Recently added articles from Philosophy and Public Affairs:
Inequality and indignation
Oct 01, 2001; ... I. OVERVIEW Every society contains countless inequalities. Some people have more money than others. Employers have authority over the livelihoods, and many daily decisions, of their workers. Some people are well-educated, while others are not. In some nations, convicted felons are not ...
Taking people as they are?
Oct 01, 2001; ... My purpose is to consider if, in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Following Rousseau's opening thought in The Social Contract ..., I ...
The real tragedy of the commons
Oct 01, 2001; ... In two celebrated and widely anthologized articles, as well as several books, the biologist Garrett Hardin claims (a) that the world population problem has a certain structure: it is a tragedy of the commons; and, (b) that, given this structure, the only tenable solutions involve either coercion ...
Respect for persons and perfectionist politics
Oct 01, 2001; ... I. INTRODUCTION In an article published in this journal, Joseph Chan defends the view that Kantian liberals have no viable objection to a nonliberal or perfectionist state, i.e., to a government that seeks to promote happiness, virtue, or meaning in people's lives.1 Kantian liberals are ...
The scope of moral requirement
Jul 01, 2001; ... The subject of this article is the duty of beneficence: the obligation we have to promote one another's good. It is generally agreed that there is a duty of easy rescue; we are required to provide aid when that will prevent or relieve dire conditions for someone, when the cost to us is slight or ...
Distributive justice, state coercion, and autonomy
Jul 01, 2001; ... Liberalism has difficulty with the fact of state borders. Liberals are, on the one hand, committed to moral equality, so that the simple fact of humanity is sufficient to motivate a demand for equal concern and respect. Liberal principles, on the other hand, are traditionally applied only within ...
Brain death and spontaneous breathing
Jul 01, 2001; ... When is a person dead? Or more precisely: what criterion should be used to determine when someone is declared dead? The answer may have great practical importance, for perhaps it should determine when medical efforts whose aim is to sustain a patient's life may be discontinued or when a ...
Are all rights positive?
Jul 01, 2001; ... In Hohfeld's classical typology of rights, he says that all rights are "legal advantages" in that they serve in various ways to protect the interests of the right-holder. It has not gone unnoticed that Hohfeld's claim-- rights entail correlative duties, and that these are usually burdens to the ...
Illiberal libertarians: Why libertarianism is not a liberal view
Apr 01, 2001; ... Liberalism as a philosophical doctrine can be distinguished from liberalism as a system of social and political institutions. Philosophical liberalism maintains that, first, there is a plurality of intrinsic goods, and that no single way of life can encompass them all. There are then different ...
Justice between the young and the old
Apr 01, 2001; ... There is deep public concern about fairness between generations and age-groups.1 The obvious example is provided by public pension systems. These programs transfer resources from a later generation to an earlier generation, and from a younger age-group to an older age-- group. Historically, all ...
Recent work on addiction and responsible agency
Apr 01, 2001; ... We tend to sympathize with addicts who behave illegally or immorally in service of their addictive cravings more readily than we do with those who act in exactly the same ways but who are not addicted. The addict who kills for money to buy crack seems less a moral monster than the unaddicted ...
From freedom to liberty: The construction of a political value
Jan 01, 2001; ... 21. I have claimed in Shame and Necessity(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ch. 5, that this was the situation with slavery in the ancient world, which was typically regarded as necessary rather than just: the Helots in Sparta were indeed explicitly understood to be enemies in ...
The genesis of shame
Jan 01, 2001; ... I "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." So ends Chapter 2 of Genesis. Chapter 3 narrates the Fall and its aftermath: "The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons." ...
Taxes, redistribution, and public provision
Jan 01, 2001; ... Our aim in this paper is to introduce and defend a distinction that is often blurred in public debate about tax policy, and whose recognition would clarify the relation between disputes about taxes and disputes about social justice. Political conservatives usually argue for lower taxes ...
Must egalitarians choose between fairness and respect?
Jan 01, 2001; ... I In a recent article, Jonathan Wolff argues that egalitarians are forced to choose between the values of fairness and respect.1 According to Wolff, a properly egalitarian conception of fairness requires us to tailor the distributive shares of different individuals in ways that ...
Simplifying "inequality"
Jan 01, 2001; ... Amongst egalitarians there has been much controversy of late concerning precisely what it is that ought to be distributed equally. Proposed candidates have, most famously, included welfare, resources,1 primary social goods,2 basic capabilities,3 opportunities for welfare,4 and access to ...
Kantian patriotism
Oct 01, 2000; ... Patriotism and cosmopolitanism are often presumed to be mutually exclusive. Defenders of cosmopolitanism often view patriotism as a dangerous form of parochialism,1 and defenders of patriotism regularly charge cosmopolitanism with advocating rootlessness and denouncing family, community, and ...
Consequentialism and cluelessness
Oct 01, 2000; ... I. INTRODUCTION Shelly Kagan in Normative Ethics said: Perhaps the most common objection to consequentialism is this: it is impossible to know the future. This means that you will never be absolutely certain as to what all the consequences of your act will be. An act that looks ...
Deliberative democracy: A sympathetic comment
Oct 01, 2000; ... As with many novel ideas in philosophy, accounts of deliberative democracy have so proliferated that many wonder whether there is anything to the idea. But deliberative democracy has become more than just another popular label that philosophers attach to different ideas (although this happens) ....
The virtue of civility
Jul 01, 2000; ... The decline of civility has increasingly become the subject of lament both in popular media and in daily conversation. Civility forestalls the potential unpleasantness of a life with other people. Without it, daily social exchanges can turn nasty and sometimes hazardous. Civility thus seems to ...