Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the interests of children, or some combination of these. Here I propose that at least in the case of biological, non-adoptive parents, these rights have a different normative basis: namely, these rights should be accorded to biological parents because of the compensatory duties such parents owe their children by virtue of having brought them into existence. Inspried by Seana Shiffrin, I argue that procreation inevitably encumbers the wills of (...) children in otherwise morally objectionable ways. Such subjection generates duties to compensate children, even if the child’s life is on balance a benefit to her. The right to procreate is thus conditioned on prospective parent’s willingness to compensate for the harms of procreation. And because parents bear such compensatory duties, they must be accorded permissions (i.e., rights) to fulfill these duties. These rights include familiar exclusionary rights to promote children’s welfare, etc. Moreover, because subjecting children to harms or the risks thereof violates their autonomy, parental duties (and rights) include the provision of education and other goods that enable their subsequent autonomy as adults. Grounding parental rights in compensatory procreative duties avoids problems associated with appeals to the interests of children (e.g., that these interests do not seem to generate exclusive parental rights) or to the interests of parents (e.g., that these interests do not appear strong enough to permit the creation of a new, vulnerable human individual). (shrink)

Access to surrogacy is often cast in the language of rights. Here, I examine what form such a right could take. I distinguish between surrogacy as a right to assisted procreation, and surrogacy as a contractual right. I find the first interpretation implausible: it would give rise to claims against the state that no state can fulfil, namely the provision of sufficient surrogates to satisfy the need. Instead, I argue that the right to surrogacy can only (...) be plausibly understood as a contractual right. I then investigate two different sets of harms that are often employed to argue against such a contractual interpretation of the right to surrogacy: harm to women's interests in a gendered society, and harm to the sense of self of the surrogate. I assess both of these through the analytical lens of vulnerability. I find neither of them to be convincing arguments against surrogacy contracts. In conclusion, I agree that surrogacy contracts should be carefully regulated, but I disagree with those who call for prohibition of the right to surrogacy as a contractual right. (shrink)

Many contemporary ethical debates turn on claims about the nature and extent of our alleged procreative moral rights: moral rights to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. In this article, I argue that there are no procreative moral rights, in that generally we do not have a distinctive moral right to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. However, interference with our procreative choices usually violates our nonprocreative moral rights, such as our (...) moral rights to bodily autonomy or to privacy. My argument presents hypothetical cases in which a state interferes with a person's procreative choices in order to promote aggregate social welfare, but this interference does not violate any of the person's nonprocreative moral rights. These cases not only undermine frequently made claims that widely recognized nonprocreative moral rights entail procreative moral rights, they also challenge the intuitively plausible claim that interference with our procreative choices as such violates our moral rights. What at first appear to be substantive moral rights are in fact a kind of illusion created by the frequent overlap of other rights, but lacking in substance beyond that overlap. While this argument against the existence of procreative moral rights has substantive implications for ongoing debates in reproductive ethics, I ultimately suggest that it is consistent with a progressive approach to reproductive justice. (shrink)

Kenneth Einar Himma (2009, 2016) argues that the existence of Hell renders procreation impermissible. Jason Marsh (2015) contends that problems of evil motivate anti-natalism. Anti-natalism is principally rejected for its perceived conflict with reproductive rights. I propose a theistic solution to the latter problem. Universalism says that all persons will, postmortem, eventually be eternally housed in Heaven, a superbly good place wherein harm is fully absent. The acceptance of universalism is now widespread, but I offer further reason to embrace one (...) variant of it. If universalism is true and there are opportunities to procreate in Heaven, then reproductive autonomy is largely preserved for everyone. Assuming Heaven is a harm-free place, there are no risks to children born in Heaven, unlike Earth or Hell. While this requires human persons to accept temporary restrictions on procreation during our premortem lives, the bulk of reproductive autonomy is preserved since one will have infinite opportunities to reproduce in Heaven. (shrink)

Sarah Conly's One Child is a substantive treatment of the extent to which procreative freedom is curtailed by rising global population and the environmental problems to which it contributes. This review provides an overview of the book's content and closes with a few critical remarks. The book is highly recommended for those interested in the intersection between environmental ethics and the ethics of procreation.

Should involuntarily childless people have the sameopportunities to access parenthood as those who are not involuntarily childless? In the context of assisted reproductive technologies, affirmative answers to this question are often cashed out in terms of positive rights, including rights to third-party reproduction. In this paper, wecritically explore the scope and extent to which any such right would hold up morally. Ultimately, we argue for a departure away from positive parental rights. Instead, we argue that the state has an (...) imperfect duty to benefit involuntarily childless people in relation to their parental aspirations. (shrink)

A book chapter (about 9,000 words, plus references) presenting an act-consequentialist approach to the ethics of climate change. It begins with an overview of act consequentialism, including a description of the view’s principle of rightness (an act is right if and only if it maximizes the good) and a conception of the good focusing on the well-being of sentient creatures and rejecting temporal discounting. Objections to act consequentialism, and replies, are also considered. Next, the chapter briefly suggests that act (...) consequentialism could reasonably be regarded as the default moral theory of climate change, in the sense that a broadly act-consequentialist framework often seems implicit in both scholarly and casual discussions of the ethics of climate change. The remainder of the chapter explores three possible responses to the threat of climate change: having fewer children to reduce the number of people emitting greenhouse gases; taxing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions (commonly called a “carbon tax”) to discourage GHG-emitting behavior; and reducing poverty to lessen personal, familial, and community vulnerability to the harms of climate change. (shrink)

In law and common-sense morality, it is generally assumed that adults who meet a minimum threshold of parental competency have a presumptive right to parent their biological children. But what is the basis of this right? According to one prominent account, the right to parent one’s biological child is best understood as being grounded in an intimate relationship that develops between babies and their birth parents during the process of gestation. This paper identifies three major problems facing (...) this view—the explanatory, adjudicatory, and theoretical problems—and explains how an alternative autonomy-based account is capable of avoiding them. (shrink)

Can appealing to children’s rights help to solve the non-identity problem in cases of procreation? A number of philosophers have answered affirmatively, arguing that even if children cannot be harmed by being born into disadvantaged conditions, they may nevertheless be wronged if those conditions fail to meet a minimal standard of decency to which all children are putatively entitled. This paper defends the tenability of this view by outlining and responding to five prominent objections that have been raised against it (...) in the contemporary literature: the identifiability objection; the non-existence objection; the waiving of rights objection, the lack of legitimate complaint objection; and the unfairness objection. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible for prospective mothers to wrong prospective fathers by bearing their child; and that lifting paternal liability for child support does not correct the wrong inflicted to fathers. It is therefore sometimes wrong for prospective mothers to bear a child, or so I argue here. I show that my argument for considering the legitimate interests of prospective fathers is not a unique exception to an obvious right to procreate. It is, rather, part of (...) a growing consensus that procreation can be morally problematic and that generally talking of rights in this context might not be warranted. Finally, I argue that giving up a right to procreate does not imply nor suggest giving up on women’s absolute right to abort, which I defend. (shrink)

Parenting our biological children is a centrally important matter, but how, if it all, can it be justified? According to a contemporary influential line of thinking, the acquisition by parents of a moral right to parent their biological children should be grounded by appeal to the value of the intimate emotional relationship that gestation facilitates between a newborn and a gestational procreator. I evaluate two arguments in defence of this proposal and argue that both are unconvincing.

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the (...) second can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Boonin’s The Non-Identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People and Rivka Weinberg’s The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When and Why Procreation May Be Permissible are both important books for those interested in procreative ethics. Each argues for surprising and controversial conclusions: Boonin argues that we should solve the non-identity problem by accepting its apparently unacceptable conclusion (...) that actions cannot be wrong due to their effects on future people whose lives are worth living and who would not exist were the actions not performed; Weinberg argues that there is no non-identity problem, that future children have no interest in existing, but significant interest in avoiding harm and that procreation is, therefore, a much more morally risky business than we tend to think. Even if... (shrink)

English-speaking research on morally right decisions in a healthcare context over the past three decades has been dominated by two major perspectives, namely, the Four Principles, of which the principle of respect for autonomy has been most salient, and the ethic of care, often presented as a rival to not only a focus on autonomy but also a reliance on principles more generally. In my contribution, I present a novel ethic applicable to bioethics, particularly as it concerns human procreation, (...) that I argue is a promising alternative to these two approaches. According to this new moral theory, an act is right just insofar as it treats people’s capacity to commune with respect, where communing is a matter of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them. This ethic is inspired by relational ideals of communion and harmony from the African philosophical tradition, but is shown to be attractive to a broad, indeed global, audience, with regard to its implications for the morality of reproduction. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the question of whether humans should reproduce. Some say human life is too punishing and cruel to impose upon an innocent. Others hold that such harms do not undermine the great and possibly unique value of human life. Tracing these outlooks historically in the debate has barely begun. What might philosophers have said, or what did they say, about human life itself and its value to merit reproduction? This article looks to (...) Kant, who wrote much on whether, by reproducing, humans do wrong or right morally. It assesses two main arguments: one examining whether perfect or imperfect duties condone reproduction, the other whether Kant’s teleological or, in the opposite sense, his eschatological outlooks can salvage reproduction. These two arguments are essential for building the entire argument. This article finds that, although Kant’s arguments against reproducing are strong, some of his writing seems to support reproduction as a good. Yet, must we must assume an author, even one who strove for systematicity, must be consistent over his entire oeuvre on every issue, especially if not handled directly in a single work? The article concludes that Kant does not sufficiently, systematically support anti-natalism as more moral than pro-natalism. It is best for the current debate to grapple with the very dilemma that daunted Kant. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is the view according to which the only basic requirement of morality is to maximize net aggregate welfare. This position has implications for the ethics of creating and rearing children. Most discussions of these implications focus either on the ethics of procreation and in particular on how many and whom it is right to create, or on whether utilitarianism permits the kind of partiality that child rearing requires. Despite its importance to creating and raising children, there are, by (...) contrast, few sustained discussions of the implications of utilitarian views of welfare for the matter of what makes a child’s life go well. This paper attempts to remedy this deficiency. It has four sections. Section one discusses the purpose of a theory of welfare and its adequacy conditions. Section two evaluates what prominent utilitarian theories of welfare imply about what makes a child’s life go well. Section three provides a sketch of a view about what is prudentially valuable for children. Section four sums things up. (shrink)

Pascal’s wager uses decision theory to argue that it is rational to attempt to nurture belief in God, based on the expected utility of believing (infinite happiness) compared to not believing (at best, only finite happiness). A belief in an eternal conscious torment in hell (infinite suffering) for non-believers makes the differences in expected utility even more apparent, strengthening the argument. Similar reasoning can also be used to calculate the expected moral value of actions, including procreation. Under theism, if possible (...) future children might suffer eternal conscious torment, the expected moral value of procreation is extremely negative. This implies that theists have a moral obligation not to procreate, which for most theists, entails a moral obligation to be celibate or to undergo sterilisation surgery. (shrink)

Several philosophers argue that individuals have an interest-protecting right to parent; specifically, the interest is in rearing children whom one can parent adequately. If such a right exists it can provide a solution to scepticism about duties of justice concerning distant future generations and bypass the challenge provided by the non-identity problem. Current children - whose identity is independent from environment-affecting decisions of current adults - will have, in due course, a right to parent. Adequate parenting requires (...) resources. We owe duties of justice to current children, including the satisfaction of their interest-protecting rights; therefore we owe them the conditions for rearing children adequately in the future. But to engage in permissible parenting they, too, will need sufficient resources to ensure their own children's future ability to bring up children under adequate conditions. Because this reasoning goes on ad infinitum it entails that each generation of adults owes its contemporary generation of children at least those resources that are necessary for sustaining human life indefinitely at an adequate level of wellbeing. (shrink)

Many philosophers and members of the public think it is wrong to procreate. If one wants children, it is permissible to adopt. But procreation is allegedly impermissible because there is some respect in which adoption is better than procreation. I show that such objections are unsound.

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, (...) it provides a useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases. (shrink)

It appears at least intuitively appropriate to claim that we owe it to victims to punish those who have wronged them. It also seems plausible to state that we owe it to society to punish those who have violated its norms. However, do we also owe punishment to perpetrators themselves? In other words, do those who commit crimes have a moral right to be punished? This work examines the sustainability of the right to be punished from the standpoint (...) of the two main theories of rights—the will and the interest conceptions. The right to be punished is shown to be largely indefensible on both accounts: on the will theory, the right to be punished conflicts with autonomy, and it can neither be claimed nor waived by a perpetrator; on the interest theory, a perpetrator’s interest in punishment, inasmuch as it exists, is not sufficient to ground a duty on the part of the state. (shrink)

The idea that citizens have a right to receive information that is relevant for their suitable exercise of political rights and liberties is well established in democratic societies. However, this right has never been systematically analyzed, thus remaining a blurry concept. This article tackles this conceptual gap by conceptualizing citizens’ right to information. After reviewing previous approaches to this idea, I locate citizens’ right to information on the map of communication rights, and put forward a systematic (...) framework for both justifying and analyzing it. This framework focuses on this right’s grounds, its function, its holders, its content, and its correlative duties. Although the conceptualization offered here will be incomplete, it will be enough to distinguish the general concept of citizens’ right to information from both its specific conceptions and from the other two best-known rights of the public: freedom of information and the public’s right to know. (shrink)

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a ‘right to explanation’ of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In (...) contrast to the right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a ‘right to be informed’. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the ‘right not to be subject to automated decision-making’ contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged ‘right to explanation’ stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018. (shrink)

The “Right to be forgotten” lies at the heart of the infosphere debate. It embodies how mature information societies cope and deal with their memories. As such, it has become a defining issue of our time. Drawing on the author’s experience as a member of the Google Advisory panel, this paper discusses some of the salient points of the “Right to be forgotten” discourse, including: privacy vs. freedom of speech and availability vs. accessibility of information. It argues that, (...) while there should be no removal of past information, steps must be taken to ensure that this is not constantly, or unnecessarily, recalled. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the right to privacy that is inspired by classic control views on this right and recent developments in moral psychology. The core idea is that the right to privacy is the right that others not make personal information about us flow unless this flow is an expression of and does not conflict with our deep self. The nature of the deep self will be spelled out in terms of stable intrinsic (...) desires. The paper argues that this view has advantages over alternative accounts of the right to privacy, that it is extensionally adequate in interesting test cases, that there is a good reason to think that the right to privacy, thus understood, can be justified, and that this view helps identify what kind of information is protected by the right to privacy. (shrink)

One fundamental healthcare issue brought to the fore by the current COVID-19 pandemic concerns the scope and nature of the right to healthcare. Given our increasing need for the usually limited healthcare resources, to what extent can we demand provision of these resources as a matter of right? One philosophical way of handling this issue is to clarify the nature of this right. Using the challenges of COVID-19 in the Philippines as the context of analysis, we argue (...) for the view that regards the right to healthcare as fundamentally moral in kind, which should thereby guide its legal and contractual appropriations. In particular, we respond to objections against this view stemming from issues concerning the universality and satisfiability of the right’s correlative duty. We deal with such issues by invoking the relative degree of incumbency of moral rights and the capability-relativity of positive duties. We further contend that as these factors define the scope of the moral right to healthcare, they thus constrain what we can demand as a matter of right to meet our healthcare needs in this time of the pandemic. (shrink)

Under no circumstances should the absurd "right to roam‟ be incorporated into the legislation of this country. In reality, it is clearly a mere licence to trespass. Armed with the appropriate economic and philosophical arguments, we should eventually be able to offer an effective counter-attack with a movement for the "right to own‟ privately every last one of the state-controlled commons, heaths, hills, mountains, downs, woodlands, rivers, beaches, and footpaths. As a result, there will be no imposition on (...) legitimate landowners and more access to better resources for ramblers. (shrink)

The present paper argues that a right to work, defined as social and legal guarantees to fair conditions of employment, should be an essential part of a democratic state with market arrangements. This argument proceeds along the following lines. First, I reconstruct an account of rights that defends the “correlativity” thesis of rights and duties. The basic idea is that a social member’s legitimate demand to something of value, such as gainful employment, implies duties on the part of others (...) to respect and fulfill it. These duties include the following with regard to that demand: avoiding actions that cause the harm, protecting it against standard threats, and otherwise providing aid in case it is deprived. Second, I sketch an outline of what a right to work will entail in terms of the correlative duties just described. This means that respect and fulfillment of the demand will require both social members and the democratic state alike to guarantee fair conditions of employment: first, by forbearing from actions that deprive members of access to work; and second, by protecting members against threats of deprivation and aiding them when they are so deprived. Third, I answer some ethical and empirical objections to the idea of a right to work: that it violates the legal rights of owners and employers, fails to impart self-respect, lacks economic efficiency, and erodes human capital by undermining competitive incentives. Finally, I make some concluding observations that a democratic right to work so conceived is ethically and economically superior to alternative arrangements that neither respect nor fulfill these correlative duties to avoid harm, protect against threats, and provide aid in cases of deprivation. (shrink)

In this article, I explicate Kant’s position on the wide right to abortion. That is, I explore the extent to which, according to Kant’s practical philosophy, abortion is punishable, even if it involves an unjust infringement of the right to life. By focusing on the state’s right to punish, rather than the right to life or the onset of personhood, I use Kant to expose a novel range of issues and questions about the legal status of (...) abortion (and criminal punishment more generally). The article is divided into four sections. In the first, I lay the groundwork for Kant’s theory of rights and briefly canvass some of the literature on Kantian approaches to abortion. In the second, I look at Kant’s discussion of equivocal rights. In the third, I turn to Kant’s discussions of capital punishment and suicide. In the fourth, I examine Kant on honor killings, and I use his position on infanticide in order to extrapolate and explain his ideas about the right to punish in the context of abortion. (shrink)

This paper investigates one of the central questions in the ethics of migration: is migration a matter of freedom or justice? The former claims that it is a human right, whereas the latter defends a remedial right to immigrate as a way to meet the requirements of global distributive justice. These arguments seem to enter into an intractable contradiction. On the one hand, if freedom of movement is a human right, it should not be subordinated to the (...) maximization of justice. On the other hand, in a non-ideal world an open-borders policy would be of little help in the assignment of priorities, and its redistributive effects would be suboptimal. The solution, I will argue, lies in a package of global redistributive measures. More open borders now can bring us closer to justice, and only then would immigration make sense as a human right. (shrink)

Hunger strikes are commonly repressed in prison and seen as disruptive, coercive, and violent. Hunger strikers and their advocates insist that incarcerated persons have a right to hunger strike, which protects them against repression and force-feeding. Physicians and medical ethicists generally ground this right in the right to refuse medical treatment; lawyers and legal scholars derive it from incarcerated persons’ free speech rights. Neither account adequately grounds the right to hunger strike because both misrepresent the hunger (...) strike as noncoercive and nonviolent. I articulate an alternative, dual account of the right to hunger strike. On the remedial argument, the right to hunger strike should be legally protected as a right to petition for redress, in light of incarcerated people’s structural vulnerability to abuse and given inadequate grievance mechanisms. The constructive argument derives the right to hunger strike from the right to resist oppression and stresses the normative permissibility of the use of coercive tactics to defend one’s liberty interests in the face of carceral oppression. -/- . (shrink)

This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient (...) for addressing the question whether and why there is a right to parent one’s biological child. Such a right is important because, in its absence, fairness towards adequate prospective parents who are involuntarily childless would demand a ‘babies redistribution’; moreover, in societies with entrenched histories of injustice there may be reasons of fairness for shuffling babies amongst all recent parents. I supplement the Brighouse-Swift account of fundamental parental rights by an account of how adequate parents acquire the right to parent their biological babies. I advance two arguments to this conclusion: by the time of birth, the birth parents will have already shouldered various burdens in order to bring children into existence, and are likely to have formed an intimate relationship with the future baby. Denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already formed parent-baby relationships which, I assume, are intrinsically valuable. (shrink)

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.

In this paper, I would like to argue that brain-dead small children have a natural right not to be invaded by other people even if their organs can save the lives of other suffering patients. My basic idea is that growing human beings have the right to grow in the form of wholeness, and dying human beings also have the right to die in the form of wholeness; in other words, they have the right to be (...) protected from outside invasion, unless they have declared their wish to abandon that right beforehand. I call this the principle of wholeness. Natural rights, which were discussed by Hobbes and Locke in the 17th century, have to be extended to include the right to grow and die in the form of wholeness in the age of scientific civilization, where peripheral human lives are being threatened by aggressive biomedicine and other advanced technologies. (shrink)

This paper provide the first extended discussion in the philosophical literature of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” it is argued that victims of gross violations and injustices not only have the right to know what happened, but also the right to be known—to be a giver of knowledge to (...) others about their own experiences. It is shown that such victims can suffer epistemic wrongs by being rendered invisible, vilified or demonized, or systematically distorted, and that these ways of not being known demand epistemic reparations. While there are traditional reparations that are epistemic in nature, such as memorialization and education, it is argued that there is a prior and arguably more important epistemic reparation—knowing victims of gross violations and injustices in the sense of bearing witness. The paper concludes with a sketch of an epistemological picture to underwrite this notion of epistemic reparations, one that significantly expands the traditional picture by including epistemic duties that are imperfect in nature and concern actions in addition to beliefs. (shrink)

Declaring a cosmopolitan right to scientific progress risks perpetuating many of the inequities it aims to overcome. This calls for a re-imagination of science that directly responds to science’s links to violent nationalist projects and the harms of capitalism.

In this short paper I will discuss the ambiguous and, even, controversial term ‘right to die’ in the context of the euthanasia debate and, in particular, in the case of passive euthanasia. First I will present the major objections towards the moral legitimacy of a right to die, most of which I also endorse myself; then I will investigate whether the right to die could acquire adequate moral justification in the case of passive euthanasia. In the light (...) of the Kantian tradition I will argue that since rights are understood as based upon duties, the right to die should also presuppose a corresponding duty, which to me could be either an imperfect, solidarity-related duty, or an autonomy-related one, at least as far as the unwanted prolongation of life is concerned. I will conclude with the view that the right to die could actually be considered a legitimate one in the case of passive euthanasia, when the application of life-supporting techniques is against the wishes and the best interests of the patient. (shrink)

The stakes associated with an algorithmic decision are often said to play a role in determining whether the decision engenders a right to an explanation. More specifically, “high stakes” decisions are often said to engender such a right to explanation whereas “low stakes” or “non-high” stakes decisions do not. While the overall gist of these ideas is clear enough, the details are lacking. In this paper, we aim to provide these details through a detailed investigation of what we (...) will call the “Simple Stakes Thesis”. The Simple Stakes Thesis, as it will turn out, is too simple. For even if the stakes associated with a specific one-off decision are low—and hence does not engender a right to an explanation—such decisions may nevertheless form part of a high stakes pattern or aggregate of decisions. In such cases, we argue, even a low stakes decision may engender a right to explanation. Not only does this show that the right to explanation is more demanding than so far recognized. It also shows that the stakes thesis is significantly harder to apply in practice. (shrink)

This article proposes a teleological ethical approach for the analysis of the conflict between the right to the city and the right to tourism. Unlike the understanding of this conflict through a deontological lens, which is based on universal and unconditioned moral duties, a teleological perspective allows us to observe much more underlying and intricate problems that can arise in any cultural and socio-historical context of each tourist city. By taking the teleological model of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (...) as a starting point, the article suggests the basis of a framework for an ethical understanding of the complexity of teleological conflicts that can appear in the pursuit of situated internal goods —sought cooperatively— and external goods— sought competitively— within and between social practices related to both rights. (shrink)

This article proposes a teleological ethical approach for the analysis of the conflict between the right to the city and the right to tourism. Unlike the understanding of this conflict through a deontological lens, which is based on universal and unconditioned moral duties, a teleological perspective allows us to observe much more underlying and intricate problems that can arise in any cultural and socio-historical context of each tourist city. By taking the teleological model of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (...) as a starting point, the article suggests the basis of a framework for an ethical understanding of the complexity of teleological conflicts that can appear in the pursuit of situated internal goods —sought cooperatively— and external goods —sought competitively— within and between social practices related to both rights. (shrink)

Ethical vegans and vegetarians believe that it is seriously immoral to bring into existence animals whose lives would be miserable. In this paper, I will discuss whether such a belief also leads to the conclusion that it is seriously immoral to bring human beings into existence. I will argue that vegans should abstain from having children since they believe that unnecessary suffering should be avoided. After all, humans will suffer in life, and having children is not necessary for a good (...) life. Thus vegans, and probably vegetarians as well, should not have children. I will consider several objections against this controversial claim, show why the objections fail and conclude that it would be best for ethical vegans to abstain from procreation. (shrink)

A short paper discussing the question of whether adults' interest in parenting can play a role in justifying the right to rear children.

Rainer Forst’s constructivism argues that a right to justification provides a reasonably non-rejectable foundation of justice. With an exemplary focus on his attempt to ground human rights, I argue that this right cannot provide such a foundation. To accord to others such a right is to include them in the scope of discursive respect. But it is reasonably contested whether we should accord to others equal discursive respect. It follows that Forst’s constructivism cannot ground human rights, or (...) justice, categorically. At best, it can ground them hypothetically. This opens the door wide for ethical foundations of human rights. (shrink)

While in this paper I focus on adoptees, my argument is applicable to donor-conceived children and children of misattributed paternity. I address some of the noted risks of closed adopted and the benefits of open adoption, which is more in keeping with Article 7 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which provides all children with a right to know about their genetic parents and which the Australian government ratified in 1980.

The right to food is recognized as a basic right under international human rights law. The lack of implementation of the right is a challenge for societies around the world. The failures in implementation are leading stakeholder's to strongly advance more appropriate standards vis-a-vis the right to food. The concept of food sovereignty for instance has gained importance in this regard. The concept of food sovereignty is interpreted to be larger in scope than the right (...) to food. Food sovereignty is not limited to the making "provision" of food to the beneficiaries by the state. In addition, it also mandates the empowerment of communities by the adoption of policies to secure land, food production and consumption, etc. -/- In 2010, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food recognized the wider import of the right to food based on the concept of food sovereignty. The Rapporteur emphasised on the provision of land for instance as essential to right to food. The acceptance of food sovereignty as a benchmark for state performance is one of the most notable developments in the field of economic, social and cultural rights. This chapter discusses the role of the concept of food sovereignty, and how it is shaping international and domestic policy frameworks. (shrink)

Joona Räsänen has argued that pro‐life arguments against the permissibility of infanticide are not persuasive, and fail to show it to be immoral. We responded to Räsänen’s arguments, concluding that his critique of pro‐life arguments was misplaced. Räsänen has recently replied in ‘Why pro‐life arguments still are not convincing: A reply to my critics’, providing some additional arguments as to why he does not find pro‐life arguments against infanticide convincing. Here, we respond briefly to Räsänen’s critique of the substance view, (...) and also to his most important claim: that possession of a right to life by an infant does not rule out the permissibility of infanticide. We demonstrate that this claim is unfounded, and conclude that Räsänen has not refuted pro‐life arguments against infanticide. (shrink)

Imagine a case of wrongdoing—not something trivial, but nothing so serious that adequate reparations are impossible. Imagine, further, that the wrongdoer makes those reparations and sincerely apologizes. Does she have a moral right to be forgiven? The standard view is that she does not, but this paper contends that the standard view is mistaken. It begins by showing that the arguments against a right to be forgiven are inconclusive. It ends by making two arguments in defense of that (...) right. (shrink)

Rather than to focus upon a particular ‘right to life’, we should consider what rights there are pertaining to our lives and to our living. There are different sorts. There are, for instance, rights that constitute absences of particular duties and rights that correspond to the duties of other agents or agencies. There are also natural and non-natural rights and duties. Different people in different contexts can have different moral duties and different moral rights including rights to life. The (...) question of the moral rights there are to and pertaining to life is considered with reference to James Griffin’s account of human rights. Also considered is the question of who or what can be a bearer of them. (shrink)

Within the small body of philosophical work on strikes, to participate in a strike is commonly seen as to refuse to do the job while retaining one’s claim upon it. What is the relationship, though, between liberalism and the right to strike? This is our main question.

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)