No one is excused from doing what he ought to do merely because he is unwilling to do it. But what if others are unwilling to play their necessary role in some joint venture that you all ought to undertake: might that excuse you from doing what you yourself ought to do as part of that? It would, if you were genuinely willing to play your necessary part if they were. But the unwillingness of everyone involved cannot reciprocally serve to (...) excuse one another from doing what they ought to do. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Protecting The Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. By Robert E. Goodin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The issue of social welfare and individual responsibility has become a topic of international public debate in recent years as politicians around the world now question the legitimacy of state-funded welfare systems. David Schmidtz and Robert Goodin debate the ethical merits of individual versus collective responsibility for welfare. David Schmidtz argues that social welfare policy should prepare people for responsible adulthood rather than try to make that unnecessary. Robert Goodin argues against the individualization of welfare policy and expounds (...) the virtues of collective responsibility. (shrink)

In response to widespread concern about illegal drug use and the associated risk of the spread of HIV/AIDS, a study was undertaken to examine whether it was, in principle, feasible to conduct a trial providing heroin to dependent users in a controlled manner. Such a trial involves real ethical issues which are examined in this paper. The general issues examined are: should a trial be an experiment or an exercise in public policy?; acts and omissions; countermobilization; termination of a trial, (...) and payment for drugs and for a trial. The specific issues examined are: selection of trial participants; privacy; issues for staff working on a trial; coupling the trial with other treatment, and issues for researchers. A number of alternative approaches to the various ethical issues are presented and discussed. (shrink)

Global Basic Rights brings together many of the most influential contemporary writers in political philosophy and international relations to explore some of the most challenging theoretical and practical questions provoked by Henry Shue's classic book Basic Rights.

Some of the most invidious injustices are seemingly the results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion...

There are two classic principles for deciding who should have a right to vote on the laws, the All Affected Principle and the All Subjected Principle. This article is devoted, firstly, to providing a sympathetic reconstruction of the All Subjected Principle, identifying the most credible account of what it is to be subject to the law. Secondly, it shows that that best account still suffers some serious difficulties, which might best be resolved by treating the All Subjected Principle as a (...) subset of the All Affected Principle with which the All Subjected Principle must in any case be supplemented. (shrink)

Elsewhere I have defended utilitarianism as a philosophy peculiarly well suited to the conduct of public affairs, on grounds of the peculiar tasks and instruments confronting public officials. Here I add another plank to that defence of ‘utilitarianism as a public philosophy’, focusing on the peculiar role responsibilities of people serving in public capacities. Such ‘public service utilitarianism’ is incumbent not only upon public officials but also upon individuals in their capacities as citizens and voters. I close with reflections on (...) how best to evoke appreciation of these utilitarian role responsibilities from officials and electors alike. (shrink)

We have no general duty to help others do their duty. But arguably we do, for a combination of agency-based and outcome-based reasons, have a general duty to let others do their duty. Our duty is derived from the other’s duty, but it is none the worse for being so. It is best seen as a duty, rather than as the upshot of some right or power of the other that would preclude us from insisting that the others do their (...) duty. Finally, our duty to let others do their duty is owed primarily to those toward to whom the others’ duty is owed, rather than to those whom we should allow to do their duty. (shrink)

In trust relationships, one person has a ‘beneficial interest’ in another’s performance. The former not only would but should benefit from the latter’s action, and the latter has a ‘fiduciary duty’ toward the former to so act. But where that act would otherwise be wrong, the first person’s beneficial interest would be providing a pro tanto reason for the second person to do something that is pro tanto wrong. That reason can – and should – be removed by the former (...) renouncing their beneficial interest in the latter’s pro tanto wrongful action. Doing so would cancel the fiduciary’s excuse for wrongdoing on the beneficiary’s behalf. (shrink)

Some say that consent is essentially just a state of mind. Others say it is essentially just a communication. Many say it is both. I say it is neither. Instead it is an act, or rather a pair of acts—an internal mental act in the first instance, an external performative act in the second. Each of those acts is an act of commitment, intrapersonally in the first case and interpersonally in the second. The content of the commitment is, familiarly enough, (...) to give permission to someone else to do something that it would be wrong for them to do without your permission. The novelty lies in seeing consent as an act of commitment in those two dimensions and in seeing those as commitments that persist until and unless undone by an act of a similar sort. (shrink)

Claims about what justice “requires” and the “requirements” of justice are pervasive in political philosophy. However, there is a highly significant ambiguity in such claims that appears to have gone unnoticed. Such claims may pick out either one of two categorically distinct and noncoextensive kinds of requirement that we call 1) requirements-as-necessary-conditions for justice and 2) requirements-as-demands of justice. This is an especially compelling instance of an ambiguity that John Broome has famously observed in the context of claims about other (...) requirements (notably the requirements of rationality and morality). But it appears to have been overlooked by political philosophers in the case of claims about the requirements of justice. The ambiguity is highly significant inasmuch as failing to notice it is liable to distort our normative thinking about politics and make us vulnerable to certain kinds of normatively consequential errors: both mistakenly drawing inferences about what justice demands of us from claims that certain states or societies are not just; and mistakenly drawing inferences about what states or societies are or would be just from claims that justice does not demand of states or societies that they do certain things. Paying greater attention to the distinction between these two different kinds of requirements and the ways in which they come apart is helpful, not merely in avoiding these distortions and errors, but also in resolving, or at least clarifying, a number of other notoriously murky meta-normative debates, especially various important debates about realism and idealism in political philosophy. (shrink)

Maximizing want-satisfactionper seis a relatively unattractive aspiration, for it seems to assume that wants are somehow disembodied entities with independent moral claims all of their own. Actually, of course, they are possessed by particular people. What preference-utilitarians should be concerned with is how people's lives go—the fulfilment of their projects and the satisfaction of their desires. In an old-fashioned way of talking, it ishappy peoplerather thanhappiness per sethat utilitarians should be striving to produce.

Among moralists and social critics of several stripes, it is not enough that the right thing be done: they also insist that it be done, and be seen to be done, for the right reasons. They are anxious to know whether we are sending food to starving Africans out of genuinely altruistic concern, or merely to clear domestic commodity markets, for one particularly topical example. Or, for another example, critics of the Brandt Commission’s plea for increased foreign aid more generally (...) say, in stinging rebuke: ‘Many of those who support the proposal... do so out of genuine humanitarian concern about... poverty. But it is doubtful whether this is the main concern of its authors, and it certainly is not their only concern.... They are, instead, primarily concerned with the preservation of the existing world economic order.’What is common to all such cases is an attempt at motive differentiation. Any particular piece of behavior might have sprung from any of a number of different underlying motives; commentators want to know which was the real motive. Here I shall show that this characteristic quest for motive differentiation is misguided. In most of the standard social situations, it makes no material difference to agents’ actions whether they act from one sort of motive or another. And in such circumstances, pressing the motivational issue will usually lead only to mischief, of both a pragmatic and a moral sort. (shrink)

This monumental volume provides the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of the essential primary readings in post-war political philosophy.

Part of the acclaimed Politics and Society series, Population and Political Theory brings together leading thinkers in the fields of philosophy, political science, economics, and social policy to address issues at the convergence of population policy and political theory. Offers a single-volume, systematic overview of philosophical issues relating to population Represents a unique merging of discussions of population policy with political theory Broad in scope, the diverse discussions will appeal to political philosophers, population specialists, and public policy makers.

abstract Complicity with wrongdoing comes in many forms and many degrees. We distinguish subcategories cooperation, collaboration and collusion from connivance and condoning, identifying their defining features and assessing their characteristic moral valences. We illustrate the use of these distinctions by reference to events in refugee camps in and around Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, and the extent to which international organizations and nongovernment organizations were wrongfully complicit with the misuse of refugees as human shields by the perpetrators of the genocide (...) who were allowed to run those camps. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that there has never been any ground for the controversy between the doctrine of free will and determinism, that it is based upon a misapprehension, that the two assertions are entirely consistent, that one of them strictly implies the other, that they have been opposed only because of our natural want of the analytical imagination. In so saying I do not tamper with the meaning of either phrase. That would be unpardonable. I mean free (...) will in the natural and usual sense, in the fullest, the most absolute sense in which for the purposes of the personal and moral life the term is ever employed. I mean it as implying responsibility, merit and demerit, guilt and desert. I mean it as implying, after an act has been performed, that one " could have done otherwise " than one did. I mean it as conveying these things also, not in any subtly modified sense but in exactly the sense in which we conceive them in life and in law and in ethics. These two doctrines have been opposed because we have not realised that free will can be analysed without being destroyed, and that determinism is merely a feature of the analysis of it. And if we are tempted to take refuge in the thought of an "ultimate ", an "innermost" liberty that eludes the analysis, then we have implied a deterministic basis and constitution for this liberty as well. For such a basis and constitution lie in the idea of liberty. -/- The thesis is not, like that of Green or Bradley, that the contending opinions are reconciled if we adopt a certain metaphysic of the ego, as that it is timeless, and identifies itself with a desire by a " timeless act". This is to say that the two are irreconcilable, as they are popularly supposed to be, except by a theory that delivers us from the conflict by taking us out of time. Our view on the contrary is that from the natural and temporal point of view itself there never was any need of a reconciliation but only of a comprehension of the meaning of terms. (The metaphysical nature of the self and its identity through time is a problem for all who confront memory, anticipation, etc.; it has no peculiar difficulties arising from the present problem.) -/- I am not maintaining that determinism is true; only that it is true insofar as we have free will. That we are free in willing is, broadly speaking, a fact of experience. That broad fact is more assured than any philosophical analysis. It is therefore surer than the deterministic analysis of it, entirely adequate as that in the end appears to be. But it is not here affirmed that there are no small exceptions, no slight undetermined swervings, no ingredient of absolute chance. All that is here said is that such absence of determination, if and so far as it exists, is no gain to freedom, but sheer loss of it; no advantage to the moral life, but blank subtraction from it. -- When I speak below of "the indeterminist" I mean the libertarian indeterminist, that is, him who believes in free will and holds that it involves indetermination. (shrink)

In the face of environmental crises such as climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss—which all adversely impact on health—Gils-Schmidt and Salloch explore whether physicians can be justified in taking climate issues into account in clinical care. 1 While their approach centres on the ‘climate-sensitive’ decisions, physicians can carry out on the micro-level of clinical decision-making, they encourage further discussions on how climate-related issues can be included across different levels of decision-making in healthcare. We propose a list of tasks and a (...) model to assist with navigating the range of factors and structural elements an environmentally sensitive ethics must address. Stephen Gardiner’s notion of a perfect moral storm is central to understanding these issues. 2 Gardiner describes how a _perfect moral storm_ occurs in the centre of three overlapping conditions for human action and policymaking in the face of climate change. This storm is driven by: (1) a... (shrink)

This study represents an improvement in the ethics scales inventory published in a 1988 Journal of Business Ethics article. The article presents the distillation and validation process whereby the original 33 item inventory was reduced to eight items. These eight items comprise the following ethical dimensions: a moral equity dimension, a relativism dimension, and a contractualism dimension. The multidimensional ethics scale demonstrates significant predictive ability.

abstract ‘Time is money’, Benjamin Franklin's ‘Poor Richard’ tells us. But instead of converting time expenditures into monetary equivalents, it makes more sense in many cases to convert money into temporal equivalents. The difficulty in putting a monetary value on time in unpaid household labour, when adjusting the National Accounts, points to the problems of the first approach. The advantages of the latter approach are illustrated by the Swedish system of specifying criminal fines in terms of the number of days (...) the offender would have to work to pay them off. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is a recognised and common part of business activity. Some of the regularly cited motives behind CSR are employee morale, recruitment and retention, with employees acknowledged as a key organisational stakeholder. Despite the significance of employees in relation to CSR, relatively few studies have examined their engagement with CSR and the impediments relevant to this engagement. This exploratory case study-based research addresses this paucity of attention, drawing on one to one interviews and observation in a large UK (...) energy company. A diversity of engagement was found, ranging from employees who exhibited detachment from the CSR activities within the company, to those who were fully engaged with the CSR activities, and to others who were content with their own personal, but not organisational, engagement with CSR. A number of organisational context impediments, including poor communication, a perceived weak and low visibility of CSR culture, and lack of strategic alignment of CSR to business and personal objectives, served to explain this diversity of employee engagement. Social exchange theory is applied to help explore the volition that individual employees have towards their engagement with CSR activities, and to consider the implications of an implicit social, rather than explicit economic, contract between an organisation and its employees in their engagement with CSR. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin's On Complicity and Compromise (OUP, 2013) for our understanding of international law. That volume systematizes and evaluates individuals’ ethical choices in getting (too) close to evil acts. For the law of nations, these concepts are relevant in three critical ways. First, they capture the dilemmas of those charged with implementing international law, e.g., Red Cross delegates pledged to confidentiality learning of torture in a prison. Second, they offer a (...) rubric for understanding when a state may use coercion against certain actors, e.g., international law's rules for when one state may use force against another based on the latter's ties to terrorist acts. Third, they offer a moral grounding for many international obligations of states based on the need to avoid their own complicity in others' wrongs, e.g., by not expelling refugees to a state persecuting them or by preventing private actors from committing human rights abuses. In the case of the last two, the law reflects decisions by states about how much complicity they will tolerate – either complicity by others or complicity by the states themselves. (shrink)

Background: Patient autonomy has been promoted as the most important principle to guide difficult clinical decisions. To examine whether practising physicians indeed value patient autonomy above other considerations, physicians were asked to weight patient autonomy against three other criteria that often influence doctors’ decisions. Associations between physicians’ religious characteristics and their weighting of the criteria were also examined. Methods: Mailed survey in 2007 of a stratified random sample of 1000 US primary care physicians, selected from the American Medical Association masterfile. (...) Physicians were asked how much weight should be given to the following: (1) the patient’s expressed wishes and values, (2) the physician’s own judgment about what is in the patient’s best interest, (3) standards and recommendations from professional medical bodies and (4) moral guidelines from religious traditions. Results: Response rate 51% (446/879). Half of physicians (55%) gave the patient’s expressed wishes and values “the highest possible weight”. In comparative analysis, 40% gave patient wishes more weight than the other three factors, and 13% ranked patient wishes behind some other factor. Religious doctors tended to give less weight to the patient’s expressed wishes. For example, 47% of doctors with high intrinsic religious motivation gave patient wishes the “highest possible weight”, versus 67% of those with low (OR 0.5; 95% CI 0.3 to 0.8). Conclusions: Doctors believe patient wishes and values are important, but other considerations are often equally or more important. This suggests that patient autonomy does not guide physicians’ decisions as much as is often recommended in the ethics literature. (shrink)

This essay explores the role of informal logicand its application in the context of currentdebates regarding evidence-based medicine. This aim is achieved through a discussion ofthe goals and objectives of evidence-basedmedicine and a review of the criticisms raisedagainst evidence-based medicine. Thecontributions to informal logic by StephenToulmin and Douglas Walton are explicated andtheir relevance for evidence-based medicine isdiscussed in relation to a common clinicalscenario: hypertension management. This essayconcludes with a discussion on the relationshipbetween clinical reasoning, rationality, andevidence. It is argued that (...) informal logic hasthe virtue of bringing explicitness to the roleof evidence in clinical reasoning, and bringssensitivity to understanding the role ofdialogical context in the need for evidence inclinical decision making. (shrink)

Translational ethics (TE) has been developed into a specific approach, which revolves around the argument that strategies for bridging the theory‐practice gap in bioethics must themselves be justified on ethical terms. This version of TE incorporates normative, empirical and foundational ethics research and continues to develop through application and in the face of new ethical challenges. Here, I explore the idea that the academic field of bioethics has not yet sufficiently analysed its own philosophical foundation for how it can, and (...) should, be practically relevant; neither has it comprehensively discussed the limitations on what impacts bioethicists should pursue. As a result, there has not been adequate training on how to suitably and appropriately impact real‐world practices. Moreover, bioethical perspectives are often competing with other strong interests, for example, economic and political, which may weaken their impact on policy‐making. The TE approach I propose can not only facilitate practical impacts of academic bioethics by being better informed by real‐world ethical issues but it also supports targeted and ethical justifications of the actual impact of academic work in real‐world contexts. In this paper, I clarify the premises for this TE approach, identify further challenges and sketch out potential solutions for the implementation of this methodological framework. (shrink)