bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Moral Pluralism and Philanthropy
Authors: Sidorsky David
Published: January 2009

The idea of moral pluralism generates a dilemma for the practice of philanthropy. Characteristically, the practice of philanthropy assumes unity, coherence, or convergence among the diverse virtues and moral aims that it pursues. In the philanthropic tradition, it is recognized that the goals of a particular philanthropy will vary. Yet, if these are sincere expressions of the philanthropic will, each represents some portion of the manifold activity of “doing good” according to particularized choice or style. The relevant analogy should be drawn to the slogan of “giving to the college of your choice” or to worship of the one god in your own way, where the plurality of expression is not only consistent with the residual value of education or of religion, but articulates the pragmatic way to realize the underlying values of a pluralistic society.

Historically, this reflects the place of a unifying religious vision of the nature of the good or of a secular conception of a public philosophy which recognized the common good. Even etymologically, the love of mankind suggests a single passion that is directed beneficently to the shared values of mankind.

The theory and practice of contemporary philanthropy is necessarily pluralistic, however, and it reflects the range of decisions by individuals with different interests and values in a pluralist, democratic society. The legitimized and recognized range of philanthropies in modern societies demonstrates divergent and even conflicting perceptions of the common good or the public interest.

Thus, the range of philanthropies includes support for bird watching and for business opportunities of minorities, which may require some decisions on “comparable worth” and competitive allocation of resources.
The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy
Authors: Cohen Joshua
Published: January 2009

There are two principal philosophical conceptions of socialism, corresponding to two interpretations of the notion of a rational society. The first conception corresponds to an instrumental view of social rationality. Captured by the image of socialism as “one big workshop,” the instrumental view holds that social ownership of the means of production is rational because it promotes the optimal development of the productive forces. Social ownership is optimal because it eliminates the costs of coordination imposed by the conduct of economic activities in formally independent enterprises, and, more generally, overcomes fetters on development that result from the control of resources by individuals whose particular interests (in profit) imperfectly correspond to a general interest in productive advance.
Socialism as Classical Political Philosophy
Authors: Lomasky Loren E.
Published: January 2009

A small puzzle: the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ initially present themselves as contraries, the one affirming what the other rejects. However, once removed from the dictionary, they function otherwise. The theory of capitalism is very much contained within the science of economics. The positive theory of capitalistic institutions, but also its normative superstructure, rest most easily within the language and methodology of the economist. What distinguishes the free market? It is efficient; allocation of factors of production are optimized; individuals maximize their utility; and so on. These are the terms with which justifications of capitalistic production typically begin – begin, and often end.
Marx, Central Planning, and Utopian Socialism
Authors: Arnold N. Scott
Published: January 2009

Marx believed that what most clearly distinguished him and Engels from the nineteenth-century French socialists was that their version (or vision) of socialism was “scientific” while the latters' was Utopian. What he intended by this contrast is roughly the following: French socialists such as Proudhon and Fourier constructed elaborate visions of a future socialist society without an adequate understanding of existing capitalist society. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism was not an idea or an ideal to be realized, but a natural outgrowth of the existing capitalist order. Marx's historical materialism is a systematic attempt to discover the laws governing the inner dynamics of capitalism and class societies generally. Although this theory issues in a prediction of the ultimate triumph of socialism, it is a commonplace that Marx had little to say about the details of post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, some of its features can be discerned from his critical analysis of capitalism and what its replacement entails.
Markets, Socialism, and Information: A Reformulation of a Marxian Objection to the Market
Authors: O'Neill John
Published: January 2009

One of the paradoxes of recent political and economic theory is that, in spite of a period of extended economic difficulty, there has been a growing consensus concerning the virtues of the market economy. In particular, there has been a trend in socialist theory to argue that not only are socialism and the market not incompatible, but that some version of market socialism is the only feasible, practicable, and ethically and politically desirable form of socialism. Notable proponents of this view with whom this paper will be particularly concerned are Selucky, Nove and Hodgson. I will not, in this paper, address the question of whether the market and socialism are necessarily incompatible. Neither will I examine the whole gamut of political and ethical issues surrounding the relation of the market to democracy, freedom, individual rights, and so on – not because they are unimportant, but because they require more extended attention than I could give here. My concern will rather be with some of the economic arguments to which defenders of market socialism have appealed.
Socialism, Capitalism, and the Soviet Experience
Authors: Nove Alec
Published: January 2009

What does the Soviet record tell us about the viability, effectiveness, and efficiency of socialism?

There are several questions that arise if one examines the Soviet experience, in addition to the comparative systems aspect (i.e., the comparison between capitalism and socialism). One question relates to the impact of the experience of the Soviet Union on theories of socialism, and also vice versa: the impact and relevance of socialist theory in assessing the Soviet system. Then there is the important issue of the role of specifically Soviet-Russian circumstances: traditions, political culture, and work ethic. A poet, Voloshin, wrote, “Velikii Pyotr byl pervyi bolshevik” (Peter the Great was the first bolshevik). The eminent philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev also remarked that “Peter's methods were purely bolshevik.” Leftists of a Trotskyist persuasion argue that the Soviet Union under Stalin took the wrong turn, that the Soviet Union is not socialist at all, that it is “state capitalist” – run by a “new bourgeoisie,” a bureaucratic ruling class—and continue to manufacture other variants on this theme.While official Soviet ideology claims that the U.S.S.R. is socialist and is following the principles laid down by Marx and Lenin, this can be questioned. One can indeed show that many aspects of the Soviet economic and political scene are at variance with the anticipations of Marx and of Lenin. But from this, one need not draw the conclusion that there was a “revolution betrayed,” but rather that some of these anticipations were unreal or unrealizable.
Mensrea
Authors: Hampton Jean
Published: January 2009

Accusing, condemning, and avenging are part of our daily life. However, a review of many years of literature attempting to analyze our blaming practices suggests that we do not understand very well what we are doing when we judge people culpable for a wrong they have committed. Of course, everyone agrees that, for example, someone deserves censure and punishment when she is guilty of a wrong, and the law has traditionally looked for a mens rea, or “guilty mind,” in order to convict someone of a criminal wrongdoing. But philosophers and legal theorists have found it interestingly difficult to say what mens rea is. For example, noting the way in which we intuitively think people aren't culpable for a crime if they disobey the law by mistake, or under duress, or while insane, theorists such as H.L.A. Hart have tried to define mens rea negatively, as that which an agent has if he is not in what we consider to be an excusing state. But such an approach only circumscribes and does not unravel the central mystery; it also fails to explain why the law recognizes any excusing states as mitigating or absolving one of guilt, much less why all and only the excusing states that are recognized by the law are the right ones. Moreover, the Model Penal Code, which gives a very detailed account of the kinds of mental states which justify criminal conviction, does not tell us (nor was it designed to tell us) why these states of mind (e.g., knowledge, purposiveness, intention, assumption of risk of harm, negligence) are relevant to an assessment of legal guilt.
Character, Choice and Moral Agency: The Relevance of Character to Our Moral Culpability Judgments
Authors: Arenella Peter
Published: January 2009

Should a person who cannot appreciate the moral significance of legal norms qualify as a blameworthy actor simply because he has the capacity to comply with them for non-moral reasons? Such a person may lack any empathy for other human beings and view moral norms as arbitrary restraints on his self-interested behavior: does he nevertheless deserve moral blame when he makes an instrumentally “rational choice” to breach a norm governing his action? Should our answers to these questions depend on whether we believe that the actor is morally responsible for lacking these moral emotions and understandings? In short, must we concern ourselves with those aspects of the agent's character – his goals, desires, values, emotions, and perceptions of what courses of action are available to him – that motivate his rational choices? Or are questions about what motivates the actor to exercise his capacity for rational choice irrelevant to our judgments concerning his moral culpability for violating some governing norm?

One way of thinking about such questions is to ask what attributes a person must possess to qualify as an appropriate addressee of moral norms and a suitable object of moral blame. Must a moral agent have the capacity to respond to moral norms as a reason for his choices? Must he also be able to control those aspects of his character that impair his capacity to make moral choices?

Most legal theorists insist that moral agents do not need such capacities to be fairly blamed for violating the minimal moral restraints that the criminal law imposes on their self-interested acts.
Reconsidering the Relationship among Voluntary Acts, Strict Liability, and Negligence in Criminal Law
Authors: Alexander Larry
Published: January 2009

This essay, as will become obvious, owes a huge debt to Mark Kelman, particularly to his article “Interpretative Construction in the Substantive Criminal Law.” That debt is one of both concept and content. There is rich irony in my aping Kelman's deconstructionist enterprise, for I do not share his enthusiasm for either the “insights” or the political agenda of the Critical Legal Studies movement. I do not believe that either the law in general or the criminal law in particular is radically indeterminate, rife with internal contradictions, or an expression of the interests of a dominant economic class. And although, like Kelman, I believe that the freedom/determinism, act/character, and rule/principle dichotomies must ultimately be dealt with in order to have a completely satisfactory account of criminal law, I also believe that these dichotomies loom just as large in other areas of law and in normative theory generally. They are problems for Crits as well as for liberal-legalists.

In any event, my intentions in undertaking this deconstructionist enterprise are modestly reformist, not revolutionary. I do not intend to shift any paradigms, but to work with well-established ones. I will assume that criminal law seeks to accomplish some blend of retributive response to and deterrence of culpable choices, choices to defy moral norms that are also legal norms. (I omit consideration of criminal laws premised on immoral norms.) I will also assume that a culpable choice is one that reflects negatively on the values held by the chooser. Beyond these quite modest assumptions, I need not and will not venture in this paper, realizing, of course, that much has and can be written about the proper aims of punishment and the proper account of culpability.
The Gender Question in Criminal Law
Authors: Schulhofer Stephen J.
Published: January 2009

Over the past decade, both the doctrine and the practice of criminal law have come under intensely critical review by feminist scholars and reformers. The territory under reexamination by or because of feminists spans the problems of women as witnesses, defendants, and prisoners in the criminal justice system; it extends to the situation of women as potential victims and offenders in diverse offense circumstances. Crimes in which the defendant or victim is typically female (e.g., prostitution, rape) are predictable subjects of feminist concern, but attention has extended as well to the dynamics of women's experience (arguably distinctive and certainly neglected) in connection with such offenses as assault, shoplifting, drug offenses, and even armed robbery.

Feminist criticism and reform efforts have focused for the most part at the level of specific rules or particular areas of practice. In this paper I want to comment on the structure of the feminist critique and to compare its underlying assumptions to those of criminal law as it has been traditionally understood and practiced. In at least some of its prominent versions, feminism entails orientations and commitments incompatible with those of the received criminal law tradition. To the extent that this is true, criminal law, constructed and expounded almost exclusively by males, can fairly be characterized (descriptively) as “sexist” or at least “gendered” (that is, male-oriented) in its core assumptions. Moving to normative ground, I suggest that if the descriptive claims of the feminist movement are true to any substantial extent, then criminal law – conceived in terms seemingly uncongenial to a large part of our population – would require thorough reexamination.
The Assumption of Risk Argument
Authors: Katz Leo
Published: January 2009

You buy a lottery ticket and you lose. You are sorry, but you wouldn't dream of complaining. Why then do you feel entitled to complain in the following sorts of cases?
Defensive Force as an Act of Rescue
Authors: Fletcher George P.
Published: January 2009

Jewish law takes an approach to self-defense that differs dramatically from the conventional assumptions of Western secular legal systems. The central theme of Talmudic jurisprudence is that self-defense rests on a duty not to stand idly by while one's neighbor suffers. “Do not stand on the blood of one's neighbor,” as the point is cryptically put in Leviticus 19:16. This way of thinking about self-defense departs in two significant ways from common Western assumptions. First, it stresses that the roots of self-defense are a duty rather than a right to act; second, it treats the case of third-party defense (defense of others) as logically prior to the first-party case ofself-defense.
Positive Retributivism
Authors: Ten C. L.
Published: January 2009

One dark and rainy night, Yuso sexually assaults and tortures Zelan. In escaping from the scene of his crime, he falls heavily and becomes an impotent paraplegic. Instead of treating his fate as divine retribution for his wicked acts, Yuso sees it as sheer bad luck. He shows no remorse for what he has done, and vainly hopes that he will recover his powers, which he now treats as involuntarily hoarded resources to be used on less rainy days. In the presence of others, he pretends that he has turned over a new leaf. He asks for religious and educational books, hoping (he tells everyone) to make up for his poor education and deprived social background. But he immediately discards them when he is alone in favor of the pornographic magazines which he has bribed a nurse to smuggle in for him. His deception and various obscene acts committed in the hospital are exposed; by the time he comes up for trial, everyone knows that he is still a lustful, sadistic, and unrepentant man.

Most retributivists have a sufficient justification for punishing Yuso independently of the social consequences of his punishment. Two features of the case might cause some difficulties. First, Yuso has already experienced considerable suffering and deprivation both before and after his crime, and retributivists might disagree about the relevance of the suffering to his punishment. Secondly, Yuso is unrepentant, and it is unlikely that punishment will change him. This might, as we shall see, create a problem for those who think that the justifying aim of punishment is the moral reform of the offender.
Getting Even: The Role of the Victim
Authors: Murphy Jeffrie G.
Published: January 2009

Achilles is vindictive; he wants to get even with Agamemnon. Being so disposed, he sounds rather like many current crime victims who angrily complain that the American system of criminal justice will not allow them the satisfactions they rightfully seek. These victims often feel that their particular injuries are ignored while the system addresses itself to some abstract injury to the state or to the rule of law itself – a focus that appears to result in wrongdoers being treated with much greater solicitation and respect than their victims receive. If the actual victims are noticed at all (other than to alert the state to a violation of its interests), they will likely be told that there is another branch of law – tort law – that has the job of dealing with private injuries and grievances and that, if they pursue this route at their own expense, they might ultimately get some financial compensation for the wrongs done to them. However, just as Achilles felt that mere compensation was inadequate to the kind of injury done to him by Agamemnon, many of these victims will often claim that the injuries they have suffered (brutal rape, perhaps) do not admit of financial compensation. How, they might ask, can a dollar value be set on the humiliation and degradation they have experienced? They might also note that those who injure them tend, unlike Agamemnon, to be judgment-proof – so lacking in resources as to be unable to make any meaningful contribution to any compensation package that the victim may win.
On the Common Saying that it is Better that Ten Guilty Persons Escape than that One Innocent Suffer:ProandCon
Authors: Reiman Jeffrey , Haag Ernest Van Den
Published: January 2009

InZadig, published in 1748, Voltaire wrote of “the great principle that it is better to run the risk of sparing the guilty than to condemn the innocent.” At about the same time, Blackstone noted approvingly that “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” In 1824, Thomas Fielding cited the principle as an Italian proverb and a maxim of English law. John Stuart Mill endorsed it in an address to Parliament in 1868. General acceptance of this maxim continues into our own period, yet it is difficult (and for us so far, impossible) to find systematic attempts to defend the maxim. It is treated as a truism in no need of defense. But the principle within it is not at all obvious; and since it undergirds many of our criminal justice policies, we should be sure that it is justifiable. First, however, we must clarify what the principle means.
Liberty and Equality: How Politics Masquerades as Philosophy
Authors: Hare R. M.
Published: January 2009

It is my intention in this paper to highlight the dangers which arise when people appeal to moral intuitions to settle questions in political, and in general in applied, philosophy. But first I want to ask why all or nearly all of us are in favour both of liberty and of equality – why all our intuitions are on their side.

In the case of liberty it is easy to understand why. Although philosophers have held diverse theories about the concept of liberty – theories which have been drawn together into two main groups in a famous lecture by Sir Isaiah Berlin – there cannot be much doubt that in the mind of the ordinary man to have liberty (to be free; I shall not distinguish between freedom and liberty) is to be under no constraint in doing what one wants to do. This, at any rate, is a main constituent of the concept of liberty as all of us understand it.

Since, therefore, it seems self-evidently true that we want to be able to do what we want, we are bound to want liberty and, in general, to be in favour of it. We want it for ourselves; if we universalize our prescriptions, this constrains us to be in favour of it for others as well. That explains why, if any politician can claim that he is fighting for liberty, he is likely to win a large following.

In the case of equality the matter is not so clear cut.
Some Thoughts on Liberty, Equality, and Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Authors: Dannhauser Werner J.
Published: January 2009

1. In praise of Tocqueville. The young United States was lucky – and deserving of its luck – to find as profound an interpreter of its principles as Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859). So deeply, so philosophically, did he comprehend this country in Democracy in America1 that today's reflections on liberty and equality in America either copy Tocqueville or fall short of understanding. The following reflections will be guilty of both plagiarism and superficiality but they do intend to capture something of Tocqueville's spirit. He gave this nation its due. He brought to his endeavors some advantages we no longer enjoy. For example, he had first-hand experience of democracy's great alternative and predecessor, aristocracy; he knew both sides because he was both sides.

Of course, some advantages accrue to those of us who have come after him, even apart from having Democracy in America to study. The United States may not be old but it is older now; we can take later developments into account. Thus, we no longer lack poets or poetry; we probably suffer as much from crime as from vice; and juries do not function all that well. But no dwarfish ability to climb the shoulders of a giant nor special dispensation from history can compensate us for the lack of Tocqueville's genius: the breadth of vision that recalls Montesquieu and even Aristotle, an intimacy, reminiscent of Rousseau, with modernity's demons, a sad coming to terms with human contingency that puts one in mind of Thucydides. All honor to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Towards a Theory of Taxation
Authors: Lucas J. R.
Published: January 2009

“Towards a Theory of Taxation” is a proper theme for an Englishman to take when giving a paper in America. After all it was from the absence of such a theory that the United States derived its existence. The Colonists felt strongly that there should be no taxation without representation, and George III was unable to explain to them convincingly why they should contribute to the cost of their defense. Since that time, understanding has not advanced much. In Britain we still maintain the fiction that taxes are a voluntary gift to the Crown, and taxing statutes are given the Royal Assent with the special formula, “La Reine remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult” instead of the simple “La Reine le veult,” and in the United States taxes have regularly been levied on residents of the District of Columbia who until recently had no representation in Congress, and by the State of New York on those who worked but did not reside in the State, and so did not have a vote. Taxes are regularly levied, in America as elsewhere, on those who have no say on whether they should be levied or how they should be spent. I am taxed by the Federal Government on my American earnings and by state governments on my American spending, but I should be hard put to it to make out that it was unjust. Florida is wondering whether to follow California in taxing multinational corporations on their world-wide earnings.
Ethics and Stochastic Processes
Authors: Hardin Russell
Published: January 2009

There is some irony, and perhaps a bit of gallows humor, in opening a paper in this volume with the claim that “applied ethics” is a misnomer. Yet that claim is true in the following sense. What we need for most of the issues that have sparked the contemporary resurgence of moral and political theory is not the application of ethics as we know it, but the revamping of ethics to make it relevant to the issues we face. It is in our concern with major policy programs that ethics and political philosophy are most commonly rejoined to become a unified enquiry after a nearly complete separation through most of this century. Yet, ethical theories may be shaken to their foundations by our effort to apply them to policy problems. I do not propose to revamp ethics here, but only to show that much ethical theory cannot readily be applied to major policy problems.

There are at least three important characteristics of major policy issues in general that may give traditional moral theories difficulties. First, such issues can generally be handled only by institutional intervention; they commonly cannot be resolved through uncoordinated individual action. Theories formulated at the individual level must therefore be recast to handle institutional actions and possibilities. Second, major policy issues typically have complicating strategic interactions between individuals at their bases. Third, they are inherently stochastic in the important sense that they affect large numbers with more or less determinable (or merely guessable) probabilities. C. H. Waddington calls such issues instances of “the problem of the ethics of stochastic processes.”
Two-Tier Moral Codes
Authors: Smith Holly M.
Published: January 2009

A moral code consists of principles that assign moral status to individual actions – principles that evaluate acts as right or wrong, prohibited or obligatory, permissible or supererogatory. Many theorists have held that such principles must serve two distinct functions. On the one hand, they serve atheoreticalfunction, insofar as they specify the characteristics in virtue of which acts possess their moral status. On the other hand, they serve apracticalfunction, insofar as they provide an action-guide: a standard by reference to which a person can choose which acts to perform and which not. Although the theoretical and practical functions of moral principles are closely linked, it is not at all obvious that what enables a principle to fill one of these roles automatically equips it to fill the other. In this paper I shall briefly examine some of the reasons why a moral principle might fail to fill its practical role, i.e., be incapable of guiding decisions. I shall then sketch three common responses to this kind of failure, and examine in some detail the adequacy of one of the most popular of these responses.
What are Civil Rights?
Authors: Weinreb Lloyd L.
Published: January 2009

For all the discussion and debate about civil rights, it is striking how little attention is given initially to the question of what civil rights are. There is no well-understood principle of inclusion or exclusion that defines the category. Nor is there an agreed list of civil rights, except perhaps a very short, avowedly nonexhaustive one, with rather imprecise entries. Yet, if the extension of the category of civil rights is uncertain, its significance is not. All agree that it is a principal task of government to protect civil rights, so much so, indeed, that a failure to protect them usually is regarded as outweighing substantial achievements of other kinds. But a right does not count as a civil right just because it is valuable or valued. Some of the rights most often asserted as civil rights reflect practical interests of their possessors considerably less than other actual or potential rights not so identified.

In the United States, familiar legal doctrine provides a shortcut to the specification of civil rights. They are whatever is embraced by the provisions of the federal Civil Rights Acts: the right to vote, fair housing, equal employment opportunity, and so forth. That path, however, is not adequate for the present purpose. For the most part, the statutes refer explicitly or implicitly to federal constitutional rights, and the collective reference to them as civil rights is unexplained. The bases of the constitutional rights are too various to be a reliable guide to an independently designated category of civil rights.
Two Conceptions of Civil Rights
Authors: Epstein Richard A.
Published: January 2009

I.WhatVintage ofCivilRights?

In this paper I wish to compare and contrast two separate conceptions of civil rights and to argue that the older, more libertarian conception of the subject is preferable to the more widely accepted version used in the modern civil rights movement. The first conception of civil rights focuses on the question of individual capacity. The antithesis of a person with civil rights is the slave. But even if individuals are declared free, they are nonetheless denied their civil rights if they are unable to own property, to enter into contracts, to make wills, to give evidence, and to sue (and be sued) in courts. With all these civil rights claims, the target of the individual grievance is the state; it has denied large classes of individuals the formal capacities that it recognized and protected in others. The Civil War was fought largely over slavery. In its aftermath, civil rights claims protecting individual capacity received explicit, if imperfect, statutory and constitutional protection. The postbellum protections didnotguarantee these rights in absolute fashion – that is, in a way that would not be susceptible to abridgment under any circumstances. Instead, civil rights were protected in what might be called a relative fashion: whatever rights of this sort were enjoyed by white citizens were to be enjoyed by the newly freed black citizens as well.
Plural but Equal: Group Identity and Voluntary Integration
Authors: Roback Jennifer
Published: January 2009

During this period, when disciples were growing in number, a grievance arose on the part of those who spoke Greek, against those who spoke the language of the Jews; they complained that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution.

When Americans think of ethnic conflict, conflict between blacks and whites comes to mind most immediately. Yet ethnic conflict is pervasive around the world. Azerbijanis and Turks in the Soviet Union; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Arabs and Jews in the Middle East; Maoris and English settlers in New Zealand; Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan; French and English speakers in Quebec; Africans, Afrikaaners, and mixed-race people in South Africa, in addition to the tribal warfare among the Africans themselves: these are just a few of the more obvious conflicts currently in the news. We observe an even more dizzying array of ethnic conflicts if we look back just a few years. Japanese and Koreans; Mongols and Chinese; Serbs and Croats; Christians and Buddhists in Viet Nam: these ancient antagonisms are not immediately in the news, but they could erupt at any time. And the history of the early Christian Church recounted in the Acts of the Apostles reminds us that suspicion among ethnic groups is not a modern phenomenon; rather, it is ancient.

The present paper seeks to address the problem of ethnic conflict in modern western democracies. How can our tools and traditions of participatory governments, relatively free markets, and the common law contribute to some resolution of the ancient problems that we find within our midst? In particular, I want to focus here on the question of ethnic integration.
Affirmative Action Rhetoric
Authors: Radin Margaret Jane
Published: January 2009

For the students, while the numbers are up,… the problem that minorities face – and it is persistent – is that there is still too much of a patronizing air in the professional schools. And there's still too much of the notion that if you're here it must be because someone gave you a break and you're different and you really don't belong here. And indeed when my son went off to school four years ago… I really wanted to warn him about the atmosphere that you see on all too many campuses, diat if you're black and walking on campus, that all too many people look at you and say, “You must be an affirmative action product,” whatever that means to them. “You're here only at our good grace.” And no one's looking at the individual. Thinking about it in retrospect, I guess, in some ways I enjoyed an advantage in being [the only black in my law school class]. It was a terrible disadvantage in a lot of ways, but, because I was the only black, the one thing I never faced was anyone ever challenging my intellectual capability. The way they brought this off was to say, “Well, you're different. You're black but you're not really black.” I think it's a lot worse now…. Professional schools are hard enough as it is, and to constantly have the pressure of what others are thinking about you and wondering whether you really belong, that really is a difficult burden.
Liberty Versus Equal Opportunity
Authors: Fishkin James S.
Published: January 2009

Liberalism has often been viewed as a continuing dialogue about the relative priorities between liberty and equality. When the version of equality under discussion requires equalization of outcomes, it is easy to see how the two ideals might conflict. But when the version of equality requires only equalization of opportunities, the conflict has been treated as greatly muted since the principle of equality seems so meager in its implications. However, when one looks carefully at various versions of equal opportunity and various versions of liberty, the conflict between them is, in fact, both dramatic and inescapable. Each version of the conflict poses hard choices which defy anysystematicpattern granting priority to one of these basic values over the other. In this essay, I will flesh out and argue for this picture of fundamental conflict, and then turn to some more general issues about the kinds of answers we should expect to the basic questions of liberal theory.
Rights to Compensation
Authors: O'Neill Onora
Published: January 2009

Rights to compensation are much invoked and much disputed in recent liberal debates. The disputes are generally about supposed fundamental (natural, human or moral) rights to compensation, whose recognition and legal enactment would transform some lives. For example, special treatment in education or employment are claimed as compensation for past denials of equal opportunity; special consideration for Third World countries in aid and trade terms is claimed as compensation for the injustices of the colonial past.

We can make ready sense of the idea of legal rights to compensation. Legal rights to compensation guarantee (some) recompense for damage suffered. The damage for which compensation is given may or may not be produced by wrongdoing; it may also be negligent or accidental or due to natural causes. In law, compensation is not always contingent upon the victim having suffered injury as well as harm, nor upon saddling a wrong-doer with the costs of compensation. Insurance policies standardly cover damage due to accident and neglect. Legal rights to compensation may provide for payments to victims of violent crime, to those whose property is requisitioned or damaged, to victims of libel or malpractice, and even to victims of natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. Legal rights to compensation are a standard way of dealing with the predicament of those who become victims, whether of others' (criminal) action, of their own negligence, or of natural catastrophe.

None of this shows that there are fundamental rights to compensation. Legal rights to compensation may lack moral grounding: and if they are morally grounded, they may rest not on fundamental rights to compensation, but on background positions in which rights are derivative or inessential.
Equal Opportunity in a Pluralistic Society
Authors: Nickel James W.
Published: January 2009

The United States has never been culturally or religiously homogeneous, but its diversity has greatly increased over the last century. Although the U.S. was first a multicultural nation through conquest and enslavement, its present diversity is due equally to immigration. In this paper I try to explain the difference it makes for one area of thought and policy – equal opportunity – if we incorporate cultural and religious pluralism into our national self-image. Formulating and implementing a policy of equal opportunity is more difficult in diverse, pluralistic countries than it is in homogeneous ones. My focus is cultural and religious diversity in the United States, but my conclusions will apply to many other countries – including ones whose pluralism is found more in religion than in culture.
Real Equality of Opportunity
Authors: Gross Barry R.
Published: January 2009

We are often told that we are morally obligated to produce equal opportunity for all. Therefore, it seems we should examine what power we have to produce that desirable state. For it would be nonsense to say we are required to provide what is beyond our power to provide. When we examine this question, we find our power limited by two sets of constraints. One set comprises formal constraints upon the idea itself of equal opportunity. We cannot do the logically impossible. The other set comprises limits upon our ability to produce the directed socio-economic change, getting known outputs for known inputs. I illustrate the formal constraints by outlining the work of Douglas Rae. The constraints upon our abilities I illustrate with evidence from sociology and politics. At the end, we shall discover that our power to make opportunities equal is sharply though not unbearably limited. A critical but unbaised survey will reveal that in the past fifty years we have gone remarkably far towards doing all that we are presently capable of doing to equalize opportunities. Perhaps we shall go even farther when we learn how.

The word ‘real’ in the title is opposed to ‘ideal’ or even ‘chimerical'. It may seem an interesting question what equality of opportunity should consist in were we able to produce directed socio-economic change at will. But we are not. Therefore, a more interesting and more important question is what equality of opportunity consists in given the very large number of constraints within which we must work to achieve it.
Global Equality of Opportunity and National Integrity
Authors: Boxil Bernard R.
Published: January 2009

Philosophers have long distinguished various interpretations of the principle of equal opportunity and argued over their implications and justifications. But they have almost always tacitly assumed that the context was a national one. They have not, in particular, considered whether some interpretation of the principle could apply and be justified globally, that is, to all people without regard to their nationality or citizenship. Yet, such an investigation is clearly demanded. The leading moral theories seem to support a case for at least some interpretation of the equal opportunity principle, and it is not obvious that they can support it only domestically.

Consider, first, those moral theories which place great value on negative liberty, for example, libertarianism. Libertarianism supports a standard interpretation of the equal opportunity principle – “formal” equality of opportunity; formal equality of opportunity requires that legal restrictions j on the taking of opportunities be lifted, and such restrictions diminish negative liberty. But libertarianism would also seem to support a global. version of formal equality of opportunity, for example, that laws be rescinded which require that candidates for jobs in a country be citizens of that country, or which restrict emigration or immigration. Such laws also diminish negative liberty.

Or consider those moral theories which place great value on efficiency, for example, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism probably supports formal equality of opportunity because legal restrictions on the taking of opportunity not only diminish negative liberty, but also often prevent talent and skill from going where it can best be used and thus reduce efficiency.
Discrimination and Income Inequality
Authors: O'Neill June Ellenoff
Published: January 2009

Discrimination against particular groups has existed throughout history and in all types of societies. Few would challenge the idea that inequality of income based on discrimination is unjust. The more problematic issues are the extent to which discrimination is in fact a significant source of inequality and whether such discrimination-based inequality is inherent in a capitalist system.

There is little doubt that discrimination can affect a group's income. But the link is by no means automatic or certain. Thus, the incomes of blacks, particularly in past decades, seem surely to have been lowered by discrimination. Yet other examples are less clear. Jewish and Japanese Americans, for instance, have had incomes substantially above those of white non-Jewish groups, despite evidence of discrimination against them.
Predicting Performance
Authors: Sher George
Published: January 2009

Equal opportunity requires (at least) that persons be selected for desirable positions on the basis of their qualifications. To assess an applicant's qualifications, we must both predict how well he would perform if chosen, and compare his projected performance with that of his rivals. Since we lack direct access to future performance (and since only those, who are chosen will ultimately perform), all such predictions must be based on some past– or present-tense information about the applicants, together with some relevant supporting information. But is any and every way of predicting performance acceptable? Or are some methods of predicting improper even if they are more accurate than any available alternatives? And, if some methods of predicting are improper, which ones are these, and why?
Positive Sexism
Authors: Sumner L. W.
Published: January 2009

No one who cares about equal opportunity can derive much comfort from the present occupational distribution of working women. In the various industrial societies of the West, women comprise between one quarter and one-half of the national labor force. However, they tend to clustered in employment sectors – especially clerical, sales, and service J occupations – which rank relatively low in remuneration, status, autonomy, and other perquisites. Meanwhile, the more prestigious and rewarding managerial and professional positions, as well as the major categories of blue-collar labor, remain largely a male preserve. In the same societies the average income earned by full-time female workers is one-half to two- J thirds that of their male counterparts. Although this disparity owes much to i other factors, including lower pay for work similar or even identical to that r standardly done by men, much of it can be explained only by the concentration of working women in traditional female job ghettos.
Why Should We Care about Group Inequality?
Authors: Loury Glenn C.
Published: January 2009

This essay is about the ethical propriety and practical efficacy of a range of policy undertakings which, in the last twenty years, has come to be referred to as “affirmative action.” These policies have been contentious and problematic, and a variety of arguments have been advanced in their support. Here I try to close a gap, as I see it, in this “literature of justification” which has grown up around the practice of preferential treatment. My principal argument along these lines is offered in the next section. I then consider how some forms of argument in support of preferential treatment, distinctly different from that offered here, not only fail to justify the practice but, even worse, work to undermine the basis for cooperation among different ethnic groups in the American democracy. Finally, I observe that as a practical matter the use of group preference can, under circumstances detailed in the sequel, produce results far different from the egalitarian objectives which most often motivate their adoption.

It may seem fatuous in the extreme to raise as a serious matter, in the contemporary United States, the question “Why should we care about group inequality?” Is not the historical and moral imperative of such concern self-evident? Must not those who value the pursuit of justice be intensely concerned about economic disparities among groups of persons? The most obvious answer to the title question would seem, then, to be: “We should care because such inequality is the external manifestation of the oppression of individuals on the basis of their group identity.”
On Some Ways in Which A Thing Can be Good
Authors: Thomson Judith Jarvis
Published: January 2009

I

There are a great many ways in which a thing can be good. What counts as a way of being good? I leave it to intuition. Let us allow that being a good dancer is being good in a way, and that so also is being a good carpenter. We might group these and similar ways of being good under the name activity goodness, since a good dancer is good at dancing and a good carpenter is good at carpentry. Everything good at doing something D is good in a way, and for each activity D, being good at D-ing falls into the class of ways of being good which I call activity goodness.

Again, let us allow that being a good hammer is being good in a way, and that so also is being a good butter knife. We might group these ways of being good under the name equipment goodness, since a good hammer is good for use in hammering nails and a good butter knife is good for use in buttering bread. Everything good for use in achieving a purpose P is good in a way, and for each purpose P, being good for use in achieving P falls into the class of ways of being good which I call equipment goodness.

Again, let us allow that tasting good is being good in a way, and so also are looking good, sounding good, and so on. The class here is aesthetic goodness.

Is all goodness goodness-in-a-way? Intuitively, the answer is yes: it seems right to think that everything is good only insofar as it is good in one or more ways.
The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others
Authors: Annas Julia
Published: January 2009

It is well-known that in recent years, alongside the familiar forms of modern ethical theory, such as consequentialism, deontology, and rights theory, there has been a resurgence of interest in what goes by the name of “virtue ethics” — forms of ethical theory which give a prominent status to the virtues, and to the idea that an agent has a “final end” which the virtues enable her to achieve. With this has come an increase of theoretical (as opposed to antiquarian) interest in ancient ethical theories, particularly Aristotle's, an interest which has made a marked difference in the way ethics is pursued in the Anglo-Saxon and European intellectual worlds.

In this essay, I shall not be discussing modern virtue ethics, which is notably protean in form and difficult to pin down. I shall be focusing on ancient eudaimonistic ethical theories, for in their case we can achieve a clearer discussion of the problem I wish to discuss (a problem which arises also for modern versions of virtue ethics which hark back to the ancient theories in their form).