Corporations,Rights, and Lobbying

While there may be several practical concerns regarding the practice of corporate lobbying of government officials, there is the more basic question of a corporation’s moral right to do so. I argue that group agents such as corporations have no moral rights, and thereby cannot have the right to lobby. There may be a basis for some legal rights for corporations, but I argue that lobbying cannot be one of the legal rights, even by reference to the rights of the individuals that make up the corporation. I end the paper by a discussion of how this argument applies to all private organizations, including public interest organizations.     

Judicial Discretion and the Problem of Dirty Hands

H.L.A. Hart’s lost and found essay ‘Discretion’ has provided new insight into the issue of how legal systems can cope with indeterminacy in the law. The so-called ‘open texture’ of law calls for the exercise of judicial discretion, which, I argue, renders judges susceptible to the problem of dirty hands. To show this, I frame the problem as being open to an array of appropriate emotional responses, namely, various senses of guilt. With these responses in mind, I revise an example from Michael Walzer’s original analysis in a way that highlights purely personal sacrifices in solutions to dirty hands situations. I then turn to an account of moral emotions in legal decision-making and show how judges—in failing to advance all interests—might be left with a unique sense of guilt. With an application of this account to Hart’s legal positivism, it can be seen that a judge’s hands are often dirtied in resolving borderline cases. If discretion leaves judges in situations where they must do wrong in order to do right, Hart’s endorsement of a closure view of wrongdoing will lead to difficulties in how he can explain the presence of moral remainders in jurisprudence.     

The Euthanasia Debate in Germany - What's the Fuss?

ABSTRACT Both opponents and proponents of Singer's right to speak about euthanasia have concentrated on the tenability of his claims. They have ignored the question of what legitimate grounds there are for suppressing academic discussion, and have failed to take into account the discussion of freedom of speech in recent legal theory. To do this is the aim of my paper. Section I claims that Singer's position is immoral. Section 2 turns to the question of whether it is protected by freedom of speech, irrespective of its merits. I reject two lines of defence for Singer's opponents, that they had no opportunity to present their case, and the Kantian idea of the primacy of practical reason. Section 3 turns to a defence from legal theory. It argues that Singer's views do not pose the kind of threat to other legal and moral values which would license a suspension of his freedom of expression. I conclude that it is illegitimate to silence Singer, since he does not deny the right to live of his disabled opponents, but legitimate to protest against him, since he denies that some of their lives are worth living, in disregard of their own preferences.     

A new solution to the problem of luck

The issue of whether and how we have the control necessary for freedom and moral responsibility is central to all control accounts of freedom and moral responsibility. The problem of luck for libertarians aims to show that indeterministic agents are ill-equipped with the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. In view of this, we must either endorse scepticism about the possibility of free and morally responsible agents, or make some form of, possibly revisionary, compatibilism work. In this paper, I shall offer a new solution to the problem of luck for libertarians. After outlining the problem of luck, I shall argue that, given a particular approach to mental causation, indeterminism can be viewed as an essential requirement of free and morally responsible action. After this, I shall distinguish between different types of inability and show how this provides us with a solution to the problem of luck. Finally, I shall consider some advantages and objections to the proposed solution.     

Independence and Property in Kant's Rechtslehre

I argue that the freedom which is to coexist with the freedom of choice of others in accordance with a universal law mentioned in Kant's Rechtslehre is not itself freedom of choice. Rather, it is the independence which is a condition of being able to exercise genuine free choice by not having to act in accordance with the choices of others. Kant's distinction between active and passive citizenship appears, however, to undermine this idea of independence, because the possession of a certain type of property right on the part of some citizens makes it possible for them to dominate others. Kant's account of property in this way turns out to be central to the question as to whether his Rechtslehre represents an internally consistent account of how freedom can be guaranteed within a legal and political community. I go on to argue that Kant's attempt to justify a pre-political right of property cannot be viewed as a successful justification of private property, and that he should have abandoned the notion of such a right together with any presumption in favour of private property.     

Personal Identity, Autonomy and Advance Statements

abstract    Recent legal rulings concerning the status of advance statements have raised interest in the topic but failed to provide any definitive general guidelines for their enforcement. I examine arguments used to justify the moral authority of such statements. The fundamental ethical issue I am concerned with is how accounts of personal identity underpin our account of moral authority through the connection between personal identity and autonomy. I focus on how recent Animalist accounts of personal identity initially appear to provide a sound basis for extending the moral autonomy of an individual — and hence their autonomous wishes expressed through an advance statement — past the point of severe psychological decline. I argue that neither the traditional psychological account nor the more recent Animalist account of personal identity manage to provide a sufficient basis for extending our moral autonomy past the point of incapacity or incompetence. I briefly explore how analogies to similar areas in law designed to facilitate autonomous decision, such as wills and trusts, provide at best only very limited scope for an alternative justification for granting advance statements any legal or moral authority. I conclude that whilst advance statements play a useful role in formulating what treatment is in a patient's best interests, such statements do not ultimately have sufficient moral force to take precedence over paternalistic best interests judgements concerning an individual's care or treatment.     

Gut Reactions: Moral Conviction, Religiosity, and Trust in Authority

ABSTRACT— Theory and research point to different ways moral conviction and religiosity connect to trust in political authorities to decide controversial issues of the day. Specifically, we predicted that stronger moral convictions would be associated with greater distrust in authorities such as the U.S. Supreme Court making the "right" decisions regarding controversial issues. Conversely, we predicted that stronger religiosity would be associated with greater trust in authorities. We tested these hypotheses using a survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 727) that assessed the degree to which people trusted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the legal status of physician-assisted suicide. Results indicated that greater religiosity was associated with greater trust in the U.S. Supreme Court to decide this issue, and that stronger moral convictions about physician-assisted suicide were associated with greater distrust in the U.S. Supreme Court to decide this issue. Also, the processes underlying religious trust and distrust based on moral convictions were more quick and visceral than slow and carefully considered.     

Liberalism, legal moralism and moral disagreement

According to "legal moralism" it is part of law's proper role to "enforce morality as such". I explore the idea that legal moralism runs afoul of morality itself: there are good moral reasons not to require by law all that there is nevertheless good moral reason to do. I suggest that many such reasons have broad common-sense appeal and could be appreciated even in a society in which everyone completely agreed about what morality requires. But I also critique legal moralism from the special perspective of liberal political justice. Liberalism requires that citizens who disagree with one another on a number of morally significant matters nevertheless coexist and cooperate within a political framework of basic rights protections. When it comes to working out the most basic terms of their political association, citizens are expected to address one another within the limits of what Rawls has called "public reason". Critics of liberalism claim that this is an essentially a-moral (or expedient) attempt to evade substantive moral issues--such as the moral status of the fetus. I argue, on the contrary, that liberalism's emphasis on public reason is itself grounded in very deep--though (suitably) "non-comprehensive"--moral considerations.     

IS THERE A RIGHT TO PRIVACY?

It is widely held that there is a legal right to privacy that plays such a central role in a number of important US Supreme Court decisions. There is however a great deal of dispute about whether there is a moral right to privacy and if there is, what grounds the right. Before this can be determined, we must be clear about the nature of privacy, something that is not clearly understood and that, as we shall see, is often confused with the right to privacy. I shall begin with a critical discussion of various views about the nature of privacy. I shall then present my own account, and show how it meets the objections that have been raised against other views. Lastly, I shall close with a discussion about whether privacy is a moral right.     

Magnanimity, Athletic Excellence, and Performance-Enhancing Drugs

abstract   In this paper, I first develop a neo-Aristotelian account of the virtue of magnanimity. I then apply this virtue to ethical issues that arise in sport, and argue that the magnanimous athlete will rightly use sport to foster her own moral development. I also address how the magnanimous athlete responds to the moral challenges present in sport by focusing on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs, and conclude that athletic excellence as it is conventionally understood, without moral excellence, has very little value.     

On Public Aid to Christian Schools in the United States: A Reformed Christian Perspective

This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the topic of public aid to Christian schools in a Reformed Christian perspective. To do so, I need to clarify a Reformed Christian approach in regard to this topic and then review the studies of the issue in legal and educational aspects in the light of the Reformed perspective. Through reviewing legal and educational discussions, I argue that Christian schools are necessary for people to exercise their religious freedom and make a society more moral and spiritual and thus deserve receiving public aid. Nevertheless, public aid to religious schools needs to be carried out in a careful, restricted way.     

International Law and Morality in the Theory of Secession

In order responsibly to decide whether there ought to be an international legal right of secession, I believe we need an account of the morality of secession. I propose that territorial and political societies have a moral right to secede, and on that basis I propose a regime designed to give such groups an international legal right to secede. This regime would create a procedure that could be followed by groups desiring to secede or by states desiring to resolve the issue of secession. It would give territorial political societies a legally recognized liberty to conduct a plebiscite on secession, and, assuming such a plebiscite is won by the secessionist side, a qualified right in international law to create a state without interference. Alan Buchanan has argued that proposals of this sort would create perverse incentives. I argue that there is no good reason to believe this. The point is to allow the legal regulation of secession in cases where there are active secessionist movements with legitimate moral claims, and to attempt to dampen the desire for secession in cases where secessionist sentiment is not well grounded in social and geographic reality.     

Basic desert,conceptual revision,and moral justification

I examine Manuel Vargas's revisionist justification for continuing with our responsibility-characteristic practices in the absence of basic desert. I query his claim that this justification need not depend on how we settle questions about the content of morality, arguing that it requires us to reject the Kantian principle that prohibits treating anyone merely as a means. I maintain that any convincing argument against this principle would have to be driven by concerns that arise within the sphere of moral theory itself, whereas Vargas's argument draws solely on concerns about the expensive metaphysics involved in a libertarian conception of freedom. I argue that this amounts not just to changing the concept of free will by stipulation, but also (more problematically) to changing our moral principles by stipulation.     

Personality, person, subject in Russian legal philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century

The problem of the legal person is a central issue in legal philosophy and the theory of law. In this article I examine the semantic meaning of the concept of the person in Russian philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, considered to be the “Golden Age” of Russian legal thought. This provides an overview of the conception of the personality in the context of different legal approaches (theory of natural law, legal positivism, the psychological legal doctrine, and the sociological school of law). I indicate a polemic among the theories of the person and attempts to create an integral concept of the legal subject. In addition I present an analysis of the relation between the concepts of the legal subject and the moral person, which personify fundamental features of law and morality. In order to demarcate the notions of individual and the legal subject, I focus on doctrines of the artificial person or the juridical person.     

Legal Necessity,Pareto Efficiency & Justified Killing in Autonomous Vehicle Collisions

Suppose a driverless car encounters a scenario where (i) harm to at least one person is unavoidable and (ii) a choice about how to distribute harms between different persons is required. How should the driverless car be programmed to behave in this situation? I call this the moral design problem. Santoni de Sio (Ethical Theory Moral Pract 20:411–429, 2017) defends a legal-philosophical approach to this problem, which aims to bring us to a consensus on the moral design problem despite our disagreements about which moral principles provide the correct account of justified harm. He then articulates an answer to the moral design problem based on the legal doctrine of necessity. In this paper, I argue that Santoni de Sio’s answer to the moral design problem does not achieve the aim of the legal-philosophical approach. This is because his answer relies on moral principles which, at least, utilitarians have reason to reject. I then articulate an alternative reading of the doctrine of necessity, and construct a partial answer to the moral design problem based on this. I argue that utilitarians, contractualists and deontologists can agree on this partial answer, even if they disagree about which moral principles offer the correct account of justified harm.     

The good,the bad,and the ugly: three agent-type challenges to The Order of Public Reason

In this issue of Philosophical Studies, Richard Arneson, Jonathan Quong and Robert Talisse contribute papers discussing The Order of Public Reason (OPR). All press what I call “agent-type challenges” to the project of OPR. In different ways they all focus on a type (or types) of moral (or sometimes not-so-moral) agent. Arneson presents a good person who is so concerned with doing the best thing she does not truly endorse social morality; Quong a bad person who rejects it and violates the basic rights of others, and Talisse a morally ugly person, a hypocrite, who criticizes others for failing to do what he does not do. All suggest that OPR does not give a satisfying account of what we are to say to, or how we should act towards, such agents. In my response I highlight some core concerns of OPR, while also seeking to show that OPR does not say quite what they think it says, and it often leaves them room for saying what they would like to say about such agents.     

Self‐legislation,Respect and the Reconciliation of Minority Claims

It is a widely supported claim that liberal democratic institutions should treat citizens with equal respect. I neither dispute nor champion this claim, but investigate how it could be fulfilled. I do this by asking, as a sort of litmus test, how liberal democratic institutions should treat with respect citizens holding minority convictions, and thereby dissenting from a deliberative output. The first step of my argument consists in clarifying the sense in which liberal democracies have a primary concern for the respectful treatment of citizens qua self‐legislating persons. Taking the second step, I address critically the common tendency in the literature to concentrate on what I have termed the ex ante legem phase, focusing solely on the structure of institutionalized decision‐making processes. I submit, rather, that the principle of equal respect for persons demands more of liberal democratic institutions to enhance citizens' chances to give voice to their consciences and influence, on that ground, the formulation of the rules to which they should conform. Fulfilling this commitment requires democratic theorizing to go beyond the ex ante legem phase and regard forms of ex post legem contestation as an extension of citizens' right to political participation. Against this backdrop, I take the third and last step and argue that a promising way forward consists in the adoption of an ex post legem version of conscientious exemptionism, granting citizens a conditional moral right to request exemptions on the grounds of conscience from certain controversial legal and political provisions.     

Kant and the Problem of Recognition: Freedom,Transcendental Idealism,and the Third-Person

Kant wants to show that freedom is possible in the face of natural necessity. Transcendental idealism is his solution, which locates freedom outside of nature. I accept that this makes freedom possible, but object that it precludes the recognition of other rational agents. In making this case, I trace some of the history of Kant’s thoughts on freedom. In several of his earlier works, he argues that we are aware of our own activity. He later abandons this approach, as he worries that any awareness of our activity involves access to the noumenal, and thereby conflicts with the epistemic limits of transcendental idealism. In its place, from the second Critique onwards, Kant argues that we are conscious of the moral law, which tells me that I ought to do something, thus revealing that I can. This is the only proof of freedom consistent with transcendental idealism, but I argue that such an exclusively first-personal approach precludes the (third-personal) recognition of other rational agents. I conclude that transcendental idealism thus fails to provide an adequate account of freedom. In its place, I sketch an alternative picture of how freedom is possible, one that locates freedom within, rather than outside of nature.     

Marriage,Morality, and Institutional Value

This paper develops a Kantian account of the moral assessment of institutions. The problem I address is this: while a deontological theory may find that some legal institutions are required by justice, it is not obvious how such a theory can assess institutions not strictly required (or prohibited) by justice. As a starting-point, I consider intuitions that in some cases it is desirable to attribute non-consequentialist moral value to institutions not required by justice. I will argue that neither consequentialist nor virtue-ethical accounts account for these intuitions, suggesting that a distinctive deontological account is needed. The account I give is drawn from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; I distinguish it from Kantian views of institutions developed by Barbara Herman and Onora O’Neill. Throughout, I use marriage as an example.