A deferred prosecution agreement, or DPA, allows a corporation, instead of proceeding to trial on a criminal charge, to settle matters with the state by acknowledging the facts on which any charge would be based, pay a reduced fine, and agree to change the way they conduct business. Critics of DPAs have suggested that, because the defendant corporation must pay a fine and submit to structural reform without having been found guilty at trial, DPAs violate the Presumption of Innocence. This (...) paper argues that they do not. The paper appeals to the role of civic trust in a liberal political community. The obligations a corporation assumes in a DPA can be framed as a reasonable retributive response to a breach by that corporation of the community’s laws, and an appropriate reassurance by that corporation to the community that such breaches will not reoccur. This framing is sufficient to deny that DPAs violate the Presumption of Innocence. (shrink)

Environmental justice crucially depends on issues of distributive justice. However, absent from philosophical examinations of environmental justice has been careful consideration of the role exploitation should occupy in our moral evaluations of some cases the initially present as instances of environmental injustice. This paper seeks to both motivate the importance of understanding the significance exploitation has in select cases of environmental justice, as well as provide a conceptual framework for how to assess the ethics of those cases.

Any plausibly just market exchange must balance two conflicting moral considerations: non-worseness (Wertheimer, 1999) and euvoluntariness (true voluntariness; Munger, 2011). We propose an analytical theory of just market exchange that partly resolves this conflict.

ABSTRACTThis paper begins with the assumption that it is morally problematic when people in need are offered money in exchange for research participation if the amount offered is unfair. Such offers are called ‘coercive’, and the degree of coerciveness is determined by the offer's potential to cause exploitation and its irresistibility. Depending on what view we take on the possibility to compensate for the sacrifices made by research participants, a wish to avoid ‘coercive offers’ leads to policy recommendations concerning payment (...) for participation. For sacrifices considered compensable, we ought to offer either no payment or payment at a level deemed fair, while for sacrifices deemed incompensable, we always ought to offer no payment because as compensation appears and increases, so too does coercion. This article provides a model for thinking of the way in which degrees of exploitativeness, irresistibility, and coerciveness interact with the size of the reward for compensable and incompensable cases. T... (shrink)

An examination of case law on forced marriage reveals that in addition to physical force, the role of emotional pressure is now taken into consideration. However, in both legal and policy discourse, the difference between arranged and forced marriage continues to be framed in binary terms and hinges on the concept of consent: the context in which consent is constructed largely remains unexplored. By examining the socio-cultural construction of personhood, especially womanhood, and the intersecting structural inequalities that constrain particular groups (...) of South Asian women in the UK, we argue that consent and coercion in relation to marriage can be better understood as two ends of a continuum, between which lie degrees of socio-cultural expectation, control, persuasion, pressure, threat and force. Women who face these constraints exercise their agency in complex and contradictory ways that are not always recognised by the existing exit-centred state initiatives designed to tackle this problem. (shrink)

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract law (...) conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical study. The philosophy of contract includes two broad sets of projects. One set, the focus of the first part of this entry, targets the basic structure and normative justification of the law of contracts. The aim is to subsume a salient body of contract law rules under general principles in order to clarify contract law’s conceptual categories, distinguish it from other areas of law, and specify criteria relevant to its normative appraisal. This kind of philosophical work presupposes detailed knowledge of the law in existing legal regimes, and the entry begins by outlining the common law of contracts. A second set of projects draws on resources from the philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy to address debates within contract law. Questions about the nature of meaning and interpretation, intentionality, freedom in contract, and distributive justice drive contemporary legal debates concerning contract formation, interpretation, and enforcement. Philosophical work on these topics has attracted significant commentary which serves as the focus of the second part of this entry. (shrink)

This paper will define human enhancement and coercion in the context of this discussion; explain separately how Bioconservatives and Transhumanists use the concept of coercion; and demonstrate how coercion is used improperly as a critique of enhancement.

Globalization connects everyone, from the world’s poorest slum dweller tothe richest billionaire. Globalization and Global Justice starts by giving a newargument for the conclusion that coercive international institutions —whosesubjects who are likely to face sanctions for violation of their rules— mustensure that everyone they coerce secures basic necessities like food, waterand medicines. It then suggests that it is possible for coercive institutionsto fulfill their obligations by, for instance, providing international aid andmaking free trade fair. This overview sketches the argument in (...) the book’sfirst half, as which is the focus of the papers in the symposium. (shrink)