Children’s rights and the non-identity problem

Abstract

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: (1) the identifiability objection; (2) the non-existence objection; (3) the waiving of rights objection, (4) the lack of legitimate complaint objection; and (5) the unfairness objection.     

More lives, better lives

Although many people believe that more people would be better, arguments intended to show this are unconvincing. I consider one of Parfit's arguments for a related conclusion, that even when both are worth living, we ought to prefer the better of two lives. Were this argument successful, or so I claim, then it would follow that more people would be better. But there aren't reasons for preferring the better of two lives. Nor is an attempted rejoinder effective. We can agree that there aren't reasons for preferring the better of two lives, and yet still maintain there are reasons for improving lives.     

国际关系的伦理审视

探讨国际关系伦理,明确战争的正义性和非正义性,以避免战争,尽量减少战争带来的伤亡,维护世界和平;各国要相互尊重,平等地开展国际合作,共同发展,实现世界的共同繁荣;南北国家要加强交流与合作,寻求最佳的结合点,共同致力于全球的可持续发展;最后,各国必须以伦理道德为依托来解决国际人权问题,必须承认人权的普遍性和多样性,确立一个同纷繁复杂的文化多样性相协调的普遍的最低道德标准。     

Global Economy,Justice and Sustainability

Although this paper attends to some extent to the question whether the global economy promotes or impedes either justice or sustainability, its main focus is on the relationship between justice and sustainability. Whilst sustainability itself as a normative goal is about sustaining inter alia justice, justice itself requires intergenerationally the sustaining of the conditions of a good life for all. At the heart of this is a conception of justice as realising the basic rights of all–in contrast to a more demanding distributive principle or a less demanding principle of not violating the liberty rights or other basic rights of others. Although Pogge’s analysis that the global economy causes harm by failing to realise basic rights is seen as a useful challenge to common libertarian assumptions, the acceptance of other positive correlative duties, following Shue, is advocated. Insofar as the global economy fails to realise basic justice, the question is ‘how far can it realistically be changed?’ and this is a function partly of the moral attitudes of individuals at large.     

Non-identity, self-defeat, and attitudes to future children

Although most people believe that it is morally wrong to intentionally create children who have an impairment, it is widely held that we cannot criticize such procreative choices unless we find a solution to Parfit’s non-identity problem. I argue that we can. Jonathan Glover has recently argued that, in certain circumstances, such choices would be self-defeating even if morally permissible. I argue that although the scope of Glover’s argument is too limited, it nevertheless directs attention to a moral defect in the attitudes that could motivate such procreative choices, attitudes that, properly characterized, turn out to be person-affecting in character. I conclude by arguing that prospective parents who want to create a child with an impairment face a dilemma. If they want to avoid the charge that their aim is morally defective, they must deny that the desired impairment is harmful. But this would commit them to endorsing the controversial claim that it is morally permissible or even required to turn normal children into impaired ones.

Generation Units and the Student Protest Movement in the United States: An Intra- and Intergenerational Analysis

The American student protest movement provides exceptional opportunities to observe how formative political experiences can affect intragenerational cleavages over the adult life span and how they may reflect on intergenerational continuities. Long-term national panel data from the high school class of 1965 and data from their parents and offspring are used here to exploit these opportunities. The results show that a sharp rift in political participation and attitudes emerged between protesters and non-protesters during the protest era, a rift that persists into mid-life and one that testifies to the conceptual utility of generation units. Continuities across the three lineage generations are demonstrated by the moderate similarities in the ideological and participative orientations that are associated with the protest status of the student generation.     

Sea for the landlocked: a sustainable development goal?

Outside Europe landlocked states are poor: 16 are extremely poor and another 16 very poor. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise their lack of sea-access as a major cause of their reduced chances of escaping poverty and reaching the stated goals. This paper proposes including corridors to the sea and other forms of sea-access among the SDGs. It also discusses objections to doing so that appeal to the rejection of global egalitarian arguments, to the possibility of compensating those countries for their disadvantage rather than removing it, and to the territorial rights of the coastal countries. The paper concludes that none of these objections to the corridors, and a fortiori to the less ambitious remedies of the Almaty and Vienna Programmes, withstands scrutiny.     

Global Justice for Humans or for all Living beings and what Difference it Makes

I begin with an account of what is deserved in human ethics, an ethics that assumes without argument that only humans, or rational agents, count morally. I then take up the question of whether nonhuman living beings are also deserving and answer it in the affirmative. Having established that all individual living beings, as well as ecosystems, are deserving, I go on to establish what it is that they deserve and then compare the requirements of global justice when only humans are taken into account with the requirements of global justice when all living beings are taken into account.     

Causes,Counterfactuals, and Non-Locality

In order to motivate the thesis that there is no single concept of causation that can do justice to all of our core intuitions concerning that concept, Ned Hall has argued that there is a conflict between a counterfactual criterion of causation and the condition of causal locality. In this paper I critically examine Hall's argument within the context of a more general discussion of the role of locality constraints in a causal conception of the world. I present two strategies that defenders of counterfactual accounts of causation can pursue to respond to Hall's challenge—including the adoption of a counterfactual condition that is sufficient for causal action-at-a-distance in place of Hall's ‘process’ condition—and conclude that Hall's argument against counterfactual accounts of causation is unsuccessful.     

Human dignity – the foundation of political human rights? Empirical research among youth in Germany

This article focuses on political human rights and on the empirically assessed legitimation of these rights. This research considers the rights of refugees, the active and passive right to vote, and the right of protest. Given that the research is empirical research, respondents are requested to express agreement, disagreement or neutrality. The assumption is that contextual factors influence people’s assessment of rights. One contextual factor is, firstly, the concept of human dignity. International human rights covenants regard human dignity as the very foundation of all rights. That said, the concept of human dignity is subject to different understandings and – certainly in the past – the understanding of what constitutes human dignity has varied. Dignity can be related to the appreciation of the person given by others, to the moral behaviour of a person, and it can be understood as inherently related to the individual as a human being. It is this last understanding that forms the basis of modern declarations of human rights. Furthermore, the respondents’ value orientations and religious beliefs, along with society’s socio-political perception, will be examined to ascertain whether these factors have any influence on respondents’ attitudes towards political rights. The key question is: does human dignity influence people’s view of the legitimacy of political rights and do other factors also count? The empirical analysis was undertaken done with German youth (N=2244). Findings show that the concept of inherent human dignity is a strong predictor for respondents’ attitudes towards political rights, but that it is not the unique predictor; relevant concepts are the value orientation of youth and their socio-political orientation. The significance of religious beliefs as a predictor is low.     

Beyond the 'Awkward Embrace': DisabilityRights, Dialogue and 'Law, Loveand Language' Revisited

Despite the perceived 'human rights revolution' within Church teaching since Vatican II, a measure of dissonance survives between secular rights theory and practice on the one hand and, on the other, ethical thinking informed by the natural law tradition. This article examines some recent developments in that secular theory and practice for signs of possible rapprochement. In particular, it considers the way in which the emergence of 'disability' as a rights issue, for example in the recently ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, has contributed to the transformation of equality and human rights law and so has helped shape a broader transformation of rights theory and practice. Central to that transformation has been the ambition of establishing human rights as the basis of a progressive political programme, as witnessed for example by the work of Sandra Fredman and by the Hamlyn Lectures of Conor Gearty, whose Catholic provenance makes his approach especially salient. The article concludes by considering Herbert McCabe's interpretation of Aquinas' ethics, especially in his Law, Love and Language , and proposes some potentially fruitful points of contact between McCabe's approach and the identified developments in secular rights theory.     

Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information

Abstract: The philosophy of information (PI) is a new area of research with its own field of investigation and methodology. This article, based on the Herbert A. Simon Lecture of Computing and Philosophy I gave at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, analyses the eighteen principal open problems in PI. Section 1 introduces the analysis by outlining Herbert Simon's approach to PI. Section 2 discusses some methodological considerations about what counts as a good philosophical problem. The discussion centers on Hilbert's famous analysis of the central problems in mathematics. The rest of the article is devoted to the eighteen problems. These are organized into five sections: problems in the analysis of the concept of information, in semantics, in the study of intelligence, in the relation between information and nature, and in the investigation of values.     

Selection Procedures in North America

The selection practices of organizations in Canada and the United States are reviewed. These practices are notable insofar as they rarely represent the most valid procedures, nor do they tend to be based on current research knowledge. Some reasons for the current state of selection and assessment procedures include knowledge of appropriate devices, professional competence, and client limitations. The challenge of complying with human rights legislation in North America is viewed by many practitioners as a selection constraint. It is argued, however, that legal requirements support valid selection practices by demanding professional accountability.