: your feminism had better be intersectional. But what exactly does this mean? This paper is partly an exercise in conceptual clarification, distinguishing at least six distinct types of claim found across the literature on intersectionality, and digging further into the most philosophically complex of these claims—namely the metaphysical and explanatory. It’s also partly a (...)
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  14. Feminist Separatism Revisited.Kate M. Phelan & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2023 - Journal of Controversial Ideas 3 (2):1-18.
    Conflict over who belongs in women-only spaces is now part of mainstream political debate. Some think women-only spaces should exclude on the basis of sex, and others think they should exclude on the basis of a person’s self-determined gender identity. Many who take the latter view appear to believe that the only reason for taking the former view could be antipathy towards men who identify as women. In this paper, we’ll revisit the second-wave feminist literature on separatism, in order to (...)
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  15. On an Alleged Case of Propaganda: Reply to McKinnon.Sophie R. Allen, Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Mary Leng, Holly Lawford-Smith, Jane Clare Jones, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper & R. J. Simpson - manuscript
    In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...)
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  16. Trashing and Tribalism in the Gender Wars.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2022 - In Noell Birondo (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Hate. Lanham and London: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 207-233.
    In 1976, Jo Freeman wrote an article for Ms. Magazine, entitled ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’. It provoked an outpouring of letters from women relating their own experiences of trashing during the course of the second wave feminist movement—more letters than Ms. had received about any previous article. Since then, the technology has improved but the climate among feminists has not; trashing is now conducted on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, in front of ever-larger audiences and with (...)
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  17. (1 other version)Cosmopolitan Global Justice: Brock vs. The Feasibility Sceptic.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2011 - Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric (4).
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  18. Gender.Holly Lawford-Smith & Michael Hauskeller - 2022 - In Michael Hauskeller (ed.), The Things That Really Matter: Philosophical Conversations on the Cornerstones of Life. UCL Press. pp. 65-83.
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  19. Juha Räikkä, Social Justice in Practice.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2014 - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-6.
    Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, marveling at the terrain below, wondering about all the sights currently obscured from your view, and lamenting that you just don’t have time to commit to the steep descent in and long trek across, which would give you a perspective from right up close. Being handed Juha Räikkä’s new book Social Justice in Practice is like being told there’s a flying fox you can take: the canyon is applied political theory, and (...)
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  20. Feasibility Constraints for Political Theories.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2010 - Dissertation, Australian National University
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  21. On Satisfying Duties to Assist.Christian Barry & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2019 - In Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In this paper, we take up the question of whether there comes a point at which one is no longer morally obliged to do further good, even at very low cost to oneself. More specifically, they ask: under precisely what conditions is it plausible to say that that “point” has been reached? A crude account might focus only on, say, the amount of good the agent has already done, but a moment’s reflection shows that this is indeed too crude. We (...)
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  22. Introduction.Christian Barry & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2012 - In Christian Barry & Holly Lawford-Smith (eds.), Global Justice. Ashgate.
    This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...)
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  23. The Importance of Being Earnest, and the Difficulty of Faking It.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2010 - In M. Baurmann, G. Brennan, R. Goodin & N. Southwood (eds.), Norms and Values. Nomos Verlag.
    http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ZIF/Publikationen/books/10_Baurmann_NormsAndValues.html.
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  24. Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law (by Larry Alexander et al.). [REVIEW]Holly Lawford-Smith - 2010 - Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 35:152-158.
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  25. Peter Corning: The Fair Society: The science of human nature and the pursuit of social justice: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011. [REVIEW]Holly Lawford-Smith - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (2):313-320.
    Peter Corning: The Fair Society: The science of human nature and the pursuit of social justice Content Type Journal Article Category Review Essay Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s10539-011-9304-0 Authors Holly Lawford-Smith, Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Philosophy, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia Journal Biology and Philosophy Online ISSN 1572-8404 Print ISSN 0169-3867.
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