When, if ever, do we wrong ourselves? The Self-Other Symmetric answer is: when we do to ourselves what would wrong a consenting other. The standard objection, which has gone unchallenged for decades, is that Symmetry seems to imply that we wrong ourselves in too many cases—where rights are unwaivable, or “self-consent” is lacking. We argue that Symmetry not only survives these would-be counterexamples; it explains and unifies them. The key to Symmetry is not, as critics have supposed, the (...) bizarre claim that we must literally give ourselves consent if we are to avoid wronging ourselves. Instead, it is that we authorize ourselves simply by making decisions, just as we can authorize others by making decisions jointly. (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)

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese (...) claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. (shrink)

The language of rights pervades modern social and political discourse and yet there is deep disagreement amongst citizens, politicians and philosophers about just what they mean. Who has them? Who should have them? Who can claim them? What are the grounds upon which they can be claimed? How are they related to other important moral and political values such as community, virtue, autonomy, democracy and social justice? In this book, Duncan Ivison offers a unique and accessible integration of, and (...) introduction to, the history and philosophy of rights. He focuses especially on the politics of rights: the fact that rights have always been, and will remain, deeply contested. He discusses not only the historical contexts in which some of the leading philosophers of rights formed their arguments, but also the moral and logical issues they raise for thinking about the nature of rights more generally. At each step, Ivison also considers various deep criticisms of rights, including those made by communitarian, feminist, Marxist and postmodern critics. The book is aimed at students and readers coming to these issues for the first time, but also at more knowledgeable readers looking for a distinctive integration of history and theory as applied to questions about the nature of rights today. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement (...) constituted a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a genuine human right? This chapter offers a new answer: human beings have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life are certain goods, capacities, and options that human beings qua human beings need whatever else they qua individuals might need in order to pursue a characteristically good human life. This chapter explains how this Fundamental Conditions (...) Approach is better than James Griffin’s Agency Approach as well as Martha Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities Approach. It also shows how it can be compatible with the increasingly popular Political Conceptions of human rights defended by John Rawls, Charles Beitz, and Joseph Raz. (shrink)

What rights and duties do adults have with respect to raising children? Who, for example, has the right to decide how and where a particular child will live, be educated, receive health care, and spend recreational time? I argue that neither biological (gene-provider) nor..

The article presents a theory of the basis and nature of parents’ rights that appeals to the goods distinctively produced by intimate-but-authoritative relationships between adults and the children they parent. It explores the implications of that theory for questions about parents’ rights to raise their children as members of a religion, with particular attention to the issue of religious schooling. Even if not obstructing the development of their children’s capacity for autonomy, parents exceed the bounds of their legitimate (...) authority in so far as they aim deliberately to influence their children’s religious views. Healthy familial relationships involve some identification of child with parent and require a sphere of spontaneous interaction between parent and child that are in any case likely to influence those views and constitute a standing threat to autonomy. Correcting over-deferential understandings of parents’ rights enables schools better to promote not only children’s autonomy but also other legitimate civic goals. (shrink)

Right- and wrong-making features ("moral grounds") are widely believed to play important normative roles, e.g. in morally apt or virtuous motivation. This paper argues that moral grounds have been systematically misidentified. Canonical statements of our moral theories tend to summarize, rather than directly state, the full range of moral grounds posited by the theory. Further work is required to "unpack" a theory's criterion of rightness and identify the features that are of ground-level moral significance. As a result, it is not (...) actually true that maximizing value is the relevant right-making feature even for maximizing consequentialists. Focusing on the simple example of utilitarianism, I show how careful attention to the ground level can drastically influence how we think about our moral theories. (shrink)

This paper explores the connections between human rights, human dignity, and power. The idea of human dignity is omnipresent in human rights discourse, but its meaning and point is not always clear. It is standardly used in two ways, to refer to a normative status of persons that makes their treatment in terms of human rights a proper response, and a social condition of persons in which their human rights are fulfilled. This paper pursues three tasks. (...) First, it provides an analysis of the content and an interpretation of the role of the idea of human dignity in current human rights discourse. The interpretation includes a pluralist view of human interests and dignity that avoids a narrow focus on rational agency. Second, this paper characterizes the two aspects of human dignity in terms of capabilities. Certain general human capabilities are among the facts that ground status-dignity, and the presence of certain more specific capabilities constitutes condition-dignity. Finally, this paper explores how the pursuit of human rights and human dignity links to distributions and uses of power. Since capabilities are a form of power, and human rights are in part aimed at respecting and promoting capabilities, human rights involve empowerment. Exploring the connections between human rights, capabilities, and empowerment provides resources to defend controversial human rights such as the right to democratic political participation, and to respond to worries about the feasibility of their fulfillment. This paper also argues that empowerment must be coupled with solidaristic concern in order to respond to unavoidable facts of social dependency and vulnerability. (shrink)

The right to a dignified death is largely overlooked by Brazilian law. This neglect of the end-of-life process and its ramifications is the focus of this study, which aims at an exploratory survey to identify pertinent aspects requiring development to ensure a dignified end-of-life experience. In total, 50 publications were examined with online and physical surveys of works published up to March 2023. They express concerns regarding ethical dilemmas in caring for individuals nearing the end of life, yet they do (...) not delve into existing mechanisms for safeguarding end-of-life dignity or identify areas that still lack standardization to ensure effective care. This study should contribute to the enhancement of critical perspectives on the issue of end-of-life experiences, considering current safeguards, the legal boundaries set by the State, and potential future strides toward advancing studies aimed at the practical update of the Brazilian legal system. (shrink)

Mark White has developed a provocative skepticism about antitrust law. I first argue against three claims that are essential to his argument: the state may legitimately constrain or punish only conduct that violates someone’s rights, the market’s purpose is coordinating and maximizing individual autonomy, and property rights should be completely insulated from democratic deliberation. I then sketch a case that persons might have a right to a competitive market. If so, antitrust law does deal with conduct that violates (...) rights. The main thread running throughout the article is that what counts as a legitimate exercise of property rights is dynamic, sensitive to various external conditions, and is the proper object of democratic deliberation. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relationship between the principle of right and the principle of morals [Sitten] in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. My interpretation denies that the principle of right is derived from the categorical imperative, but neither does it adhere to the independence thesis. I present a third way of understanding the relationship between the law of right and the universal law of morals: the latter is needed in order to formulate the former, but it is not sufficient. (...) The principle of right is obtained by applying the categorical imperative to the concept of right. I highlight the discussion on the subject within the late eighteenth-century German natural law tradition and similar arguments found in Achenwall. (shrink)

There is significant controversy over whether patients have a ‘right not to know’ information relevant to their health. Some arguments for limiting such a right appeal to potential burdens on others that a patient’s avoidable ignorance might generate. This paper develops this argument by extending it to cases where refusal of relevant information may generate greater demands on a publicly funded healthcare system. In such cases, patients may have an ‘obligation to know’. However, we cannot infer from the fact that (...) a patient has an obligation to know that she does not also have a right not to know. The right not to know is held against medical professionals at a formal institutional level. We have reason to protect patients’ control over the information that they receive, even if in individual instances patients exercise this control in ways that violate obligations. (shrink)

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)

Chapter 1 of this book argued that moral philosophy should be based on seven principles of theory selection adapted from the sciences. Chapter 2 argued that these principles support basing normative moral philosophy on a particular problem of diachronic instrumental rationality: the ‘problem of possible future selves.’ Chapter 3 argued that a new moral principle, the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative, is the rational solution to this problem. Chapter 4 argued that the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative has three equivalent formulations akin to but superior to (...) Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Chapter 5 argued that my principle’s three formulations make it rational to adopt a Moral Original Position to derive moral principles. The present chapter derives Four Principles of Fairness from the Moral Original Position--principles of coercion minimization, mutual assistance, fair negotiation, and virtue—and unifies them into a single principle of rightness: Rightness as Fairness. Finally, this chapter argues that Rightness as Fairness entails a novel approach to applied ethics called ‘principled fair negotiation’, illustrating how the theory provides a plausible new framework for addressing applied cases including lying, suicide, trolleys, torture, distribution of scarce resources, poverty, and the ethical treatment of animals. (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)

I would argue that toleration is one of the cornerstones for a just social order in any pluralistic society. Yet, the ideal of toleration is usually thought to originate from within, and most often justified from a European historical and philosophical context. It is thought to be a response to societal conflict and the Wars of Religion in the West, which is then exported to the rest of the world, by colonialism (ironically), or globalization. The West, once again, calls upon (...) itself to teach the rest of the world how to be more ethical. I think that this not only plays into the hands of cultural and ethical relativists, but that this picture is far from accurate; it ignores rich indigenous sources for toleration that already exist and have existed in India for millennia. In this chapter, I explore three central and predominant ideas in India as providing justification for distinctly Indian forms of toleration; as well, I explore Indian forms of secularism. I examine how toleration, and indeed, more strongly, respect for difference and pluralism, emerge through three influential Indian self-understandings: the theory of anekāntavāda or non-absolutism; the concept of ātman or self; and the idea of pratītyasamutapāda or interconnectedness. In contrast to various Euro-Western legal and political ideals that may have little resonance, I think indigenous sources offer a far more promising alternative ground upon which to build an overlapping convergence on basic human rights in India. As the eminent Indian philosopher and states person Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1955), Gadamer (Pantham 1992), and James Tully (1995) contend: the purpose of such convergence is not uniformity in diversity, but rather, unity in diversity. These sources provide an antidote not only to current forms of Hindutva in India, but may have something of value from which the West can learn -- given the European Caste System which is alive and continues to thrive today. (shrink)

The human mind has been a subject matter of study in psychology, law, science, philosophy and other disciplines. By definition, its potential is power, abilities and capacities including perception, knowledge, sensation, memory, belief, imagination, emotion, mood, appetite, intention, and action (Pardo, Patterson). In terms of role, it creates and shapes societal morality, culture, peace and democracy. Today, a rapidly advancing science–technology–artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is able to reach into the inner realms of the human mind. Technology, particularly neurotechnology enables access (...) to the human mind for research, treatment and other purposes. This enabling feature is now a growing concern. In the field of human rights, this human-science–technology interface is leading to articulation of new human rights to safeguard against modern threats. The wider usage of expressions like neurolaw and mental autonomy reflects on the emerging field of standards to protect the human mind from interference, manipulation and control. Growing literature on the subject sheds light on the human-rights-based approach to the challenge. (shrink)

What is a normative reason for acting? In this paper, I introduce and defend a novel answer to this question. The starting-point is the view that reasons are right-makers. By exploring difficulties facing it, I arrive at an alternative, according to which reasons are evidence of respects in which it is right to perform an act, for example, that it keeps a promise. This is similar to the proposal that reasons for a person to act are evidence that she ought (...) to do so; however, as I explain, it differs from that proposal in two significant ways. As a result, I argue, the evidence-based account of reasons I advance shares the advantages of its predecessor while avoiding many of the difficulties facing it. (shrink)

Domestic courts are often quoting foreign case law on human rights. The conversation pursued through cross-referencing across jurisdictions has added to the globalization of international human rights standards. As the practice is gaining ground and becoming a more permanent feature of domestic judgments, its relevance needs to be examined. A closer look at the practice will bring forth a more realistic understanding of the approaches of domestic courts and the advantages which they offer to the institution. This paper (...) raises few questions on the value and influence of cross-referencing in the area of human rights. Questions in this regard can be posed as to (a) whether cross-referencing is reflective of an emerging consensus on the subject matter? (b) Is it strategic for domestic courts to quote foreign case law? (c) Is the practice of cross-referencing simply a trend or an urge to belong to a community of courts? (d) Is the practice of relevance towards the implementation and advancement of international human rights standards? The topic can shed light on broader themes including the universality of human rights, contestations/disagreements over human rights standards, and the measure of acceptability of international human rights standards within domestic settings. This paper discusses the practice, its role and influence in relation to international human rights standards. Three judgments [of the courts of Nepal, India and Singapore] addressing the human rights and homosexuality agenda have been illustrated for discussion. (shrink)

There are two basic views concerning the relationship between constitutional rights and proportionality analysis. The first maintains that there exists a necessary connection between constitutional rights and proportionality, the second argues that the question of whether constitutional rights and proportionality are connected depends on what the framers of the constitution have actually decided, that is, on positive law. The first thesis may be termed ‘necessity thesis’, the second ‘contingency thesis’. According to the necessity thesis, the legitimacy of (...) proportionality analysis is a question of the nature of constitutional rights, according to the contingency thesis, it is a question of interpretation. The article defends the necessity thesis. | A previous version of this article was published in Chinese Yearbook of Constitutional Law, Vol. 2010, 221–235. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out a new Kantian approach to resolving conflicts between moral obligations for highly autonomous machine agents. First, I argue that efforts to build explicitly moral autonomous machine agents should focus on what Kant refers to as duties of right, which are duties that everyone could accept, rather than on duties of virtue (or “ethics”), which are subject to dispute in particular cases. “Moral” machines must first be rightful machines, I argue. I then show how this (...) shift in focus from ethics to a standard of public right resolves the conflicts in what is known as the "trolley problem" for autonomous ma-chine agents. Finally, I consider how a deontic logic suitable for capturing duties of right might meet Kant’s requirement that rightfully enforceable obligations be consistent in a system of equal freedom under universal law. (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)

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.

My goal in this paper is to show that two theses that are widely adopted among Kantian ethicists are irreconcilable. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I briefly sketch the contours of my own positive view of Kantian ethics, concentrating on the issues relevant to the two theses to be discussed: I argue that agents can perform actions from but not in conformity with duty, and I argue that agents intentionally can perform actions they take to (...) be contrary to duty. In the second, I focus on Barbara Herman’s non-accidental rightness condition from “On the Value of Acting from Duty.” In the third, I focus on Christine Korsgaard’s guise of the objectively good from “Formula of Humanity.” In the fourth, I explain why the positions developed by Herman and Korsgaard are irreconcilable and I make a suggestion about how to move forward. (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)

This article introduces a new formulation of the interest theory of rights. The focus is on ‘Bentham’s test’, which was devised by Matthew Kramer to limit the expansiveness of the interest theory. According to the test, a party holds a right correlative to a duty only if that party stands to undergo a development that is typically detrimental if the duty is breached. The article shows how the entire interest theory can be reformulated in terms of the test. The (...) article then focuses on a further strength of the interest theory, brought to the fore by the new formulation. In any Western legal system, the tortious maltreatment of a child or a mentally disabled individual results in a compensatory duty. The interest theory can account for such duties in a simple and elegant way. The will theory, on the other hand, struggles to explain such compensatory duties unless it abandons some of its main tenets. (shrink)

Human rights have a rich life in the world around us. Political rhetoric pays tribute to them, or scorns them. Citizens and activists strive for them. The law enshrines them. And they live inside us too. For many of us, human rights form part of how we understand the world and what must (or must not) be done within it. -/- The ubiquity of human rights raises questions for the philosopher. If we want to understand these (...) class='Hi'>rights, where do we look? As a set of moral norms, it is tempting to think they can be grasped strictly from the armchair, say, by appeal to moral intuition. But what, if anything, can that kind of inquiry tell us about the human rights of contemporary politics, law, and civil society — that is, human rights as we ordinarily know them? -/- This volume brings together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars to address philosophical questions raised by the many facets of human rights: moral, legal, political, and historical. Its original chapters, each accompanied by a critical commentary, explore topics including: the purpose and methods of a philosophical theory of human rights; the "Orthodox-Political" debate; the relevance of history to philosophy; the relationship between human rights morality and law; and the value of political critiques of human rights. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to continue the discussion on Europe’s converging criminal justice systems. In particular, I test a hypothesis that has recently appeared in the literature, which sees the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights as one of the most significant factors that encourage a harmonization process between the adversarial and inquisitorial criminal justice systems of Europe. This claim is supported by examining the Court’s jurisprudence to identify decisions that led to legislative and policy (...) amendments in the domestic legal orders of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe. This account shows how an interplay currently taking place between judicial, policy, and statutory powers is marking the end of the adversarial-inquisitorial era. Finally, the conclusion identifies the three most important impediments that are likely to hamper this harmonization process. (shrink)

I argue that the right to sexual satisfaction of severely physically and mentally disabled people and elderly people who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases can be fulfilled by deploying sex robots; this would enable us to satisfy the sexual needs of many who cannot provide for their own sexual satisfaction; without at the same time violating anybody’s right to sexual self-determination. I don’t offer a full-blown moral justification of deploying sex robots in such cases, as not all morally relevant concerns can (...) be addressed here; rather, I put forward a plausible way of fulfilling acute sexual needs without thereby violating anybody’s sexual rights. (shrink)

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

This chapter is devoted to the discussion of religious freedom and the anti-racist fight in the Black Diaspora in Latin America, considering the historical processes that involve such discussion, including legal apparatus such as Human Rights and local legislation. Therefore, as a starting point, we take the historical conditions of the emergence of Candomblé in Brazil, that are linked to the trafficking of enslaved African peoples and their resistance to keep alive in their memories, their religious beliefs and their (...) worldviews. Wherefore, it is a discussion in which religious freedom is not dissociated from the anti-racist struggle in the case of Brazil, where, in the 20th century, the myth of racial democracy is produced in the light of studies carried out by Gilberto Freyre in the midst of the 1922 post-week modernist movement. (shrink)

According to a popular view, privacy is a function of people not knowing or rationally believing some fact about you. But intuitively it seems possible for a perpetrator to violate your right to privacy without learning any facts about you. For example, it seems plausible to say that the US National Security Agency’s PRISM program violated, or could have violated, the privacy rights of the people whose information was collected, despite the fact that the NSA, for the most part, (...) merely collected information without examining it, and thus, for the most part, did not acquire knowledge about specific people. This pair of judgements creates the challenge of aligning one of the most popular accounts of what privacy is with a suitable account of the right to privacy. Call this the alignment challenge. -/- In this paper, I criticize two recent attempts to answer the alignment challenge: one based on risk, proposed by Björn Lundgren, and one based on modal robustness, proposed by Carissa Véliz. I then offer my preferred response, which I call the inquiry account. According to this account, the right to privacy protects against certain forms of inquiry. This account explains why there is a gap between what privacy is a what the right to privacy protects people against. Moreover, it explains why it is possible to violate someone’s right to privacy without obtaining knowledge. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is on conflicts of values and rival options in public decision-making, ethics and justice that seem to require us to balance the values or options against each other. The aim is to investigate implications of the so-called fourth value relation between competing valuable options for the possibility to weigh and balance them. The fourth value relation applies to many alternatives that represent important but conflicting or incompletely compatible human values. In this essay I will try (...) to show that in those cases it is implausible that relative weights and right balances can be determined or that they exist at all. The fourth value relation has significant implications for the resolution of the relevant value conflicts because it renders the answer to the question ‘what’s the right thing to do?’ indeterminate as far as this answer depends on comparative weights of the alternatives. (shrink)

Bringing a unique perspective to the burgeoning ethical and legal issues surrounding the presence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, the book uses theory and practice on animal rights and the rights of nature to assess the status of robots. -/- Through extensive philosophical and legal analyses, the book explores how rights can be applied to nonhuman entities. This task is completed by developing a framework useful for determining the kinds of personhood for which a nonhuman (...) entity might be eligible, and a critical environmental ethic that extends moral and legal consideration to nonhumans. The framework and ethic are then applied to two hypothetical situations involving real-world technology—animal-like robot companions and humanoid sex robots. Additionally, the book approaches the subject from multiple perspectives, providing a comparative study of legal cases on animal rights and the rights of nature from around the world and insights from structured interviews with leading experts in the field of robotics. Ending with a call to rethink the concept of rights in the Anthropocene, suggestions for further research are made. -/- An essential read for scholars and students interested in robot, animal and environmental law, as well as those interested in technology more generally, the book is a ground-breaking study of an increasingly relevant topic, as robots become ubiquitous in modern society. (shrink)

This book argues that moral philosophy should be based on seven scientific principles of theory selection. It then argues that a new moral theory—Rightness as Fairness—satisfies those principles more successfully than existing theories. Chapter 1 explicates the seven principles of theory-selection, arguing that moral philosophy must conform to them to be truth-apt. Chapter 2 argues those principles jointly support founding moral philosophy in known facts of empirical moral psychology: specifically, our capacities for mental time-travel and modal imagination. Chapter 2 then (...) shows that these capacities present human decisionmakers with a problem of diachronic rationality that includes but generalizes beyond, L.A. Paul’s problem of transformative experience: a problem that I call “the problem of possible future selves.” Chapter 3 then argues that a new principle of rationality—the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative—is the only rational solution to this problem, as it requires our present and future selves to forge and uphold a recursive, bi-directional contract with each another given mutual recognition of the problem. Chapter 4 then shows that the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative has three identical formulations analogous but superior to Immanuel Kant’s various formulations of his ‘categorical imperative.’ Chapter 5 shows that these unified formulas jointly entail a particular test of moral principles: a Moral Original Position similar to John Rawls’ famous ‘original position’, but which avoids a variety of problems with Rawls' model. Chapter 6 then shows that the Moral Original Position generates Four Principles of Fairness, which can then be combined into a single principle of moral rightness: Rightness as Fairness. This new conception of rightness is shown to reconcile four dominant moral frameworks (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and contractualism), as well as entail a new method of moral decisionmaking for applied ethics: a method of “principled fair negotiation” according to which applied ethical issues cannot be wholly resolved through principled debate, but must instead be resolved by actual negotiation and compromise. This method is then argued to generate novel, nuanced analyses of a variety of applied moral issues, including trolley cases, torture, and the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. Chapter 7 then shows that Rightness as Fairness reconciles three leading political frameworks—libertarianism, egalitarianism, and communitarianism—showing how all three embody legitimate moral ideals that can, and should, be fairly negotiated against each other to settle the scope, and nature, of domestic, international, and global justice on an ongoing, iterated basis. Finally, Chapter 8 argues that Rightness as Fairness satisfies all seven of the principles of theory-selected defended in Chapter 1 more successfully than rival theories. (shrink)

Awarding rights to rivers, forests, and other environmental entities (EEs) is a new and increasingly popular approach to environmental protection. The distinctive feature of such rights of nature (RoN) legislation is that direct duties are owed to the EEs. This paper presents a novel rebuttal of the strongest argument against RoN: the no interest argument. The crux of this argument is that because EEs are not sentient, they cannot possess the kinds of interests necessary to ground direct duties. (...) Therefore, they cannot be legitimate rights-bearers. After considering and rejecting standard responses to this argument, the paper challenges its fundamental assumption: that rights-correlative duties must be grounded in the interests of the rights-bearer. The paper then presents the RoN critic with a dilemma. The critic must either accept that EEs are legitimate rights-bearers, or delegitimise many well-established rights-bearers along with EEs. Either way, the no interest argument loses its force. (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)

I argue that all rights exist by convention. According to my definition, a right exists by convention just in case its justification appeals to the rules of a socially shared pattern of acting. I show that our usual justifications for rights are circular, that a right fulfills my criterion if all possible justifications for it are circular, and that all existing philosophical justifications for rights are circular or fail. We find three non-circular alternatives in the literature, viz. (...) justifications of rights by consequences, by autonomy or by divine commands. I show that all three alternatives fail, and I conclude that all rights exist by convention. This ontological result has a surprising and beneficial consequence. A common argument against conventionalism is that it implies cultural relativism. I finish by showing that the suggested conventionalism is incompatible with cultural relativism. (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)

According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no "moral equality of combatants." That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war - but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large number of wars (and in practically all modern wars) where the combatants on the justified side violate the (...) rights of innocent people ("collateral damage"), these combatants are in fact liable to attack by the combatants on the unjustified side. I will support this view with a rights-based account of liability to attack and then defend it against a number of objections raised in particular by Jeff McMahan. The result is that the thesis of the moral equality of combatants holds good for a large range of armed conflicts while the opposing thesis is of very limited practical relevance. (shrink)

The rightness and wrongness of actions fits on a continuous scale. This fits the way we evaluate actions chosen among a diverse range of options, even though English speakers don’t use the words “righter” and “wronger”. I outline and defend a version of scalar consequentialism, according to which rightness is a matter of degree, determined by how good the consequences are. Linguistic resources are available to let us truly describe actions simply as right. Some deontological theories face problems in accounting (...) for degrees of rightness, as they don't invoke continuous parameters among the right-making features of action. (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)

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)

Twentieth century philosophers introduced the distinction between “objective rightness” and “subjective rightness” to achieve two primary goals. The first goal is to reduce the paradoxical tension between our judgments of (i) what is best for an agent to do in light of the actual circumstances in which she acts and (ii) what is wisest for her to do in light of her mistaken or uncertain beliefs about her circumstances. The second goal is to provide moral guidance to an agent who (...) may be uncertain about the circumstances in which she acts, and hence is unable to use her standard moral principle directly in deciding what to do. This paper distinguishes two important senses of “moral guidance”; proposes criteria of adequacy for accounts of subjective rightness; canvasses existing definitions for “subjective rightness”; finds them all deficient; and proposes a new and more successful account. It argues that each comprehensive moral theory must include multiple principles of subjective rightness to address the epistemic situations of the full range of moral decision-makers, and shows that accounts of subjective rightness formulated in terms of what it would reasonable for the agent to believe cannot provide that guidance. -/- . (shrink)

This article discusses the rights enjoyed by irregular combatants in detention, that is, members of organized groups (who may be fighting an insurgency or engaging in terror attacks) who fail to qualify for POW status. The paradigmatic example of such a detainee would be an al-Qaeda agent.

This article addresses the so-called to human rights. Focusing specifically on the work of Onora O'Neill, the article challenges two important aspects of her version of this objection. First: its narrowness. O'Neill understands the claimability of a right to depend on the identification of its duty-bearers. But there is good reason to think that the claimability of a right depends on more than just that, which makes abstract (and not welfare) rights the most natural target of her objection (...) (section II). After examining whether we might address this reformulated version of O'Neill's objection by appealing to the specificity afforded to human rights in international, regional and domestic law (in section III), the article challenges a second important feature of that objection by raising doubts about whether claimability is a necessary feature of rights at all (section IV). Finally, the article reflects more generally on the role of abstraction in the theory and practice of human rights (section V). In sum, by allaying claimability-based concerns about abstract rights, and by illustrating some of the positive functions of abstraction in rights discourse, the article hopes to show that abstract rights are not only theoretically coherent but also useful and important. (shrink)

Reportedly ever since Pythagoras, but possibly much earlier, humans have been concerned about the way non human animals (henceforward “animals” for convenience) should be treated. By late antiquity all main traditions with regard to this issue had already been established and consolidated, and were only slightly modified during the centuries that followed. Until the nineteenth century philosophers tended to focus primarily on the ontological status of animals, to wit on whether – and to what degree – animals are actually rational (...) beings; accordingly they allowed – or denied – them some kind of moral standing. This modus operandi was for the first time seriously questioned by Jeremy Bentham, who put the issue on a different track. If the question, as Bentham suggested, is not if animals can think or speak, but if they can suffer1, then it seems plausible that moral agents ought to abstain from inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals; in other words, humans might have at least one – even limited – moral duty towards animals. And if this, in turn, is true, then animals should arguably be allowed the commensurate moral right, namely the right not to be inflicted unnecessary pain. Then, if animals possess this right, they could probably possess others, as well. This is how grosso modo the issue of animal rights became a pivotal part of the discussion concerning animal ethics. Bentham himself, of course, wouldn’t have gone that far; to him even the idea of human rights sounded like “simple… rhetorical nonsense upon stilts”.2 It was mostly due to his views, however, that the debate was moved from the way things actually are to the way things should ideally be – thus merging into what, in my view, should always have been: one primarily concerning ethics. (shrink)

Kant limits cosmopolitan right to a universal right of hospitality, condemning European imperial practices towards indigenous peoples, while allowing a right to visit foreign countries for the purpose of offering to engage in commerce. I argue that attempts by contemporary theorists such as Jeremy Waldron to expand and update Kant’s juridical category of cosmopolitan right would blunt or erase Kant’s own anti-colonial doctrine. Waldron’s use of Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right to criticize contemporary identity politics relies on premises that upset (...) Kant’s balanced right to hospitality. An over-extensive right to visit can invoke “Kantian” principles that Kant himself could not have consistently held, without weakening his condemnation of European settlement. I construct an alternative spirit of cosmopolitan right more favorable to the contemporary claims of indigenous peoples. Kant’s analysis suggests there are circumstances when indigenous peoples may choose whether to engage in extensive cultural interaction, and reasonably refuse the risks of subjecting their claims to debate in democratic politics in a unitary public. Cosmopolitan right accorded respect to peoples; any “domestic” adaptation of cosmopolitan right should respect indigenous peoples as peoples, absent a serious public explanation by a democratic state for why it has now become appropriate to treat indigenous peoples merely as individual citizens. (shrink)