In “The Search for Environmental Rights,” Joseph Sax argues that each individual should have, as a right, freedom from environmental hazards and access to environmental benefits, but he makes clear that environmental rights do not exist and their recognition would truly be a novel step. Sax states that environmental rights are different from existing human rights and argues that the closest analogy is welfare interests. In arguing for environmental rights, I follow Sax’s direction and draw from the work of those (...) who are the most relevant in establishing environmental rights. I consider Joel Feinberg’s notion of welfare interests, Henry Shue’s notion of basic rights, and James Nickel’s right to a safe environment. I draw from Mill’s harm principle, the superfund legislation, and the Clean Air Act to illustrate the existing ethical and legal bases for establishing environmental rights. Finally, I discuss positive and negative duties that such rights might carry. (shrink)

This anthology offers a fresh approach to the ethics of business, casting a critical eye on entrenched assumptions and practices. It includes central works from such thinkers as John Locke, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, and Thomas Piketty, while also introducing new voices on a range of pressing practical topics, including racial discrimination in the workplace, factory farming, climate change, affirmative action, and whistleblowing. A truly applied anthology, this book encourages students to see the real-world applications of the theories (...) at issue and to examine the consequences of business as usual. (shrink)

Ethical Challenges to Business as Usual offers a fresh approach to the ethics of business, casting a critical eye on entrenched assumptions and practices. It includes central works from such thinkers as John Locke, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, and Thomas Piketty, while also introducing new voices on a range of pressing practical topics including racial discrimination in the workplace, factory farming, climate change, affirmative action, and whistleblowing. A truly applied anthology, this book encourages students to see the real-world (...) applications of the theories at issue and to examine the consequences of business as usual. (shrink)

This new anthology takes a broad approach to ethics, incorporating traditional topics and texts while bringing in voices and themes that are too often excluded. A substantial section on ethical theory is provided, as are readings on topics such as: oppression, sex, identity, the environment, life and death, war and terror, and caring for others. Accessible introductions and discussion questions are included throughout to contextualize material for the student reader without playing favorites among the positions at issue.

Anonymous sperm donation offspring often yearn for information about their biological fathers, and as they come of age that yearning increases in intensity. We first explore will and interest theory regarding this desire to know one’s heritage and argue that both theories lead to a right of the offspring to know. We then turn to the donor contract, look at the inconsistencies between donor ability to eschew parental responsibility compared to other biological fathers, and argue that there should be a (...) procedure similar to adoption procedures, whereby sperm donors take seriously the legal severing of their parental rights and responsibilities. We conclude that the offspring have a right to their genetic heritage and call for caring reproductive technological practices that ensure children of donors this right. (shrink)

For over two decades, the debate about whether legally to recognize environmental refugees as refugees has been ongoing. Because their numbers are growing, environmental refugees should be recognized as convention refugees or a new UN convention should be drafted to address their needs. A typology of the environmental refugee should be developed to make the term more concrete and useful.

This anthology takes a broad approach to ethics, incorporating traditional topics and texts while bringing in voices and themes that are too often excluded. A substantial section on ethical theory is provided, as are readings on topics such as oppression, sex, identity, the environment, life and death, war and terror, and caring for others. Accessible introductions and discussion questions are included throughout to contextualize material for the student reader without playing favorites among the positions at issue.

This text addresses various topics in applied ethics from Western and non-Western perspectives. Multicultural perspectives are fully integrated throughout the text.

Much of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of language and content makes appeal to the theories developed in generative syntax. In particular, there is a presumption that—at some level and in some way—the structures provided by syntactic theory mesh with or support our conception of content/linguistic meaning as grounded in our first-person understanding of our communicative speech acts. This paper will suggest that there is no such tight fit. Its claim will be that, if recent generative theories are (...) on the right lines, syntactic structure provides both too much and too little to serve as the structural partner for content, at least as that notion is generally understood in philosophy. The paper will substantiate these claims by an assessment of the recent work of King, Stanley, and others. (shrink)

Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the bodies of its members (...) but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize the school of higher learning.

A plausible thought about vagueness is that it involves semantic incompleteness. To say that a predicate is vague is to say (at the very least) that its extension is incompletely specified. Where there is incomplete specification of extension there is indeterminacy, an indeterminacy between various ways in which the specification of the predicate might be completed or sharpened. In this paper we show that this idea is bound to founder by presenting an argument to the effect that there are vague (...) predicates which cannot be sharpened in such a way as to meet certain basic constraints (of penumbral connection and public accessibility) that must be imposed on the very notion of a sharpening. (shrink)

The paper presents an accommodation problem for extant semantic accounts of fiction. Some accounts of fiction are designed to accommodate one or another form of fictive statement exclusively, what I shall call in-fiction and out-fiction. Thus, typically, the accounts fail to do justice to their respective excluded form. A natural response, entertained by Kripke and in a different fashion by latter-day Meinongians, is to let the two different kinds of fiction have their respective accounts. It is very easy, however, to (...) mix in and out predicates, which amounts to a species of copredication, where a single nominal receives simultaneous distinct interpretations relative to distinct predicates without creating ambiguity. Copredication is a perfectly general phenomenon that arises for any nominal. The simple problem now is that copredication appears to render all extant accounts of fiction either essentially partial, in dealing with one kind of simple form of fiction but not another, or merely wrong in imagining that fiction comes in categorically distinct forms, for the coherence of copredication is enough to show that this is not so. The aim of the paper is to show to resolve this accommodation problem by the radical expedient of suggesting that the fiction/non-fiction distinction is not really a semantic one, but more one between different ways in which sentences are made true or false. (shrink)

What makes a multimillion-dollar, transnational intimate industry possible when most people see it as exploitative? Using the newly emergent case of commercial surrogacy in India, this article extends the literature on stratified reproduction and intimate industries by examining how surrogacy persists and thrives despite its common portrayal as the “rent-a-womb industry” and “baby factory.” Using interview data with eight infertility specialists, 20 intended parents, and 70 Indian surrogate mothers, as well as blogs and media stories, we demonstrate how market actors (...) justify their pursuits through narrating moral frames of compassion and altruism that are not incidental but systematic to and constitutive of transnational surrogacy. We observed two predominant moral frames: surrogacy liberates and empowers Indian women from patriarchal control; and surrogacy furthers reproductive rights. Within these frames, the market exchange of money for babies is cast as compassion, which allows commissioning clients to sidestep accusations of racism, classism, and sexism. Yet, we reveal that the ability to navigate around these threats relies on racist, classist, and sexist tropes about Third World working-class women. Further, we find that surrogate mothers did not experience significant changes in economic status after surrogacy. (shrink)

Many professional philosophers are hesitant about “public philosophy”—unsure about what it is and how it’s done, and downright pessimistic about whether it is an important and valuable philosophical practice. In response to this hesitancy and in support of public philosophy, I argue that most of these philosophers already find at least one form of public philosophy important and valuable for the discipline and profession: teaching. I offer and defend a broad conception of public philosophy in order support this controversial claim. (...) I continue by briefly offering some reasons to think that public philosophy is of value for society generally (i.e., “the public”), and argue that we, as a profession, need to fully recognize our standing commitment to public-facing philosophical work; and to engage in serious discussion and debate to better examine the various types of public philosophy, clarify the broad range of public-facing activities, and encourage/reward further public work of value. (shrink)

Bringing together the work of Hannah Arendt, poststructuralist and hermeneutic theories of narrative, and feminist standpoint theory, this book examines the role of narrative in both ideological and critical political thinking. The book recasts feminist affirmations (and critiques) of "marginal experience" by situating experience and identity within a theory of narrative and it identifies the specific narrative strategies that impede, and those that facilitate, feminist and democratic struggles.

Are obligations of collective agents—such as states, businesses, and non-profits—ever overdemanding? I argue they are not. I consider two seemingly attractive routes to collective overdemandingness: that an obligation is overdemanding on a collective just if the performance would be overdemanding for members; and that an obligation is overdemanding on a collective just if the performance would frustrate the collective’s permissible deep preferences. I reject these. Instead, collective overdemandingness complaints should be reinterpreted as complaints about inability or third-party costs. These are (...) not the same as overdemandingness. Accordingly, we can ask an awful lot of collective agents. (shrink)

Tensions exist between the disability rights movement and the work of many bioethicists. These reveal themselves in a major recent book on bioethics and genetics, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. This book defends certain genetic policies against criticisms from disability rights advocates, in part by arguing that it is possible to accept both the genetic policies and the rights of people with impairments. However, a close reading of the book reveals a series of direct moral criticisms of the (...) disability rights movement. The criticisms go beyond a defense of genetic policies from the criticisms of disability rights advocates. The disability rights movement is said not to have the same moral legitimacy as other civil rights movements, such as those for women or "racial" minorities. This paper documents, and in some cases shows the flaws within, these challenges to the disability rights movement. (shrink)

Sociology is split into two antagonistic or mutually oblivious wings: quantitative and nonquantitative. Statistics does not occupy a privileged methodological position vis-a-vis qualitative, verbal sociology. Probability is a theory like any other, and each statistical method contains its particular theoretical bias. Such biases should be brought into the open and tested. Statistics may continue to be useful, though, as a substantive theory of change processes in the social world. A reorientation in our views of statistics may bring mathematical and antimathematical (...) branches of sociology back into a common enterprise. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the question of who has duties regarding poverty and what those duties demand, from within the perspective of contemporary analytic normative philosophy. The chapter is structured in three sections. Section 1 considers the duties of those living in poverty, which might be either self-regarding or other-regarding duties, and which must be tempered by concerns of overdemandingness. Section 2 considers the duties of affluent individuals. These are imperfect duties grounded in affluent individuals’ relations to the structures that (...) produce poverty: relations of contribution, benefit, and ability to change. Section 3 considers duties of collective agents – including states, for-profits, charities, and civil society groups. The poverty-related duties of these collective agents are sometimes perfect and sometimes imperfect, and include both primary and secondary duties, and both positive and negative duties. (shrink)

The organ transplantation enterprise is morally flawed. “Brain‐dead” donors are the primary source of solid vital organs, and the transplantation enterprise emphasizes that such donors are dead before organs are removed—or in other words that the dead donor rule is followed. However, individuals meeting standard diagnostic criteria for brain death—unresponsiveness, brainstem areflexia, and apnea—are still living, from a physiological perspective. Therefore, removing vital organs from a heart‐beating, mechanically ventilated donor is lethal. But neither donors nor surrogates nor the public in (...) general are typically informed of this obviously relevant information. Therefore, donors or surrogates do not provide valid consent for a lethal medical procedure. This is a serious moral failing on the part of the transplant community. To address this concern, I advocate for accurate and fully transparent communication of information to the public to allow for an informed civic dialogue about the ethics and legality of lethal organ procurement. Furthermore, I advocate that systems be put in place by the transplant community to allow for valid consent for lethal organ procurement. (shrink)

This is a response to the critial comments by Anne Schwenkenbecher, Olle Blomberg, Bill Wringe and Gunnar Björnsson.

Critics of Hegel's social philosophy usually focus their objections on Hegel's account of the relation between civil society and the state. Herbert Marcuse provides the best example of the standard Marxist objection. According to Marcuse, Hegel recognizes the inevitable destructiveness of competing individual interests and handles the problem by giving the state strong political powers. The state imposes restraints on the free play of individuality in the workplace while upholding and protecting the rights of individual freedom. Marcuse objects to this (...) structure because in his judgment the restraints imposed by the state are external to the free individuality they control. The dynamic of competing individual interests cannot produce a common interest and hence cannot establish a basis for real social unity. The rule of the state must stand above this competitiveness, not be involved in it, if the state is to overcome the divisiveness of free individuality. Hence, the law, which embodies the rule of the state, treats every individual as the same, guarantees to each and all the same rights, and imposes on all the same restrictions. But this sameness is an abstraction. Individuals exist with real differences and opposing interests. They live their freedom in competition with the freedom of others and some lose. The law escapes from this inequality and divisiveness by detaching itself from the realities of social living. (shrink)

Horwich (1998) seeks to undermine the familiar truth-theoretic approach to meaning, as championed by Davidson. Horwich’s criticism has two chief parts: (i) the Davidsonian approach commits a common constitution fallacy under which the form of the explanans (in this case, truth theoretic clauses and theorems) is constrained to respect the form of the explanandum (in this case, ‘meaning facts’) and (ii) that compositionality can be explained independently of a concept of truth, and so the putative central plank of Davidson’s argument (...) is removed. This paper seeks to show that these claims are premised upon a systematic misreading of the Davidsonian approach. First, the very idea of a constitution fallacy has no application to the truth-theoretic approach, for meaning is simply not analysed under it. Second,compositionality is properly understood to be a general, independent constraint on theories of meaning, not a consequence of any particular approach. Moreover, I shall show that Horwich’s format for explaining compositionality independently of truth fails to meet certain elementary constraints. (shrink)

The HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine Gardasil (Merck & Co.) was licensed for use by the FDA on June 8, 2006. The Centers for Disease Control and major physician professional organizations have recommended routine universal vaccination in young girls. However, questions remain regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in this age group. Also, vaccine use will not eliminate the need for routine Pap screening, and it may not decrease future cervical cancer rates. This paper surveys the natural history of (...) HPV infection as well as the controversies surrounding the vaccine’s use as currently recommended. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.3 (Autumn 2010): 459–469. (shrink)

This article examines the ways that managers in a rapidly globalizing industry use gendered discourses of skill to justify and frame their search for inexperienced workers in low-wage regions, using a case of a U.S.-based apparel firm that relocated and subcontracted its sewing operations in the 1990s. It uses feminist theory to examine managers' claims that women's sewing skills in the United States were disappearing and that they needed to seek out these skills in parts of the world where women (...) were not yet active participants in labor markets. Feminist researchers have long understood the ways that naturalization of skill cheapens women's labor. The case presented here highlights the way in which the portrayal of certain skills as naturally occurring resources justifies the movement of capital in search of new pools of workers without labor market experience or union representation. (shrink)