It’s fashionable to call for supplementing traditional
economic measures with measures targeting the impact of policies on well-being.
Leaving aside worries about measuring well-being and implementing policies, a
more basic question remains: should the state be in the business of monitoring
and promoting people’s well-being in the first place? Call this the Question. I’m
going to argue that there’s good reason to answer in the negative: either
well-being policy is paternalistic towards the beneficiaries, or it imposes an undue burden on the benefactors. Insofar as we have positive
duties toward each other, paternalism is the lesser evil.
All of you are of course aware that here in the UK there has been huge phone hacking scandal. This scandal lead to the Leveson Inquiry on Culture, Practice, and Ethics of Press. Last week, on Monday 16th of July, the Inquiry interviewed various philosophers on freedom of speech, human rights, democracy, and media ethics. These incredibly interesting interviews can be viewed online. The morning session is on this page:
The philosophers interviewed in this session are first Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck), Sue Mendus (York), and John Tasioulas (UCL). The second half of the session interviews Rowan Cruft (Stirling) and Chris Megone (Leeds). The afternoon session is here:
It contains the interviews of Neil Manson (Lancaster) and Onora O'Neill (Cambridge). The page also has a link to an interesting witness statement from Jeremy Waldron (NYU).
A free online forum sponsored by Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Wiley-Blackwell. Scheduled to run July 9 to 13, the invited symposium "Feminists Encountering Animals," published in the Animal Others special issue of Hypatia, is open for public comments and discussion.
Leading feminist animal studies scholars Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals: An Introduction) and Kari Weil (Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now) invited six feminist scholars to reflect on trends within this burgeoning new field of scholarship. The online forum will include free access to their co-edited special issue in addition to commentary and real-time interaction among participants and authors—allowing for a lively discussion that extends the beyond the printed page.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in any given post reflect the opinion of only that individual who posted the particular entry or comment.
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