PEA Soup

Blog Symposium on Libertarianism and Land

Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, we're running a symposium this week on the topic of "Libertarianism and Land," featuring essays by Eric Mack, Hillel Steiner, Fred Foldvary, Kevin Carson, and David Schmidtz.

The first essay went up this morning: "Natural Rights and Natural Stuff," by Eric Mack. The other essays will go up one per morning for the rest of the week.

Conference: 'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'

Sam Wren-Lewis is organizing a conference on subjective well-being and public policy at Leeds in July that might be of interest to Peasoupers (indeed, several of us are speaking there). Here's the official announcement:

Conference:  'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'

Registration now open.

Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Layard
• Peter Railton
• Valerie Tiberius
• Dan Haybron

Goodin and the Big Society

As anyone who reads Leiter Reports or follows the Philos-L mailing-list knows, there has been a big uproar recently in the UK about the AHRC’s (a government body which funds Arts and Humanities research) ‘connected communities’ funding scheme. One problem is that, in advertising the scheme, the AHRC has adopted the current government’s notion of the ‘Big Society’. This raises a variety of important ethical questions about on what grounds public research funding should be distributed. However, in this post, I want to focus on the question of whether the Big Society is a good idea in the first place. It seems to me that, contrary to what some people at the AHRC and the government seem to think, there’s already plenty of good philosophical research done to show that it is not (which has unfortunately been ignored in the public discourse). So, to do my part of the unoriginal academic research on the Big Society, I want to lay out Robert Goodin’s argument against the Big Society from his wonderful 1988 book Reasons for Welfare – the Political Theory of the Welfare State.

Exploitation and Unfairness

According to what is now probably the standard view of (transactional) exploitation, it is a matter of someone taking unfair advantage of another (Wertheimer 1996). There have been various attempts to cash out the notion of unfair advantage, but I haven’t found a satisfactory one. I will propose a simple liberal theory, according to which taking unfair advantage is, in a slogan, taking advantage of unfairness. On this view, exploitation is a matter of degree: I exploit someone the more the more their willingness to engage in a transaction on my terms depends on what I will call structural injustice.

Property Rights and Moral Seriousness

I want to try to develop an argument against deontological libertarian moral principles that treat a wide range of our basic rights as flowing from morally powerful rights of self-ownership. I am curious how widely this problem afflicts a broader range of deontological views but I will not much pursue that here.

Previously (and following Nozick and Railton) I offered the criticism that such libertarian views have great trouble handing risk. The fear was that such views cannot explain why it is permissible for me to throw a stick for my dog when there is some small chance that the stick would violate the property rights of others. I now think (non-absolutist) libertarians should accept that, whatever amount of social good it takes to justify a property rights violation, they should say that it takes only 10 percent of that amount of good to justify a 10 percent chance of a rights violation. While this perhaps makes our rights more fungible for social good than the libertarian is comfortable with, it seems necessary to explain why we are permitted to fly planes, throw sticks, etc.

Personal Identity and Bioethics Essays

Some of our readers may be interested in this new collection of essays just published in Theoretical Medicine & Bioethics on the general topic of personal identity and bioethics.  There are excellent papers by Eric Olson, Marya Schechtman, Tim Campbell & Jeff McMahan, James Delaney & David Hershenov, and David DeGrazia.

Religion and Employment Discrimination

The Pope has recently launched an attack on the UK's anti-discrimination legislation.

The Pope seems to be referring to certain provisions in the government's Equality Bill which is currently being debated in Parliament -- specifically, the provisions that clarify the conditions in which an employer can lawfully refuse to hire someone because of their sex or marital status or sexual orientation. According to the bill, the principal conditions in which a religious organization may do this is when filling positions that "mainly involve (a) leading or assisting in the observance of liturgical or ritualistic practices, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others)."

According to the Pope, this "imposes ... unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs, [and] in some respects, ... violates natural law". I shall argue that on this point the UK government is basically right, and the Pope is wrong.

Consumers’ Obligations in Labor Disputes

Over at The Business Ethics Blog, Chris MacDonald has a very interesting post on ethical issues surrounding the labor dispute at the Westin St. Francis, the site of the 2010 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.  Specifically, he asks what obligations the existence of such a dispute might impose upon consumers.  Should consumers stay away from businesses when unions are calling for a boycott, or are on strike?

Chris raises a number of good points in his post, and I won’t repeat them here.  And I won’t try, just yet, to answer the big question of what consumers have all-things-considered reason to do in such situations in general, or in the situation faced by the APA in particular.  But I do want to set out a few questions that I think are worth addressing in the course of trying to answer that larger question.  I’d be curious to hear what PEA Soupers think about them, as well as what they think about the other issues Chris raises.

The Epistemology of Advance Directives

Here’s the familiar hard case: At 50, younger-Meredith (YM), just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, signs an advance directive (AD) expressing her preference that her doctors do not give her extraordinary treatment to keep her alive if she gets ill after having become demented.  Meredith is an intellectual, someone who values the life of the mind, and she feels that to be kept alive when demented would make of her life a cruel joke.  At 60, older-Meredith (OM) is demented but seemingly quite content with her life when she contracts pneumonia.  When asked if she wants to be kept alive via extraordinary treatment, OM says yes.  Whose preferences are morally authoritative, YM’s or OM’s?

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War"

We are pleased to announce the first installment of our collaboration with Ethics, where we will host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal will make a copy of that article freely accessible (for a limited time) to our participants. 

Our first featured article is Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War" (Volume 120, issue 1).  The article is now available here.  We are also very pleased that Jeff McMahan has agreed to provide a précis to introduce the discussion.  Professor McMahan's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Monday, January 11.