Hypothetical contractarianism and the disclosure requirement problem in informed consent

Two of the more deeply problematic issues surrounding the doctrine of informed consent are providing a justification for the practice of informed consent and providing an account of the nature and amount of information that must be disclosed in order for informed consent to take place. This paper is concerned with the latter problem, the problem of disclosure requirements, but it deals with this problem in a novel way; it approaches the problem by asking what fully informed and fully rational agents would agree to under certain hypothetical conditions. In general terms I juxtapose the hypothetical contractarianism found in Rawls' A Theory of Justice with that found in Gauthier's Morals By Agreement and ask what their respective hypothetical contractors would agree to with respect to choosing a particular standard of disclosure to govern the practice of informed consent. In more specific terms a contrast is made between what a Rawlsian agent behind a veil of ignorance would choose as compared to what, in Gauthier's terms, an ideal actor making an Archimedean choice would choose. The idea of an Archimedean point, and the subsequent choice made from that point, although technically identified by Rawls, originated with Archimedes of Syracuse.     

Libertarianism,Climate Change,and Individual Responsibility

Much has been written about climate change from an ethical view in general, but less has been written about it from a libertarian point of view in particular. In this paper, I apply the libertarian moral theory to the problem of climate change. I focus on libertarianism’s implications for our individual emissions. I argue that (i) even if our individual emissions cause no harm to others, these emissions cross other people’s boundaries, (ii) although the boundary-crossings that are due to our ‘subsistence emissions’ are implicitly consented to by others, there is no such consent to our ‘non-subsistence emissions’, and (iii) there is no independent justification for these emissions. Although offsetting would provide such a justification, most emitters do not offset their non-subsistence emissions. Therefore, these emissions violate people’s rights, which means that they are impermissible according to libertarianism’s non-aggression principle.

     

E-sports are Not Sports

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it in order to join the Olympic club. The justification for the definition lies in the conceptual analysis offered—an ‘exhibition-analysis’ which clarifies the concept of sport by offering ‘construals’ of the six first-level terms. The conclusion is that e-sports are not sports because they are inadequately ‘human’; they lack direct physicality; they fail to employ decisive whole-body control and whole-body skills, and cannot contribute to the development of the whole human; and because their patterns of creation, production, ownership and promotion place serious constraints on the emergence of the kind of stable and persisting institutions characteristic of sports governance. Competitive computer games do not qualify as sports, no matter what ‘resemblances’ may be claimed. Computer games are just that—games.     

What is terrorism and can psychology do anything to prevent it?

Terrorism has a long history, which continues to unfold, and takes many forms. Notwithstanding these facts, there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. I set forth the definitional issues that underlie the current debate about terrorism. By comparing terrorism with various forms of violence, I argue that it is plausible to construe terrorism as crime and, in support of this, I demonstrate why terrorism cannot be morally justified. Next, I cluster various immediate and long-term approaches intended to prevent terrorism, highlighting psychologically based strategies, such as behavioral profiling, teaching tolerance and citizenship, modifying media images of terrorism, and building peace. In order to understand and respond more effectively to 21st-century terrorism, I advocate adoption of a multidisciplinary, contextually sensitive approach.     

The Morality of Terrorism

In this paper (a sequel to ‘What Is Terrorism?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 7 [ 1990]) I discuss both consequentialist and deontological justifications of terrorism. In the consequentialist context, I look in particular into Leon Trotsky’s classic defence of the ‘red terror’, based on the argument of continuity of war, revolution, and terrorism, and the claim that the distinction between the guilty and the innocent, combatants and noncombatants, is not relevant to modern warfare. On the deontological side, I discuss Virginia Held’s recent attempt at justifying terrorism in terms of basic human rights and distributive justice. The conclusion reached is that terrorism remains almost absolutely morally impermissible.     

Towards a critique of the moral foundations of intellectual property rights1

Research in recent history has neglected to address the moral foundations of particular kinds of public policy such as the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs). On the one hand, nation-states have enforced a tightening of the IPR system. On the other, only recently have national government and international institutions recognised that the moral justification for stronger IPRs protection is far from being plausible and cannot be taken for granted. In this article, IPRs are examined as individual rights founded upon natural law, personality development, just reward and social utility. It is argued that these foundations cannot be philosophically sustained. IPRs constitute morally indefensible political developments which aim to reproduce the capitalist division of knowledge and labour at national, international and global levels. The need for such a critical approach to the moral foundations of IPRs has increased in importance as a consequence of their role in justifying corporate power, globalisation policies and harmonisation of such.     

Customary Trade and the Complications of Consent

Global justice theorists have given much attention to corporations' purchases of state‐owned natural resources controlled by dictators. These resources, the common argument goes, belong to the people rather than to those who exercise effective political power. Dictators who rely on violence to secure their political power and who sell state‐owned natural resources without authorisation from their people, or from their people's elected delegates, are therefore violating their peoples' property rights. But many dictatorships also distribute natural resource revenue to the population, and stopping to purchase natural resources from them is therefore likely to produce relative deprivation for the people, even while increasing the chances of the people gaining control over their property. Given these circumstances, can corporations buying the people's natural resources from a distributive dictatorship appeal to the people's consent as justification for such purchases? I consider this question by inspecting three types of consent to which resource corporations might appeal. I show that, under the circumstances of natural resource trade with distributive dictatorships, none of these types of consent can obtain. Hence, resource corporations cannot appeal to popular consent to defend their transactions with distributive dictatorships.     

RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS: SELFISHNESS IS NOT ENOUGH

Abstract. I agree with George Williams's most significant point: both questions and answers about our moral natures lie in our biological origins. He fails, however, to show that nature is morally evil and that therefore we should vigilantly resist it. The products of evolution are morally neutral, but the human moral sense is arguably a positive good. Morality is functional. It does not require ultimate justification in the sense of correspondence with or attack upon reality "out there." It is an adaptation "intended" to make us social, and sociality—with its sense of right and wrong—makes us fitter than otherwise     

Primoratz on Terrorism

ABSTRACT In ‘What is Terrorism?’ Igor Primoratz defines terrorism as “the deliberate use of violence, or the threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them, or other people, into a course of action they would not otherwise take”. In this article I argue that Primoratz is wrong (a) to posit a necessary connection between terrorism and terror or intimidation, (b) to argue that terrorism is directed solely against people, and not, for example, property, and (c) to argue that the targets of terrorism proper are ‘the innocent’.     

Shared intentions,public reason,and political autonomy

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.     

Emotional Justification

Theories of emotional justification investigate the conditions under which emotions are epistemically justified or unjustified. I make three contributions to this research program. First, I show that we can generalize some familiar epistemological concepts and distinctions to emotional experiences. Second, I use these concepts and distinctions to display the limits of the ‘simple view’ of emotional justification. On this approach, the justification of emotions stems only from the contents of the mental states they are based on, also known as their cognitive bases. The simple view faces the ‘gap problem’: If cognitive bases and emotions (re)present their objects and properties in different ways, then cognitive bases are not sufficient to justify emotions. Third, I offer a novel solution to the gap problem based on emotional dispositions. This solution (1) draws a line between the justification of basic and non‐basic emotions, (2) preserves a broadly cognitivist view of emotions, (3) avoids a form of value skepticism that threatens inferentialist views of emotional justification, and (4) sheds new light on the structure of our epistemic access to evaluative properties.     

Praise,blame, and demandingness

Consequentialism has been challenged on the grounds that it is too demanding. I will respond to the problem of demandingness differently from previous accounts. In the first part of the paper, I argue that consequentialism requires us to distinguish the justification of an act \(\varphi\) from the justification of an act \(\psi\), where \(\psi\) is an act of praise or blame. In the second part of the paper, I confront the problem of demandingness. I do not attempt to rule out the objection; instead, I argue that if certain plausible empirical claims about moral motivation are true, we morally ought not to blame people for failing to meet certain very demanding obligations. With this theory, we create a space in consequentialism for intuitions questioning the plausibility of demanding obligations. I conclude the paper by showing that separate justifications for \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) may also give us a theoretical niche for intuitions about supererogation.     

The value of practical usefulness

Some moral theories, such as objective forms of consequentialism, seem to fail to be practically useful: they are of little to no help in trying to decide what to do. Even if we do not think this constitutes a fatal flaw in such theories, we may nonetheless agree that being practically useful does make a moral theory a better theory, or so some have suggested. In this paper, I assess whether the uncontroversial respect in which a moral theory can be claimed to be better if it is practically useful can provide a ground worth taking into account for believing one theory rather than another. I argue that this is not the case. The upshot is that if there is a sound objection to theories such as objective consequentialism that is based on considerations of practical usefulness, the objection requires that it is established that the truth about what we morally ought to do cannot be epistemically inaccessible to us. The value of practical usefulness has no bearing on the issue.     

Rationality and moral autonomy: An essay in moral psychology

Although there are many variations on the theme, so much is made of the good of moral autonomy that it is difficult not to suppose that there is everything to be said for being morally autonomous and nothing at all to be said for being morally nonautonomous. However, this view of moral autonomy cannot be made to square with the well-received fact that most people are morally nonautonomous — not, at any rate, unless one is prepared to maintain that most people are irrational in this respect. I am not. Thus, I reject what I take to be the prevailing view of moral autonomy. I argue that it is false that (1) moral autonomy is such that it is rational for every person to prefer being morally autonomous to being morally nonautonomous, but true that (2) moral autonomy is such that if anyone is morally autonomous, then it is rational for him to prefer being morally autonomous to being morally nonautonomous.     

Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience

In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law and engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political obligation—the Samaritan duty. Christopher H. Wellman has recently offered a ‘Samaritan account’ of state legitimacy and political obligation, according to which the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order to rescue all from the perilous circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is bound to obey the law, as the state demands, because we each have a responsibility to help rescue others when this assistance is not unreasonably costly. Though Wellman recognizes that there can be reasons for disobeying the law and resisting injustice in otherwise legitimate states, he overlooks the possibility that at least some of these reasons could be Samaritan in nature, grounded in the duty to rescue people from peril. As I shall argue, the Samaritan duty supports obligations to disobey the law, when the law prohibits Samaritan rescues, and to engage in civil disobedience, when unjust laws and practices contribute to endangering people. The discussion proceeds as follows. After a brief overview of the Samaritan duty, I articulate my case for Samaritan duties to disobey the law, and duties to engage in civil disobedience when unjust laws, institutions, or practices enable what I call ‘persistent Samaritan perils’. I then examine and respond to several objections to my account: first, that the costs of law-breaking are unreasonable, and thus cannot be morally required; second, that individuals’ particular acts of protest and civil disobedience do not appear to make any difference to the rescue, and thus cannot be required; third, that I stretch the Samaritan duty beyond recognition; and fourth, that the Samaritan duty binds us to help people in need or peril anywhere, not particularly at home. I consider in conclusion the advantages and limits of my account of citizens’ Samaritan duties in the face of injustice.     

Multiculturalism and Equal Treatment: Scope and Limits of the Uniform Treatment Approach

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the scope and limits of Brian Barry’s uniform treatment approach to cultural differences through a critical assessment of its two main arguments. The first maintains that under a regime of institutions serving legitimate public purposes, equal opportunity is an objective state of affairs, and religious or cultural maladjustments to laws and public policies are morally irrelevant to the issue of equal opportunity. The other maintains that unlike physical disabilities, religious and cultural affiliations are the result not of morally arbitrary factors over which one has no control but of life choices for which people must assume responsibility. To the first argument, I respond that equal opportunity is best viewed as an interactive phenomenon encompassing subjective and objective components and that a deliberative approach to cultural claims is more likely than Barry’s uniform approach does to grant religious and cultural minorities equal opportunities and equal treatment. To the second argument, I respond that, even if they arise out of the life choices made by people, religious conducts and cultural practices deserve to be accommodated through law exemption because it is sometimes the only way our liberal democracies can show respect for citizens as ethical subjects.     

How you can help,without making a difference

There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and motivating the typical responses to it is a standard, intuitive assumption. The assumption is that if an act will not make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a significant, non-superfluous role in bringing that outcome about. In other words, helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference. I argue that the key to solving the problem is to reject this assumption. I develop an account of what it is to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require making a difference, and I use this explain our reasons for action in the problem cases. This account also yields an error theory that explains why the standard assumption is so tempting, even though it is mistaken.     

Extending Kindness: A Confucian Account

The Confucian philosopher Mengzi believes that ‘extending’ one's kindness facilitates one's moral development and that it is intimately tied to performing morally good actions. Most interpreters have taken Mengzian kindness to be an emotional state, with the extension of kindness to centrally involve feeling kindness towards more people or in a greater number of situations. I argue that kindness cannot do all the theoretical work that Mengzi wants it to do if it is interpreted as an emotion. I submit that Mengzi's notion of extending kindness is best understood as the exercise of a capacity for intelligently performing kind actions.     

The Linguistic Territoriality Principle — A Critique

In this essay, I develop a critique of the linguistic territoriality principle, which states that, for reasons related to the value of language identity, language groups should be territorially accommodated. While I acknowledge the desirability of implementing a linguistic territoriality principle in some specific cases, I claim that this principle is in general inappropriate for the ‘post‐Westphalian’ linguistic world in which we live. I identify, analyze and reject two distinct justifications for the linguistic territoriality principle: the Linguistic Context justification and the Language Survival justification. Finally, I argue for different means of giving political recognition to the fact that most people value their language as an importance source of identity. This alternative theory sets out to officially recognize multiple languages in a given territory.     

Telling Others to Do What You Believe Is Morally Wrong: The Case of Confucius and Zai Wo

Can it ever be morally justifiable to tell others to do what we ourselves believe is morally wrong to do? The common sense answer is no. It seems that we should never tell others to do something if we think it is morally wrong to do that act. My first goal is to argue that in Analects 17.21, Confucius tells his disciple not to observe a ritual even though Confucius himself believes that it is morally wrong that one does not observe the ritual. My second goal is to argue against the common sense answer and explain how Confucius can be justified in telling his disciple to do what Confucius thought was wrong. The first justification has to do with telling someone to do what is second best when the person cannot do what is morally best. The second justification has to do with the role of a moral advisor.