This article proposes an analysis of the doctrine of sufficiency. According to my reading, the doctrine's basic positive claim is ‘prioritarian’: benefiting x is of special moral importance where (and only where) x is badly off. Its negative claim is anti-egalitarian: most comparative facts expressed by statements of the type ‘x is worse off than y’ have no moral significance at all. This contradicts the ‘classical’ priority view according to which, although equality per se does not matter, whenever x is (...) worse off than y, at least some priority should be assigned to helping x. Section I elaborates and defends this reconstruction of the doctrine of sufficiency, and section II shows that the privileged utility level presumed within the sufficiency framework exists. (shrink)

Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman present a new theory on the ethics of war which shows that wars can be morally justified at both the ad bellum level and the in bello level.

My claim is that despite powerful arguments to the contrary, a coherent moral distinction between the jus in bello code and the jus ad bellum code can be sustained. In particular, I defend the traditional just war doctrine according to which the independence between the in bello and ad bellum codes reflects the moral equality between just and unjust combatants and between just and unjust non-combatants. In order to establish this, I construe an in bello proportionality condition which can be (...) satisfied by just and unjust combatants alike. (shrink)

The moral right to act in self-defense seems to be unproblematic: you are allowed to kill an aggressor if doing so is necessary for saving your own life. Indeed, it seems that from the moral standpoint, acting in self-defense is doing the right thing. Thanks, however, to works by George Fletcher and Judith Thomson, it is now well known how unstable the moral basis of the right to self-defense is. We are in the dark with regard to one of the (...) most basic problems raised by this right, namely: the problem of the innocent aggressor. The disturbing question is simple enough: Is a potential victim allowed to kill, in self-defense, a morally innocent aggressor? (shrink)

Larry Temkin challenged what seems to be an analytic truth about comparatives: if A is Φ-er than B and B is Φ-er than C, then, A is Φ-er than C. Ruth Chang denies a related claim: if A is Φ-er than B and C is not Φ-er than B, but is Φ to a certain degree, then A is Φ-er than C. In this paper I advance a context-sensitive semantics of gradability according to which the data uncovered by Temkin and (...) Chang leave both statements intact. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

According to the purist war ethic, the killings committed by soldiers fighting in just wars are permissible, but those committed by unjust combatants are nothing but murders. Jeff McMahan asserts that purism is a direct consequence of the justice-based account of self-defence. I argue that this is incorrect: the justice-based conception entails that in many typical cases, killing unjust combatants is morally unjustified. So real purism is much closer to pacifism than its proponents would like it to be. I conclude (...) that the best explanation of the common view that unjust combatants may be defensively killed relies on a rights-based conception of self-defence. (shrink)

A striking feature of Cappelen and Lepore's Davidsonian theory of quotation is the range of the overlooked data to which it offers an elegant semantical analysis. Recently, François Recanati argued for a pragmatic account of quotation, on the basis of new data that Cappelen and Lepore overlooked. In this article I expose what seem to me the weak points in Recanati's alternative approach, and show how proponents of the demonstrative theory can account for the data on which Recanati bases his (...) theory. (shrink)

Some relativists deny that moral discourse is factual. According to them, our ethical commitments are to be explained by appealing to noncognitive mental states like desires, rather than to beliefs in some independent moral facts. Indeed, the package antirealism (there are no moral properties) & noncognitivism (the source of moral commitments is noncognitive) seems to be implicit in Lewis’s and Harman’s relativism. But to many philosophers this package seems to be unattractive. Our task in this paper is to construe and (...) defend a less committal and hence more attractive version of relativism. Our thesis has two elements. First, we shall present a version of relativism that combines, on the one hand, realism with regard to thick ethical properties, and, on the other, antirealism with regard to thin ethical properties. Secondly, we shall argue that this version of relativism can be defended through the skeptical theory of meaning Kripke attributes to the later Wittgenstein. The paper comprises three parts: the first sketches in very broad lines a version of standard moral relativism. In the second part we construe an alternative version that we call ‘cultural relativism.’ By appealing to the thick-thin distinction, cultural relativists explain what it means to say of forms of life that they are in conflict. In the third part we shall elaborate an argument whose conclusion is that in ranking conflicting ethical outlooks, people make an error, that is, they attribute to these outlooks moral properties that do not exist. (shrink)

One motivation for adopting a justice-based view of the right to self-defense is that it seems to solve the puzzle of how a victim may kill her attacker even when doing so is not predicted to protect her from the threat imposed upon her. The paper shows that this view leads to unacceptable results and that its solution to cases of futile self-defense is unsatisfactory. This failure makes the interest-based theory of self-defense look more attractive, both in the context of (...) futile self-defense and in general. To understand how a victim might use force in this context, one need only point to some interest of hers that is threatened, and the best candidate for such interest in cases of futile self-defense is her honor. (shrink)

Many believe that if the indiscriminate bombings of German cities at the beginning of World War II were necessary for preventing unlimited spread of Nazism, then the bombings were justified. For, the outcome, in which innocent Germans living in Nazi Germany are killed, was not as bad as the outcome in which the Nazis inflict ethnic cleansing and enslavement on a massive scale. Recently, however, Daniel Statman has advanced a powerful case against this type of justification. I aim in this (...) paper to develop an enriched version of consequentialism which rescues the "lesser evil elucidation" of the Exemption. (shrink)

: A striking feature of Cappelen and Lepore's Davidsonian theory of quotation is the range of the overlooked data to which it offers an elegant semantical analysis. Recently, François Recanati argued for a pragmatic account of quotation, on the basis of new data that Cappelen and Lepore overlooked. In this article I expose what seem to me the weak points in Recanati's alternative approach, and show how proponents of the demonstrative theory can account for the data on which Recanati bases (...) his theory. (shrink)

Revisionist just war theorists maintain that, soldiers, and not merely their leaders or superiors, bear moral responsibility for objectively wrongful harms imposed in pursuit of an unjust war. The conviction that underlies revisionism is that a person's responsibility for her intentional, objectively unjustified, killing is non-transferable. In this essay I aim to elaborate a specific counterexample to this general claim. I will argue that in cases that I characterize as "special authority cases", the moral responsibility for the unintended outcomes that (...) a person brings about because of following the orders of a legitimate authority is transferred to the authority. (shrink)

This Article aims to extend contractarianism in just war theory to the case of asymmetric war of independence. Its main thesis is that within asymmetric wars, the traditional rule of noncombatant immunity has no contractarian justification: It systematically discriminates against the weak part to the conflict, and thus it is unfair. On the other hand, a rule that allows those who take themselves to be freedom fighters to threaten civic life, yet prohibits deliberately targeting individuals, is fair and mutually beneficial. (...) The branch of the war convention I called “justice in asymmetric war” instructs militants to treat civilians as if they bear no personal responsibility for the evil that their society causes. (shrink)

Civilian Immunity is the legal and moral protection that civilians enjoy against the effects of hostilities under the laws of armed conflict and according to the ethics of killing in war. Immunity specifies different permissibility conditions for directly targeting civilians on the one hand, and for harming civilians incidentally on the other hand. Immunity is standardly defended by appeal to the Doctrine of Double Effect. We show that Immunity's prohibitive stance towards targeting civilians directly, and its more permissive stance towards (...) harming them incidentally, can be defended without appealing to the DDE if agents suffer from overconfidence. Overconfidence is a cognitive bias that affects agents who are required to make decisions in the presence of significant uncertainty. (shrink)

Michael Walzer is one of the world’s leading philosophers and political theorists. In addition to his best-known books such as Spheres of Justice , and Just and Unjust Wars , he has contributed to contemporary political debates beyond academia in the New York Times , the New Yorker and Dissent . Reading Walzer is the first book to assess the full range of Walzer’s work. An outstanding team of international contributors consider the following topics in relation to Walzer’s work: the (...) moral standing of nation states individual responsibility and laws governing the conduct of war debates over intervention and non-intervention human and minority rights moral and cultural pluralism equality justice Walzer’s radicalism and role as a critic. All chapters have been specially commissioned for this collection, and Walzer’s responses to his critics makes Reading Walzer essential reading for students of political philosophy and political theory. (shrink)

The Kantian theory of private law, as Ernest Weinrib and Arthur Ripstein have developed it over the last two decades, is based on a fundamental normative truth, viz., no person is subordinate or superior to another person. Kantians construe any attempt to understand and justify the distribution of the rights-claims and rights-liberties that constitute private law in terms of aggregate welfare and/or distributive justice, as a deep category mistake. This essay outlines a ‘semi-Kantian’ theory of private law, which is like (...) Kant’s in that it understands private law as a means of instituting and protecting private freedom. Yet, semi-Kantians insist that the choice between different private law programs, which respect private freedom equally well, can at times be justified by considerations of aggregate welfare and distributive justice, as well as other considerations that concern the impact on society as a whole. (shrink)

This paper challenges what I call ‘Frankfurt's Care-Importance Principle’ (or ‘the CIP’), according to which, ‘If there is something that a person does care about, then it follows that it is important to him.’ Indeed, caring may generate genuine importance. I claim, however, that the agent's caring may have blinding effects too, it may blind him to what is really important to him. In this kind of case, caring does not generate genuine importance; rather, it reinforces the agent's false belief (...) that what he cares about is really important to him. In the second part of the paper, I try to explain the philosophical urgency in correcting the CIP. I claim that Frankfurt's adherence to the CIP casts doubt upon the adequacy of his conceptual framework to deal with a special kind of conflict, namely, the conflict between the moral and the personal. (shrink)

Philosophers tend to presuppose a close relationship between language and thought. They express and defend this conviction in different ways. I shall focus on the relation between the thinkable and the expressible, as stated in the Inexpressibility Thesis.

I shall consider the phenomenon of believing ourselves to have at least one false belief: a phenomenon I call believed fallibility I shall first present a paradoxical argument which appears to show that believed fallibility is incoherent; second, note that this argument assumes that we are committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs; third, sketch a more intuitive notion of commitment in which we are not committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs and argue that the original paradoxical (...) argument is now defused; fourth, construct a new paradoxical argument showing that if we believe that we have at least one false belief we are committed to a contradiction, employing the preferable notion of commitment; and, fifth, suggest that perhaps we might avoid the new paradox by denying that closing our beliefs under conjunction is required by rationalityJe me pencherai ici sur le phénomène qui consiste à penser que nous avons au moins une opinion fausse: je nomme ce phénoméne «la croyance d’etre faillible». Je présente en premier lieu un argument paradoxal qui semble démontrer que la croyance d’être faillible est incohérente. Deuxièmement, je remarque que cet argument suppose que nous nous obligions à réaliser la conjonction de toutes nosopinions. Troisièmement, je propose une version plus intuitive de cette obligation selon laquelle nous ne sommes pas obligés de réaliser la conjonction de toutes nos opinions, et je soutiens que le paradoxe initial est alors désamorcé. Quatrièmement, je construis un nouvel argument paradoxal démontrant que, si nous croyons que nous avons au moins une opinion fausse, nous sommes obligés de nous contredire, selon la notion d’obligation que je préconise d’adopter. Cinquièmement, je suggère que nous pourrions peut-être éviter ce nouveau paradoxe en niant que la rationalité exige de soumettre nos opinions à la conjonction. (shrink)

The rule I call ‘Civilian Immunity’ – the rule that prohibits targeting civilians in war – is the heart of the accepted jus in bello code. It prohibits targeting civilians in a wide variety of war circumstances. Seth Lazar's brilliant book, Sparing Civilians, attempts to defend Civilian Immunity. In this essay I show, first, that his ‘Risky-Killing based argument’ fails to provide civilians with the robust protection Sparing Civilians promises. I argue, secondly, that the moral framework that Sparing Civilians employs, (...) a moral framework that centralizes the Deontological Clause, leaves the immunity of civilians against Leaders unexplained. (shrink)

Philosophers tend to presuppose a close relationship between language and thought. They express and defend this conviction in different ways. I shall focus on the relation between the thinkable and the expressible, as stated in the Inexpressibility Thesis.

This Article offers a defense of egalitarian Zionism that, unlike Chaim Gans’s argument for this view, does not appeal to the Jewish problem in justifying the Zionist requirement for a state with a dominant Jewish community. The argument extracts from the egalitarian principles that underlie John Rawls’s political liberalism, a conception of global justice according to which members of a scattered nation are entitled to a fair opportunity to establish a new state within which they enjoy the advantage of demographic (...) dominance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I shall consider the phenomenon of believing ourselves to have at least one false belief: a phenomenon I call believed fallibility I shall first present a paradoxical argument which appears to show that believed fallibility is incoherent; second, note that this argument assumes that we are committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs; third, sketch a more intuitive notion of commitment in which we are not committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs and argue that the original (...) paradoxical argument is now defused; fourth, construct a new paradoxical argument showing that if we believe that we have at least one false belief we are committed to a contradiction, employing the preferable notion of commitment; and, fifth, suggest that perhaps we might avoid the new paradox by denying that closing our beliefs under conjunction is required by rationalityRÉSUMÉ: Je me pencherai ici sur le phénomène qui consiste à penser que nous avons au moins une opinion fausse: je nomme ce phénoméne «la croyance d’etre faillible». Je présente en premier lieu un argument paradoxal qui semble démontrer que la croyance d’être faillible est incohérente. Deuxièmement, je remarque que cet argument suppose que nous nous obligions à réaliser la conjonction de toutes nosopinions. Troisièmement, je propose une version plus intuitive de cette obligation selon laquelle nous ne sommes pas obligés de réaliser la conjonction de toutes nos opinions, et je soutiens que le paradoxe initial est alors désamorcé. Quatrièmement, je construis un nouvel argument paradoxal démontrant que, si nous croyons que nous avons au moins une opinion fausse, nous sommes obligés de nous contredire, selon la notion d’obligation que je préconise d’adopter. Cinquièmement, je suggère que nous pourrions peut-être éviter ce nouveau paradoxe en niant que la rationalité exige de soumettre nos opinions à la conjonction. (shrink)

This Article challenges Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller’s choice theory of contract, according to which contract law is autonomy-enhancing. I make three points: first, the choice theory of contract cannot clarify the critical normative distinction between enforceable formal contracts and unenforceable informal promises. Second, I develop the roads/contract-types analogy: instead of promoting individuals’ autonomy and enhancing their choice among different projects, most contract types are justified by the preexisting preferences of citizens. Finally, I outline a teleological justification of contract law (...) that is different from that propounded by Dagan and Heller. On this view, contract law should remain neutral as to which conception of the good is commendable and provide individuals with the means of shaping and pursuing a conception of a good life. (shrink)