14 found
Order:
  1.  11
    What we owe to future people: a contractualist account of intergenerational ethics.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2024 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    The aim of the book is twofold: (1) To develop a comprehensive, contractualist theory of intergenerational ethics; (2) To argue that contractualism's ability to be that comprehensive theory of intergenerational ethics contributes to its plausibility as a moral theory in general. The book's core claim is that contractualism provides us with a comprehensive theory of intergenerational ethics that justifies including future people in the scope of what we owe to each other and tells us how much we owe them. It (...)
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  2. Luck egalitarianism and non‐overlapping generations.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2023 - Ratio 36 (3):215-223.
    This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it might be required (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  3. ‘Humanity’: Constitution, Value, and Extinction.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2024 - The Monist 107 (2):99-108.
    When discussing the extinction of humanity, there does not seem to be any clear agreement about what ‘humanity’ really means. One aim of this paper is to show that it is a more slippery concept than it might at first seem. A second aim is to show the relationship between what constitutes or defines humanity and what gives it value. Often, whether and how we ought to prevent human extinction depends on what we take humanity to mean, which in turn (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  4. Productive Justice in the ‘Post‐Work Future’.Caleb Althorpe & Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2024 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 41 (2):330-349.
    Justice in production is concerned with ensuring the benefits and burdens of work are distributed in a way that is reflective of persons' status as moral equals. While a variety of accounts of productive justice have been offered, insufficient attention has been paid to the distribution of work's benefits and burdens in the future. In this article, after granting for the sake of argument forecasts of widespread future technological unemployment, we consider the implications this has for egalitarian requirements of productive (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  5.  77
    The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics.Gustaf Arrhenius, Krister Bykvist, Tim Campbell & Elizabeth Finneron-Burns (eds.) - 2022 - Oxford University Press.
    This handbook presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of problems associated with the moral standing of future people in current decision-making. Future people pose an especially hard problem for our current decision-making, since their number and their identities are not fixed but depend on the choices the present generation makes. Do we make the world better by creating more people with good lives? What do we owe future generations in terms of justice? Such questions are not only philosophically difficult and important, but (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  6. Contractualism and the Non-Identity Problem.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2016 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (5):1151-1163.
    This paper argues that T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism can provide a solution to the non-identity problem. It first argues that there is no reason not to include future people in the realm of those to whom we owe justification, but that merely possible people are not included. It then goes on to argue that a person could reasonably reject a principle that left them with a barely worth living life even though that principle caused them to exist, and that current people (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  7. Do We Have Relational Reasons to Care About Intergenerational Equality?Caleb Althorpe & Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - manuscript
    Relational egalitarians sometimes argue that a degree of distributive equality is necessary for social equality to obtain among members of society. In this paper, we consider how such arguments fare when extended to the intergenerational case. In particular, we examine whether relational reasons for distributive equality apply between non-overlapping generations. We claim that they do not. We begin by arguing that the most common reasons relational egalitarians offer in favour of distributive equality between contemporaries do not give us reasons to (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. What’s wrong with human extinction?Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3):327-343.
    This paper explores what could be wrong with the fact of human extinction. I first present four reasons why we might consider human extinction to be wrong: it would prevent millions of people from being born; it would mean the loss of rational life and civilization; it would cause existing people to suffer pain or death; it would involve various psychological traumas. I argue that looking at the question from a contractualist perspective, only reasons and are admissible. I then consider (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  9. On an Alleged Case of Propaganda: Reply to McKinnon.Sophie R. Allen, Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Mary Leng, Holly Lawford-Smith, Jane Clare Jones, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper & R. J. Simpson - manuscript
    In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10.  48
    Human Extinction and Moral Worthwhileness.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (1):105-112.
    In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  11. (1 other version)Are Saviour Siblings a Special Case in Procreative Ethics?Caleb Althorpe & Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - forthcoming - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.
    Children conceived in order to donate biological material to save the life of an already existing child are known as 'saviour siblings'. The primary reasons that have been offered against the practice are: (i) creating a saviour sibling has negative impacts on the created child and (ii) creating a saviour child represents a wrongful procreative motivation of the parents. In this paper we examine to what extent the creation of saviour siblings actually presents a special case in procreative ethics. Although (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12.  36
    Global justice, sovereign wealth funds and saving for the future.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
    In this paper I give some reasons why ‘saving for future generations’ is not as straightforward as it sounds and when we might be skeptical of the permissibility of states saving for future citizens, even though such savings are often seen to be morally praiseworthy. I emerge with an account of when state savings for future citizens through sovereign wealth funds may be morally permissible. I argue that we ought to follow a modified version of Armstrong’s criteria for the moral (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13.  20
    Should We Control World Population? Diana Coole , 140 pp., $45 cloth, $12.95 paper, $10.99 eBook.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2019 - Ethics and International Affairs 33 (1):101-103.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14.  53
    The Intergenerational Original Position.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2017 - Social Theory and Practice 43 (4):805-823.
    I evaluate the mechanism Rawls uses to elicit his just savings principle. My analysis focuses on his account of membership in the original position because who is in the original position and what they know has important consequences for the rest of Rawls’s theory of intergenerational justice. I consider three options: present time of entry (PTE), actual people from various generations, and all possible people. However, I will argue that Rawls is ultimately not successful since there is no plausible composition (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark