This is a Swedish translation of the complete text of "In Defense of Abortion and Infanticide" from Moral Issues, edited by Jan Narveson, Oxford University Press, Toronto and New York, 1983, 215-233. -/- There are various ways of attempting to defend an extreme liberal view on abortion, according to which a woman always has the right to control what happens inside her own body. First of all, there is the popular view that appeals to the idea that there is (...) a fundamental, underived right that women have to control what occurs within their own bodies. Secondly, there is a related type of philosophical argument advanced by Judith Jarvis Thomson in her famous and oft-reprinted article “A Defense of Abortion” for the slightly weaker claim that while abortion is not always permissible, since, as she says near the end of her essay, it is impermissible in, and only in, the following circumstances: “There may well be cases where carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard w must not fall below.” Subsequently, Thomson’s type of argument was then developed and defended at much greater length by David Boonin in his very carefully argued book A Defense of Abortion, though Boonin does not discuss the case of the Minimally Decent Samaritan. I believe that there is a strong objection to the Thomson/Boonin approach to justifying abortion. It was set out in an article by Richard Langer, namely, in ‘Silverstein and the “Responsibility Objection”’, Social Theory and Practice 19/3. 345-58. Langer’s discussion is not, in general, very strong, but in a very important paragraph, on pages 351-2, Langer argues that if the responsibility objection to Thomson is unsound, then it follows that there will also be circumstances in which allowing one’s children to die, simply because one no longer wishes to care for them, will also be morally permissible. David Boonin replies to Langer’s objection in his A Defense of Abortion, but in discussing, on pages 182-3, Langer’s point about a parent’s responsibility to his or her children, Boonin relies upon a tacit consent argument that appears open to decisive objections. It seems to me, then, that the only possibility for a successful defense of an extreme liberal view concerning the justification of abortion will have to involve setting out a plausible account of what it is that gives something a right to life, and I think that the right answer is that neo-Lockean persons, and only neo-Lockean persons, have a right to continued existence. This leaves one with the scientific question of when developing humans become neo-Lockean persons. The answer to that question is perhaps still not firmly settled, although the extensive research that I carried out back in the 1970s seemed to me to support the conclusion that it is not until sometime that humans acquire the capacity for thought, a capacity that is necessary if a developing human is to be a neo-Lockean person. The upshot is that if one defends an extreme liberal view on abortion in the only way that seems to be satisfactory – that is, by setting out an account of what it is that gives something a right to life, and arguing that humans before birth do not have the relevant property, one must also address the question of infanticide, and that to fail to do so is intellectually unacceptable. (shrink)

Most ethics committees which review research protocols insist that potential research participants reserve unconditional or absolute ‘right’ of withdrawal at any time and without giving any reason. In this paper, I examine what consent means for research participation and a sense of commitment in relation to this right to withdraw. I suggest that, once consent has been given (and here I am excluding incompetent minors and adults), participants should not necessarily have unconditional or absolute rights to withdraw.This does (...) not imply that that there should be a complete absence of rights, or, indeed, an abandonment of the right to withdraw. The point of this paper is to show that the supposed unconditional or absolute nature of these rights may be self‐defeating and so fail to respect the autonomy of participants. In addition, and on a more positive note, I suggest that, attaching certain conditions on the right to withdraw, may better respect the autonomy of these participants by underlining the idea that autonomy is more than mere whim or indifference to the fate of others. On the contrary, research staff are currently unable to ‘push’ participants, who may merely have logistical difficulties unrelated to the research itself, but who really want to stay the course, for fear of coercing them. Furthermore, researchers now try to ‘screen out’ people they think may be unreliable to protect the science of the study and so groups at risk of dropping out may be unfairly denied access to research treatments. I conclude that on‐going negotiation between the relevant parties could be on balance the only truly acceptable way forward but concede certain important limitations to take into account. (shrink)

Do fetuses have a right to life in virtue of the fact that they are potential adult human beings? I take the claim that the fetus is a potential adult human being to come to this: if the fetus grows normally there will be an adult human animal that was once the fetus. Does this fact ground a claim to our care and protection? A great deal hangs on the answer to this question. The actual mental and physical capacities (...) of a human fetus are inferior to those of adult creatures generally thought to lack a serious right to life, and the mere fact that a fetus belongs to our species in particular seems morally irrelevant. Consequently, a strong fetal claim to protection rises or falls with the appeal to the fetus's potentiality, for nothing else can justify it. (shrink)

This is a Japanese translation of "Abortion and Infanticide" from Philosophy & Public Affairs 2/1, 1972, 37–65. -/- This essay deals with the question of the morality of abortion and infanticide. The fundamental ethical objection traditionally advanced against these practices rests on the contention that human fetuses and infants have a right to life, and it is this claim that is the primary focus of attention here. Consequently, the basic question to be discussed is what properties a thing must (...) possess in order to have a serious right to life. The approach involves defending, then, a basic principle specifying a condition living things must satisfy to have a serious right to life, and the answer given makes it unlikely that this condition is satisfied by human fetuses and infants, though this tentative conclusion could be altered by future scientific studies of the development of the human brain. As things stand at the moment, however, it seems unlikely that developing humans acquire the physical basis of the psychological capacities on which the right to continued existence rests, and therefore unless there are other substantial objections to abortion and infanticide that undercut the above line of thought, the conclusion is that such practices are not intrinsically wrong. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether vegan activists should cater to their audience by framing their message according to the pre-existing values of their interlocutors. Specifically, I focus on deliberative activism, which is based on speech and exchanges with the audience. I propose that message framing can lead to a neglect of animal suffering in favor of focusing on less contentious motives for veganism, such as environmental or health benefits. I claim that neglecting the issue of animal suffering can (...) have several problematic consequences. Concretely, I argue that message framing can: (1) lead to the objectification of animals, treating them as mere means to other ends (such as environmental and health benefits); (2) imply a denial of their personhood; (3) perpetuate their status as property; (4) enable future harm to animals; and (5) create a hierarchy of moral worth among different animal species. For these reasons, I suggest that message framing is less appealing than it initially seems. (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of (...) a wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render certain norms, (...) but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

An increasingly popular view in scholarly literature and public debate on implicit biases holds that there is progressive moral potential in the discomfort that liberals and egalitarians feel when they realize they harbor implicit biases. The strong voices among such discomfort advocates believe we have a moral and political duty to confront people with their biases even though we risk making them uncomfortable. Only a few voices have called attention to the aversive effects of discomfort. Such discomfort skeptics warn that, (...) because people often react negatively to feeling blamed or called-out, the result of confrontational approaches is often counterproductive. To deepen this critique, I distinguish between awareness discomfort and interaction discomfort, developing a contextual approach that draws on recent research on negative affect and emotions to chart a more complete picture of the moral limits of discomfort. I argue that discomfort advocates risk overrating the moral potential of discomfort if they underestimate the extent to which context shapes the interpretation of affect and simple, raw feelings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason by Beatrice LonguenesseMichelle GreerBeatrice Longuenesse. Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 420. Cloth, $59.50.Kant and the Capacity to Judge is a translation (...) of Longuenesse’s Kant et Pouvoir de juger, although Longuenesse has revised and added to the original version. The central argument seeks to demonstrate the essential role played by the logical forms of judgment in the arguments of Kant’s first Critique. Longuenesse emphasizes straight away Kant’s efforts (in the Metaphysical Deduction) to deduce a set of pure concepts from the logical forms of judgment. Against many standard readings, she aims to reveal the very “tight” connection between this attempt and subsequent arguments in the Transcendental [End Page 372] Analytic. That Kant takes the functions of judgment to be relevant to these arguments is hardly a novel claim. The originality of Longuenesse’s work, however, stems both from the central and pervasive role she assigns to the logical forms of judgment, and from the impressive, painstaking effort she makes to sustain the close connection between these forms and Kant’s subsequent arguments. According to Longuenesse, any proper understanding of the arguments of the Transcendental Analytic absolutely depends upon relating these “down to the minutest details of their proofs,” to the role of the logical forms (5).These minute details do not escape Longuenesse in her subsequent elaboration on this original thesis. Given the length and detail of her work, I can only highlight a few of the central points and strategies. One should note from the outset, however, that the detail and the scholarship evinced to support her claims constitute much of what is of value in the book. Many of these “supporting arguments” and discussions, which include efforts to trace Kantian conceptions back to their historical/philosophical origins, stand in their own right as independent contributions to Kant scholarship and interpretation.The work is divided into three parts. The first part is essentially propaedeutic. Longuenesse begins by drawing a distinction between the potential or capacity to judge and judgement itself (i.e., the “actualization” of this judgmental capacity under [externally grounded] sensory stimulation) (7). Taking this distinction as her cue, Longuenesse seeks to reveal the way in which the line of argumentation in the transcendental analytic presents an extended investigation into the formal capacity (ibid). The centrality of the logical forms of judgment is secured early on by assigning them a substantive role in the very presentation of something in intuition “as” an “object.” Insofar as she assigns this role to the logical forms themselves, her account clearly undercuts the primary function of the categories in this regard. Relevant here is Longuenesse’s construal of “appearances” as the intentional correlates of our representational capacities and activities (cf. 20–21). Given this, the problem now motivating the transcendental deduction is how to make sense of the relation between this “internalized” object of (indeterminate) empirical intuition (the appearance) and the object corresponding to intuition which concepts allow one to think in a determinate way (the phenomenon). This ability to think the object in a determinate fashion appears to be the essential contribution made by judgement.These preliminary considerations ground Longuenesse’s efforts (in Part Two) to isolate and examine the discursive activity of judgment. Longuenesse stresses the reflective (and not simply the determinative) role of judgment and its forms. Indeed, she suggests that concepts (not merely empirical concepts, but also the pure concepts of the understanding themselves) are formed by reflecting (through acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction) on the “sensible given.” Drawing extensively from the Logic, she interestingly argues that the form of judgment itself carries with it some inherent claim to objectivity. Thus, objectivity is folded into the formal activity of judging by being identified as a “normative propensity” inherent in every judgment by virtue of its form alone (87–88). Longuenesse accordingly eschews efforts to downplay the role of the logical use of the... (shrink)

Among the functions of state borders is to delineate a domain within which outsiders may normally not interfere. But the human rights practice that has sprung up in recent decades has imposed significant limits on a state’s right against interference. This article considers the connection between human rights on the one hand and justified interference in the internal affairs of states on the other. States, this article argues, have a right against interference if and because they serve their (...) subjects. Interference by outsiders threatens to set back their capacity to serve and thus ultimately harms those over whom the state exercises power. Human rights, in turn, circumscribe the outer limits of what any state can do while plausibly claiming to be serving its subjects. On this view, human rights are distinguished from other rights because they function as cancelling conditions on the state’s right against outside interference: while interfering in the internal affairs of a state normally wrongs that state, interfering where the state fails to respect human rights does not. Contrary to what is often thought, human rights violations do not justify outside interference. They merely make a state liable to such interference. The further considerations that must enter into an all things considered judgment in favor of interference are irrelevant for determining what human rights we have. (shrink)

In this paper, a rights-based argument for the impermissibility of abortion, infanticide and neglect of some pre-natal organisms and infants/children is advanced. I argue, in opposition to most rights-ethicists, that the potentiality for autonomous agency gives individuals negative rights. I also examine the conjecture that potential autonomous agents have positive rights in virtue of their vulnerability. According to this suggestion, once an individual obtains actual autonomous agency, he or she has merely negative rights. Possible solutions to conflicts of rights between (...) parents and their offspring are investigated. Finally, I discuss a lexical order between positive and negative rights, which may solve conflicts between the rights of potential autonomous agents and actual autonomous agents. (shrink)

Too often, the right to healthcare has been considered an illusory right that is not even a legal right, but merely an aspirational norm that cannot be adjudicated before the court. In modern human rights law, considering individual and social rights as interdependent and indivisible, such an approach is untenable. Both legal doctrine and recent case law from domestic and international courts have elaborated and confirmed the specific obligations under the right to healthcare, countering the general (...) complaint of “shrouded vagueness”. Landmark cases have even provided a functional remedy to enforce individual healthcare claims successfully. This paper will examine the revised legal status and content of such a right to healthcare from a European perspective. (shrink)

The right to withdraw from research without penalty is well established around the world. However, it has been challenged in some corners of bioethics based on concerns about various harms—to participants, to scientific integrity, and to research bystanders—that may stem from withdrawal. These concerns have become particularly salient in emerging debates about the ethics of controlled human infection (CHI) studies in which participants are intentionally infected with pathogens, often in inpatient settings with extensive follow‐up. In this article, I provide (...) support for preserving the right to withdraw from research without penalty and demonstrate that it is also typically justified in the specific context of CHI studies. The right is well aligned with individual freedoms outside the research setting, where autonomous individuals are permitted to engage in behaviors that will foreseeably cause them harm; where they cannot be compelled to satisfy contracts for their services, nor penalized for failure to do so; and where their behavior is not constrained by public health authorities except in extreme circumstances. These freedoms are supported by U.S. law, as well as by ethical analysis that is more globally relevant. The problems associated with the right to withdraw, however, remain. The best approach to addressing them is not to restrict the right but rather to avoid initiating research when withdrawal would be especially problematic. If research proceeds, steps can still be taken to minimize participant withdrawal without infringing the right. Investigators can avoid participant surprise through informed consent focused on a study’s most burdensome aspects and promote study completion through financial incentives. Should participants nonetheless seek to withdraw, investigators may attempt to persuade them not to do so by encouraging consideration of the range of potential harms that may result. Researchers conducting CHI studies and other research from which withdrawal might be especially problematic should prepare for the possibility of participant withdrawal, respect participant requests to withdraw without penalty, and incorporate various measures to avoid such requests. (shrink)

The view that the fetus' potential for human consciousness confers upon it the right to life has been widely criticised on the basis that the notion of potentiality is so vague as to be meaningless, and on the basis that actual rights cannot be deduced from the mere potential for personhood. It has also been criticised, although less commonly, on the basis that it is not the potential to assume consciousness, but rather the potential to resume consciousness which (...) is morally significant, and on the basis that the fetus does not really possess the potential for consciousness. In response, I argue that these criticisms are mistaken and that the potential for human consciousness is a sufficient condition not simply of potential, but actual, personhood. Since it possesses this potential from the moment of conception, the fetus should be considered an actual person from the moment of its conception. (shrink)

In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the ‘right to have rights’ as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancière’s response to Arendt’s aporetic account of human rights, (...) situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancière, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoë) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoë and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancière ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancière’s approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life. (shrink)

On the ethics of extending human life: healthy people have a right to carry on livingHumanity has long demonstrated a paradoxical ambivalence concerning the extension of a healthy human lifespan. Modest health extension has been universally sought, whereas extreme health extension has been regarded as a snare and delusion—a dream beyond all others at first blush, but actually something we are better off without. The prevailing pace of biotechnological progress is bringing ever closer the day when humanity will be (...) able to act on the latter view by rejecting a clear and present opportunity for much longer healthy lives. Indeed, some biogerontologists contend that that day has already arrived, to the extent that our hesitation in embarking on a vigorous “war on ageing” is already delaying the point at which a cure for ageing will be developed. Here I consider whether our present caution concerning the wisdom of truly curing ageing is likely to survive the increased scrutiny that it will receive in coming years as a result of these technical advances. I conclude that it will not, because of its irreconcilability with values that are more deeply held by the large majority of humanity than any values that argue against the quest for a cure. I further conclude that all the major current reasons given for not curing ageing are mere crutches to help us cope with the immutability of ageing that we have been brought up to accept. Our failure to set aside such irrationality is already shortening potential longevity—quite probably of those already alive today—to a staggering degree. Once we realise this, our determination to consign human ageing to history will be second …. (shrink)

Demands for improved access to innovative therapies have prompted a discourse that claims patients have rights to access treatments that may be of benefit, even if evidence that demonstrates safety and efficacy is lacking. This rights-based discourse is grounded in accounts of autonomy and assertions claiming that the state ought to not interfere with the free choices of patients and clinical decision-making. In this essay, we scrutinise these arguments to defend the ethical and legal permissibility of interference in contexts where (...) the uncertainty of benefit and potential for harm creates vulnerabilities that undermine patient capacity for self-determination. In support of this argument, we draw on two theoretical approaches to explore the limits of autonomy in innovative contexts and analyse the legal bases of the rights-based discourse. We then apply this analysis to the case example of stem cell transplantation as an innovative treatment for multiple sclerosis. (shrink)

Within the framework of a new interdisciplinary scientific scientific field – epistemological urbanism – the authors develop the idea of the human right to their city and show the epistemological nature of this right, which is explained by the fact that it is conditioned by the processes of cognition and scientific communication. Three main provisions are substantiated. Firstly, the city is an intelligent system. “The right to your city” is a specific right to scientific and intellectual (...) production and consumption. Such a right is not realized in every locality designated as a city, but only where there are conditions for intellectual dynamics – where art, education and science are developing. Secondly, the intellectual system of the city has autonomy. Each city has its own intellectual resource. Realizing the right to their city, citizens are involved in the activity of the city's scientific and intellectual autonomy. In other words, a city where there are opportunities to realize the “right to the city” generates an autonomous scientific school or a set of scientific schools. Thirdly, cities how research centers form a scientific network. Not a scientific consortium with common ideas and goals, but a network based on the principles of proliferation. The authors insist on the decentralization of science not for the purpose of its enclavization, but for the purpose of developing the potential, multi-vector and intellectual self-realization of urban communities themselves. It is shown that the development of science as a whole can be ensured by the heterogeneity of science itself : integration and differentiation give rise to an integration scientific and communicative process. (shrink)

After having received little attention over the past decades, one of the least known human rights—the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications—has had its dust blown off. Although included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)—be it at the very end of both instruments -this right hardly received any attention from States, UN bodies and programmes and academics. The role of (...) science in societies and its benefits and potential danger were discussed in various international fora, but hardly ever in a human rights context. Nowadays, within a world that is increasingly turning to science and technology for solutions to persistent socio-economic and development problems, the human dimension of science also receives increased attention, including the human right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications. This contribution analyses the possible legal obligations of States in relation to the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, in particular as regards health. (shrink)

Suppose we agree to reject the view that privacy has narrow scope and consequently is irrelevant to the constitutional privacy cases. We then have (at least) these two options: (1) We might further emphasize and draw out similarities between tort and constitutional privacy claims in order to develop a notion of privacy fundamental to informational and Fourth Amendment privacy concerns as well as the constitutional cases. We can cite examples indicating this is a promising position. Consider consenting homosexuality conducted (...) in one's home, for instance. We view it as a private matter, whether the state is seeking to regulate the behavior, or if others are attempting to gain or exploit information about it. I believe basic conceptual similarities between tort and constitutional interests can be identified by showing that there is a range of similar reasons for protecting both tort and constitutional privacy concerns. We might worry, however, that a comprehensive concept of privacy may be too general to be very useful, given that privacy violations can be so diverse, and can arise, for example, from misuse of confidential information, from conduct that is intrusive even if no information is gained or disclosed, from disturbance of an intimate relationship, or from disruption of various other important aspects of one's life.(2) We could concede that whatever “privacy” means in the tort and Fourth Amendment cases, it means something different in the constitutional cases. Nevertheless, we might take that “something else” seriously as a distinct but legitimate use of the term which is not “spurious” but is reflected in our ordinary language. This appears to me to be a fruitful alternative. After all, contrary to Henkin's view that tort privacy is “what most people mean by privacy,” the term is often used in contexts beyond informational privacy and clearly related to the interests at stake in the constitutional cases. Thus, for example, in a pamphlet explaining how to protect children by teaching them how to say “No!” to strangers without making them paranoid or antisocial, parents and teachers are told, Children have a right to privacy. Teach it. Reinforce it. One of the ways to help children prevent sexual assault is to encourage them to develop a sense of physical integrity. A sense that they have a right to their own body space and privacy. Just as we allow them to close the door when they use the bathroom, we must allow them to say no to any unwanted physical affection and touch. Flora Calao and Tamar Hosansky, “The Key to Having Fun is Being Safe: Teaching Personal Safety to Children,” The Safety and Fitness Exchange, 1123 Broadway, N.Y., N.Y. 10010. Unfortunately, the most obvious starting point for identifying the sense of private relevant to the constitutional cases is extremely worrisome. The Court itself has said ... only personal rights that can be deemed “fundamental”...are included in this guarantee of personal privacy...the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage...procreation...contraception...family relationships... and child rearing and education.Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).The difficulty, of course, is that little more is offered by way of explanation of which rights are “personal” or “fundamental” or both. Focusing on marriage makes Roe v. Wade difficult to understand given that Ms. Roe was unmarried, and attending only to family issues does not help us make sense of the Stanley case protecting one's right to view pornography in one's home. It is perhaps more problematic that decisions such as what color shoes to wear are reasonably viewed as personal, yet are far from fundamental enough to warrant protection. And regulations governing the draft and employment, for example, are not viewed as privacy invasions although they might be said to interfere with matters of one's life that are both fundamental and personal in the vague sense described.Before we give up in frustration, however, I would urge that we recall that even in tort law the notion of privacy has been evolving through a constellation of judgments. Although there is no fixed way of using the term which we then proceed to analyze, the concept of privacy has not in those cases been taken to be meaningless or empty. Similarly, there is reason to believe that the scope of a “personal and fundamental” notion of privacy relevant to the constitutional cases can be further delineated through a consideration of cases, especially since it seems to me that in many cases application of the term is clear and unproblematic. A decision to have a vasectomy, for example, can uncontroversially be said to be a personal and fundamental one, and it is in that sense private. We fail to acknowledge the personal significance in an individual's life of forcing or refusing him the operation if we deny that this important sense of privacy is relevant to such a decision merely because an interest in determining for oneself what one ought to do is also at risk.Of course, once it is settled that something is a private matter, it is a separate issue to decide whether or not, in some social context, an invasion of it can be justified. Thus, I would claim, a mandatory sterilization program for male recidivists or for those in a country suffering grave poverty and overpopulation does invade privacy, and the social or legal question is whether or not the invasion can, in the particular circumstances, be justified. Although all will agree that both individual and social interests must be balanced by moral philosophers as well as the courts, in conflicts we will not always agree on the weight to be accorded individual claims.I have not provided a constitutional defense for citing privacy as one right at stake in the constitutional privacy cases. Nor have I attempted to enter the debate about how strictly to interpret the Constitution. But if I am correct, then we can agree there is an important interest in privacy at issue in those cases without merely conflating privacy and autonomy or liberty, and can continue the process of marking out its boundaries. If we reach such agreement, we will have made considerable progress. Moreover, the implications of this view are significant. Current constitutional standards, controversial though they may be, require “strict scrutiny” for cases concerning “fundamental values,” and privacy has been judged to be one such value. Thus these privacy claims have a greater chance of being protected when they conflict with other rights or general interests than they would have if only liberty, or freedom from governmental interference, were involved. (shrink)

1. Two IssuesIn recent years, a number of philosophers have discussed the possibility that the widely recognized right of self-defense includes another, more controversial right: a right to arms, where “arms” is understood to include guns. I will argue in what follows that the right of self-defense does indeed have this feature, and I will offer a new explanation of why it does so—an explanation that, despite its novelty is, I believe, deeply rooted in common sense.I (...) n Section 2, I will clarify the issue to be addressed and define a spectrum of possible solutions to it. Underlying the narrow issue of the relation between the right of self-defense and the putative right to arms is a broader issue of more general interest, between two classes of rights: what I will call option-rights and means-rights. My ultimate purpose will be to propose a solution to both issues. In Section 3, I attempt to show that the most extreme solutions to the issue of self-defense and arms are not very plausible. In Section 4, I will lay down some desiderata concerning some features that an ideally illuminating solution to these issues should have. These will serve as a rough guide as I attempt to discuss the more moderate solutions. In Section 5, I discuss one such potential solution—one grounded in the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable costs. I argue that, though it may be plausible enough as a guide to policy, it does not satisfy any of my desiderata, nor does it answer my original question, about what is included in the right of self–defense. In Sections 6 and 7, I propose my own solution to both the narrower and broader issues—one that is grounded in the nature of action itself. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new self-defense theory of punishment, the rights-protection theory. By appealing to the interest theory of right, I show that what we call “the right of self-defense” is actually composed of the right to protect our basic rights. The right of self-defense is not a single, self-standing right but a group of derivative rights justified by their contribution to the protection of the core, basic rights. Thus, these rights of self-defense (...) are both justified and constrained by the basic rights they are supposed to protect. I then explain how this theory responds to a common objection. Opponents argue that, to exercise the right of self-defense, some threat must be present. However, in the context of punishment, the threat has already taken effect or is already gone. Thus, the right of self-defense becomes irrelevant when we punish an offender. I show that this objection is based on an implausibly narrow conception of self-defense. A reasonable conception would allow us to exercise our right of self-defense when there is a present definite threat, a future definite threat, or a potential threat. Thus, we may still exercise our right of self-defense in the context of punishment. (shrink)

Using the right to die and the United States Supreme Court case of Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health as exemplars, this article explores the notion of third-order decisionmaking. If first order decisionmaking is about what should happen, and second-order decisionmaking is about who should decide what should happen, then third-order decisionmaking is about who should decide who decides. This turns out to be an apt characterization of constitutionalism, which is centrally concerned with the allocation of responsibility for (...) making decisions about the allocation of responsibility. Deference to erroneous second-order decisions, as in the Cruzan case itself, may merely be an example of this central feature of constitutionalism. Keywords: constitutionalism, Cruzan case, right-to-die, rules CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

David Hume and James Madison believed that a republic can secure domestic tranquility by discouraging the development of factions. Modern computer technology shatters these hopes, which rest on the idea that factions will not grow because great distance makes it difficult for individuals to discover that others share their interests or grievances. Today, technology renders geographical distance increasingly irrelevant to communication with others. If Madison and Hume were right about the effects of distance prior to the current development (...) of computer technology, then we may experience the growth of factions and associated violence that Hume and Madison feared. Increased domestic terrorism made more effective by technologically developed weapons of mass death could be the way of the future. I contend that education can modify such developments by giving priority to Jane Roland Martin's suggestion that we adopt an educational aim intent on securing domestic tranquility. I revise the content of her proposal to include features of communicative rationality as an indispensable element of political dialogue. This provides resources by which factional elements can access and influence political discussion. If we are to enjoy a decent degree of domestic tranquility in the future, we must integrate potentially factious elements into the political process. To marginalize such elements, no matter how repugnant their political views, will merely serve to legitimate their use of terror as the only option available to them for political expression. (shrink)

The Ford Pinto’s fuel tank was prone to rupture in collisions above 20 mph, sometimes resulting in burn deaths. An infamous Ford memo estimated the cost of a shield correcting the problem at $11. Should Ford have installed the shield, holding public safety paramount, or, respecting consumer autonomy, have made the shield an option? Answering this question requires distinguishing between three kinds of autonomy: merechoice autonomy (deciding something for oneself, regardless of the content of the choice), proclamative autonomy (making a (...) choice that holds up a value or standard, commitment to which is partly definitive of who one is), and high-impact autonomy (making a choice that profoundly affects one’s ability to make proclamative choices). (This is not a formal distinction, that is, a distinction meant be to be clear, rigorous, and neutral). Autonomy is thus asymmetric: choosing to do x may be highly proclamative while choosing not to do x is not. In the Pinto case, not giving consumers the option of declining the shield undercuts only mere-choice autonomy. Several arguments are provided (including an argument based on the nature of moral agency) that proclamative autonomy (and, derivatively, high-impact autonomy), rather than mere-choice autonomy, has significant positive value. More precisely, it is argued that, as a rule, the more proclamative a choice is, other things being equal, the more weight autonomy claims about that choice possess. The paper concludes that common sense is correct about the Pinto case. In some instances, consumer choice may legitimately count more than the engineer’s commitment to public safety (particularly when proclamative choice is involved). However, losing the opportunity to save $11 is not too large a price to pay in order to counter market pressures against safety by inducing in engineers a professional commitment to put safety first. (shrink)

This paper examines whether physician-assisted suicide is morally permissible, and whether it should be legalised in the sense that those seeking or performing such procedure will be immune from prosecution. The issues of moral and legal permissibility1 are closely connected. One way to argue for the permissibility of PAS is grounded in the argument that a patient has the right to refuse life-saving equipment, or to have it withdrawn,2 and then to further argue that there is no relevant distinction (...) between refusal/withdrawal and PAS, if the patient consents. This is essentially the argument raised in “The Philosophers’ Brief ”, filed by six distinguished philosophers. However, this argument has been soundly criticised. Frances Kamm points out that the general claim on which Dworkin et al. rely—that there is no moral difference per se between killing and letting die—is false. This is because a patient has the right to refuse treatment even when this is against his interest because the alternative would be forced treatment, but it is not true to say that a patient has the right to PAS even when it is against his interest. Also at issue is the Doctrine of Double Effect, according to which there is a moral distinction between an action that is intended to cause death and one that is merely foreseen to cause death. [End Page 224] In section I of this paper, I shall argue against DDE, which purports to disallow PAS but not refusal/withdrawal. I shall argue that since it is permissible for a physician to prescribe morphine to a patient suffering excruciating pain, it is also permissible for her to prescribe such a drug to a patient suffering pain, with the intention that he be killed and hence relieved of the suffering. The grounds on which I rely is the thesis that intention is irrelevant to permissibility, as proposed by Judith Thomson and T.M. Scanlon. In section II, I shall discuss David Velleman’s argument that termination of life is morally impermissible. I proceed to examine in section III the theoretical version of the Slippery Slope Argument. In section IV, I shall consider the practical version of the Slippery Slope Argument. In section V, I shall discuss other consequentialist objections to the legalisation of PAS. In the final section, I shall consider the view that even if PAS is morally permissible, it does not follow that it should be legalised. The argument I consider is the consequentialist one that legalising PAS may have a very different significance—when we consider the total consequences—than if there is only a single act of PAS, considered in isolation. While I agree that consequences are generally very important, I shall argue that we should approach the issue from a contractualist rather than a utilitarian perspective.3. (shrink)

The “right to belong” is a human right in two ways. First, there is the right to belong in a limited sense, i.e., to the extent necessary for individuals to secure all other human rights, such as those recognized by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, there is a deeper aspect of the right to belong, that which is necessary to flourish as a human being. To establish, first, that the right to (...) belong in a limited sense should be a human right, I draw upon Hannah Arendt’s claim that stateless persons are without rights, as only communities can grant them. I argue that this limited level of belonging is a necessary but insufficient condition for human flourishing. Full human flourishing requires belonging on a deeper level. To articulate the nature of this deeper level of belonging I draw on Simone Weil’s definition of the “need for roots” and John Dewey and Jane Addams’ constructions of the self as social. I then show how “belonging” in a deeper sense necessarily connects with how a person is perceived and received by individuals and institutions in a community and argue that full perception by and participation in a community is necessary for humans to flourish. Thus, the right to belong imposes an ethical obligation on other members of the community to perceive undocumented immigrants as full human persons with the potential to lead flourishing lives. (shrink)

Medical interventions such as methadone treatment for drug addicts or “chemical castration” for sex offenders have been used in several jurisdictions alongside or as an alternative to traditional punishments, such as incarceration. As our understanding of the biological basis for human behaviour develops, our criminal justice system may make increasing use of such medical techniques and may become less reliant on incarceration. Academic debate on this topic has largely focused on whether offenders can validly consent to medical interventions, given the (...) coercive environment of the criminal justice system. Both sides in this debate share the assumption that administering medical interventions to offenders without their valid consent would be unethical. Recently, Thomas Douglas has mounted a formidable challenge to this “consent requirement”. Essentially, his argument rests on a comparison between prison and medical interventions. Douglas asks: if the state is entitled to impose a prison sentence on a criminal without the criminal’s consent, why is consent required for the imposition of a medical intervention? The most obvious way of defending the consent requirement against Douglas’s challenge appeals to the fact that incarceration merely interferes with the right to free movement, but medical interventions interfere with the right to bodily integrity. This argument rests on what Douglas calls the “robustness claim”—the claim that the right to bodily integrity is more robust than the right to freedom of movement. In other words, the right to freedom of movement loses its protective force in a wider range of circumstances than the right to bodily integrity. Douglas’s article seeks to undermine the robustness claim, by arguing that neither case-based intuitions, nor theoretical considerations support this claim. In this article, I will attempt to raise some doubts about Douglas’s challenge to the consent requirement and the robustness claim. (shrink)

There is an apparent ambiguity in Thomas Hobbes’s account in Leviathan1 of the source of the sovereign’s right to punish. Hobbes appears to both claim and deny that the prospective sovereign is granted the right to punish by prospective subjects. In claiming that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the acquisition of the right follows from authorization—a process by which a representative is commissioned to act on the behalf (...) of another person. In denying that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the possession of the right is merely the product of the mass relinquishment of natural rights; the prospective sovereign alone does .. (shrink)

In this short essay I argue that the main insight of Murphy and Nagel’s book, The Myth of Ownership, that people have no right to their pre-tax income, is not supported by their claim that the right to private property is not a natural right. The non-naturalness of the right to private property, I argue, is irrelevant to their moral argument. The plausibility of their moral conclusion derives from the thesis that people have a (...) class='Hi'>right to the fruits of their labor, maintaining, however, that there is no possible conception, morally speaking, of what the fruits of one’s labor are, independent of a system of legal and social norms that constitute the terms of fair bargaining, pricing, etc. People can only have a right to a fair assessment of the added value of their labor, and the latter cannot make any sense independent of the entire system of norms prevailing in the relevant society. I argue that this last conclusion is not affected by the nature of the right to private property. (shrink)

In opposition to what we claimed in Unfit for the Future, Jan Christoph Bublitz argues that people have a right to privacy which stands in the way of the use of biomedical moral enhancement. We reply that it is not clear that he has understood what we mean by a right to privacy, that we were speaking of moral and not a legal right to privacy, and that we take a moral right to privacy to be (...) a right against others that they don’t acquire certain beliefs about us. This is compatible with the fact that the means they use to acquire beliefs about us, or the use to which they put these beliefs could violate our moral rights. Once these points are taken on board, it becomes clear that the existence of a right to privacy is irrelevant to biomedical moral enhancement which consists in changing us rather than simply acquiring information about us. (shrink)

In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides comprehensive rules for the processing of personal data. In addition, the EU lawmaker intends to adopt specific rules to protect confidentiality of communications, in a separate ePrivacy Regulation. Some have argued that there is no need for such additional rules for communications confidentiality. This Article discusses the protection of the right to confidentiality of communications in Europe. We look at the right’s origins to assess the rationale for (...) protecting it. We also analyze how the right is currently protected under the European Convention on Human Rights and under EU law. We show that at its core the right to communications confidentiality protects three individual and collective values: privacy, freedom of expression, and trust in communication services. The right aims to ensure that individuals and organizations can safely entrust communication to service providers. Initially, the right protected only postal letters, but it has gradually developed into a strong safeguard for the protection of confidentiality of communications, regardless of the technology used. Hence, the right does not merely serve individual privacy interests, but also other more collective interests that are crucial for the functioning of our information society. We conclude that separate EU rules to protect communications confidentiality, next to the GDPR, are justified and necessary. (shrink)

I argue in this Article that our right to procreate should be balanced against the survival rights of the procreated children and against the right not to suffer an undue burden of those, whether near or far, who share the world with us. I observe that the African environment with its strong cultural values promotes the rapid rate of procreation on the continent and I find in the “best interests of the child principle” the most acceptable means of (...) challenging the status quo with minimum controversy. It is my conclusion that a right to procreate carries with it an inherent duty to act responsibly, and that this should be the basis of a legal framework to regulate procreation and maintain a balance between the right to procreate and the rights of potential children and/or third parties. (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao argues here that children have a right to be loved. To do so he investigates questions such as whether children are rightholders; what grounds a child's right to beloved; whether love is an appropriate object of a right; and other philosophical and practical issues. His proposal is that all human beings have rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life; therefore, as human beings, children have human rights to the fundamental conditions for (...) pursuing a good life. Since being loved is one of those fundamental conditions, children thus have a right to be loved. Liao shows that this claim need not be merely empty rhetoric, and that the arguments for this right can hang together as a coherent whole. This is the first book to make a sustained philosophical case for the right of children to be loved. It makes a unique contribution to the fast-growing literature on family ethics, in particular, on children's rights and parental rights and responsibilities, and to the emerging field of the philosophy of human rights. (shrink)

This paper analyses the right to repair (R2R) movement through the lens of radical democracy, elucidating the opportunities and limitations for advancing a democratic repair ethics against a backdrop of power imbalances and vested interests. We commence our analysis by exploring broader political-economic trends, demonstrating that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly shifting towards asset-based repair strategies. In this landscape, hegemony is preserved not solely through deterrence tactics like planned obsolescence but also by conceding repairability while monopolizing repair and (...) maintenance services. We further argue that the R2R serves as an ‘empty signifier’, whose content is shaped by four counter-hegemonic frames used by the R2R movement: consumer advocacy, environmental sustainability, communitarian values, and creative tinkering. These frames, when viewed through Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy, reveal different potentials for sustaining dissent and confronting OEMs' hegemony in the field of repair. Analysed in this way, an emerging business ethics of repair can be understood as driven by _the politics of repair beyond repair._ This notion foregrounds the centrality of non-violent conflict and antagonism for bringing radical democratic principles to repair debates, looking beyond narrow instrumentalist conversations, where repairability is treated as an apolitical arena solely defined by concerns for eco-efficiency and resource productivity. (shrink)

Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of ‘health’ as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. This article draws critically on literature about the implications of developments in medical biotechnologies, to argue that a (...) positive acknowledgement of the indeterminate character of health should transform, rather than simply hinder, the quality of debate over what is to be understood and expected in connection with a right to health. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related demands that may not stem from the scarcity of material resources or technical means, but from the misplaced authority of particular voices in defining what possibilities are to be seriously envisaged. This proposition only becomes politically effective, it is argued, when ‘indeterminacy’ (and the capacity for normativity) is referred to life itself and not merely to social and moral judgements about life. Although more immediately pertinent to the concerns of relatively privileged populations, the focus on indeterminacy provides a key to generating a certain symmetry and complementarity of interest, across the privileged/underprivileged divide, in promoting health as a (human) right. (shrink)

One of the much debated issues around the evolving human genetics is the question of the right to know versus the right not to know. The core question of this theme is whether an individual has the right to know about her own genetic constitution and further, does she also have the right to remain in ignorance. Within liberal traditions it is usually held that people, if they so wish, have the right to all the (...) knowledge available about themselves. This right is based on the value of autonomy or on the right of self‐determination, and it is sometimes partly justified as a countermeasure to the authorities' control over people. I do not wish to deny the right to genetic knowledge (about oneself). I think that its existence is self‐evident. The argument I want to put forth in this paper is that in liberal societies we should acknowledge people’s right to remain in ignorance as well. The only reason for not doing this would be that grave harm to others would follow if people were allowed to make these seemingly self‐regarding decisions. Arguments presented against the right to ignorance are twofold. First there are those arguing against the right to ignorance on the grounds of harm to others, that is, philosophers who do not deny people’s right to ignorance in self‐related matters but wish to state that genetic ignorance causes harm to others, and this is one of the most commonly accepted reason for restricting people’s freedom. The other line of argument flows from the Kantian view that not even merely self‐regarding foolishness (in the eyes of others) should be allowed. (shrink)

When a person finds herself in peril her right to be rescued is activated and a rescue duty is imposed on those who are in a position to help. In this article, I argue that the activation of the right to be rescued needs to be suitably constrained so that the rescuee is prevented from arbitrarily controlling the normative situation between herself and potential rescuers. Such control would be in conflict with the moral equality of persons. I argue (...) that the activation of the right to be rescued should be conditional on the person having a justification for the action that caused her peril. One implication of my view is that the right to be rescued cannot fulfill the function that Jonathan Quong ascribes to it. The right to be rescued turns out to be an unsuitable ground for the necessity condition which constrains the permissible use of defensive force. (shrink)

In mass democracies, voting—in elections or referendums—is the main way in which most citizens can publicly express their political preferences. And yet this means of expression is sometimes perceived by them as highly frustrating, partly because it does not allow for much expression. Dominant voting methods lead to a reduction of options, pressure citizens to vote tactically at the cost of expressing their genuine preferences, and fail to convey what they really think about different candidates, parties, or options. Yet citizens (...) do not merely have a right to vote; they have a more fundamental right to political expression from which one can derive a right to a voting method that offers the most opportunities for expression among those satisfying other important requirements. The aim of this article is therefore to add this consideration about the importance of political expression to debates about voting methods that have mainly been conducted from the perspective of social choice theory. To illustrate what is at stake, it introduces evaluative voting methods (allowing voters to grade all of the candidates, parties, or options) as a promising way of honoring the right to political expression without jeopardizing other important properties of voting methods. (shrink)

Since the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, they have diffused into policy frameworks, laws, and regulations across the globe. This special issue seeks to advance the interdisciplinary field of human rights research by examining key elements of the emerging transnational regime for the regulation of business and human rights. In seven original contributions, scholars from political science, law, accounting, and philosophy critically reflect on the theoretical foundations of (...) the UNGPs, they analyze the effectiveness of implementation mechanisms and current regulatory practice, and they advance proposals for the future development of the business and human rights regime. In this introduction, we prepare the ground for these analyses, proceeding in three steps. Firstly, we argue that the adoption of the UNGPs has triggered a norm cascade which requires a distinctive, empirically oriented research agenda focusing on the scope, governance, and effectiveness of corporate human rights accountability norms and instruments. Secondly, we explain how the articles in this special issue contribute to that research agenda by addressing these themes. Thirdly, we provide an overview of the individual contributions and point out avenues for future research. (shrink)

There is increasing consensus that the right to health can provide ethical, policy and practical groundings for health systems development. The goals of the right to health are congruent with those of health systems development, which are about strengthening health promotion organizations and actions so as to improve public health. The poor shape and performance of health systems in Chad question the extent of realization of the right to health. Due to its comprehensiveness and inclusiveness, the (...) class='Hi'>right to health has the potential of being an organizational and a normative backbone for public health policy and practice. It can then be understood and studied as an integral component of health systems development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Another Look at Silence and Knowledge of God in Ignatius's Letter to the EphesiansRyan Patrick Budd"The man whose delight is in the Lord's teaching knows the art of sitting still in the right place."—Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical PoetryIn this essay, I attempt to supplement the better analyses of St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Ephesians (Ign. Eph.) 14.1 through 15.3 with structural insights. The main (...) fruit of the analysis will be to affirm the "mystical" meaning of Ignatius's concept of "hearing Christ's silence": the mature believer, who truly understands Christ's word, will be able to hear the silence of Christ—meaning, to understand Christ's hidden and mysterious Godhead—because Christ dwells within the believer as in a temple. The essay will proceed in three sections: First, a review of the more substantive commentaries on "silence" in Ign. Eph. 14–15; second, a presentation of a potential structure of the passage and a commentary on what that structure, if correct, would yield; and third, a very brief confirmation of the findings by reference to themes in St. Paul's own Epistle to the Ephesians.Scholarly Commentary on Ignatius and "Silence"In discussing Ign. Eph. 14–15, scholars have come to a wide variety of views, for almost as many reasons, as to what Ignatius means when he says the following: [End Page 451]It is better to be silent and to be, than to speak and not be. Teaching is good, if the one speaking should do. There is, then, one Teacher, who "spoke and it came to be," and even the things he has done silently are worthy of the Father. The one truly hearing the word of Jesus can also hear his [Jesus's] silence, that he might be fully made, that he might act through what he says and be understood through his (the believer's) silence.(15.1–2)1There are, however, two predominant camps into which one could group the different scholarly opinions: the first camp holds that Ignatius merely is speaking about integrity, the correspondence between words and deeds;2 the second camp holds that he is enunciating a kind of Christian mysticism.3 Two prominent members of the second camp, Virginia Corwin and Gregory Vall, though quite distinct in their views of the bishop of Antioch, provide reasoning that I find decisive in favor of recognizing that Ignatius—while certainly emphasizing a true correspondence between words and deeds—carries the point further than simple moralizing.Virginia Corwin's "Reserve of Deity" and the Believer's Knowledge of ChristCorwin, in her analysis of the passage, points toward a "reserve" existing "behind" the visible works of Christ, which is to be identified with his invisible, and thus "silent," Godhead, which one who truly hears his word can also "hear." She acknowledges, however, that Ignatius first recognizes Christ as an example of a truly effective teacher due to the absolute [End Page 452] correspondence between his words and his acts. She writes, "Christ... is a teacher unlike most, since there is no contrast at all between his profession and his actions.... He has an absolute clarity and a complete lack of any hypocrisy."4 The result of this recognition is not to stress ethical integrity, however important: it is to argue that, because of the correspondence between Christ's words and his silent acts and his even more silent person, the one who knows his words can come to a deep, profound, and infallible knowledge of who he is, himself.Corwin argues that there is something more about this Teacher than the mere—though impressive—integrity of his message:But it is not only the integrity of the teacher that distinguishes him, but his unique power: "He spoke and it came to pass"; at these words to the minds of both the writer and the hearers of the letter must have occurred the image of the mighty acts of creation.... It is precisely because the words of Jesus are in a sense mighty acts that they must be seen in the larger perspective.5Which "larger perspective" she means... (shrink)

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between philosophers and non-philosophers on the question of gun rights is over the relevance of arms to our dignitary interests. This essay attempts to address this gap by arguing that we have a strong prima facie moral right to resist with dignity and that violence is sometimes our most or only dignified method of resistance. Thus, we have a strong prima facie right to guns when they are necessary often enough for effective dignified resistance. (...) This approach is distinctively non-libertarian: it doesn’t justify gun rights on the basis of (mere) liberty or security. Nonetheless it is compatible with libertarian defenses of gun rights based on a liberty right to guns, and, if sound, in fact lowers the bar for gun rights in some ways, as it justifies access to guns even when nonviolent means would better achieve the liberty or security aims of potential victims. And although this defense of gun rights is most readily categorized as “conservative” or rightist, it relies upon principles and intuitions about dignity popular among progressives in other domains, such as in disability, women’s, or LGBT rights debates. (shrink)

After the initial surge in cases of coronavirus, the outbreak has been managed differently in different countries. In the USA, it has been managed in many different ways between states, cities and even counties. This disparity is slowly becoming more and more pronounced with the advent of antibody testing. Although many argue over the potential merits of antibody testing as an immunity passport to allow the economy to restart, there are other implications that stand at the heart of the bioethical (...) debate that are often overlooked. Particularly with COVID-19, there are many uncertainties and the discourse alone of antibodies presumes misinformation that may outweigh the epidemiological benefits of antibody testing. Although this paper does not seek to eliminate antibody testing, it does highlight the need for appropriate counselling both on a personal level with each patient but on a more global level. This moral standard of appropriate education is key to allowing the continued autonomy needed during this pandemic. (shrink)

The debate on the right to be forgotten on Google involves the relationship between human information processing and digital processing by algorithms. The specificity of digital memory is not so much its often discussed inability to forget. What distinguishes digital memory is, instead, its ability to process information without understanding. Algorithms only work with data without remembering or forgetting. Merely calculating, algorithms manage to produce significant results not because they operate in an intelligent way, but because they “parasitically” exploit (...) the intelligence, the memory, and the attribution of meaning by human actors. The specificity of algorithmic processing makes it possible to bypass the paradox of remembering to forget, which up to now blocked any human-based forgetting technique. If you decide to forget some memory, the most immediate effect is drawing attention to it, thereby activating remembering. Working differently from human intelligence, however, algorithms can implement, for the first time, the classical insight that it might be possible to reinforce forgetting not by erasing memories but by multiplying them. After discussing several projects on the web which implicitly adopt this approach, the article concludes by raising some deeper problems posed when algorithms use data and metadata to produce information that cannot be attributed to any human being. (shrink)

If one has a right merely in virtue of being a person, she cannot lose that right as long as she remained a person – or so I argue. After sketching out what I mean by “natural rights,” “inalienable rights,” and “nonforfeitable rights,” I give some reasons to think any instance of the first would also have to be an instance of the latter two. I then respond to critiques of inalienability by A. John Simmons and Andrew Jason (...) Cohen. After which, I apply the argument given for why natural rights would have to be inalienable as a reason to think they would also have to be nonforfeitable. Then I respond to the idea that the nonforfeitability of natural rights would conflict with self-defense by outlining an alternate account of self-defense. In closing, I consider some potential implications of the inalienability and nonforfeitability of natural rights, should such natural rights exist. (shrink)

In his 2007 Ethics article, “Responsibility Incorporated,” Philip Pettit argued that corporations qualify as morally responsible agents because they possess autonomy, normative judgment, and the capacity for self-control. Although there is ongoing debate over whether corporations have these capacities, both proponents and opponents of corporate moral agency appear to agree that Pettit correctly identified the requirements for moral agency. In this article, I do not take issue with either the claim that autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are the requirements for (...) moral agency or the claim that corporations possess them. I claim that if both of these claims are correct, then corporate moral agency entails that, in a liberal democracy, corporations should have the right to vote. I show that under the conception of democracy supported by most liberal political theorists, all parties subject to the law are entitled to the right to vote, and all parties that possess autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are subject to the law. Therefore, if the proponents of corporate moral agency are correct, then corporations satisfy the requirements for the right to vote. I then consider potential objections to this argument. I show that the strongest objection to the corporate right to vote is undermined by Pettit’s own argument for corporate autonomy. I then show that objections derived from other arguments for limiting the rights of corporations are equally unavailing. I conclude with some observations about the implications of my argument for the question of corporate speech rights. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that patients who are subjects of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-supported diagnosis and treatment planning should have a right to a second opinion, but also that this right should not necessarily be construed as a right to a physician opinion. The right to a second opinion could potentially be satisfied by another independent AI system. Our considerations on the right to second opinion are embedded in the wider debate on different approaches to (...) the regulation of AI, and we conclude the article by providing a number of reasons for preferring a rights-based approach over a risk-based approach. (shrink)

The article reveals the Ukrainian experience of the transition from an exclusive to a democratic model of the implementation of the right to philosophical education. While the first model provides limited access to philosophy in the interests of the ruling state-party groups, in the second one, citizens are guaranteed an equal right to study philosophy as potential subjects of philosophizing. The coverage of this transition is conducted in the light of research and recommendations of UNESCO and relevant international (...) experience. The current state of Ukrainian philosophical education is analyzed and evaluated. Existing obstacles in ensuring equal access to philosophy are identified and, accordingly, conceptual guidelines for the formation of a democratic model of the implementation of the right to philosophical education in contemporary Ukraine are determined. (shrink)