bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Two Theories of the Good
Authors: Sumner L. W.
Published: January 2009

Suppose that the ultimate point of ethics is to make the world a better place. If it is, we must face the question: better in what respect? If the good is prior to the right — that is, if the rationale for all requirements of the right is that they serve to further the good in one way or another — then what is this good? Is there a single fundamental value capable of underlying and unifying all of our moral categories? If so, how might it defeat the claims of rival candidates for this role? If not, is there instead a plurality of basic goods, each irreducible to any of the others? In that case, how do they fit together into a unified picture of the moral life?

These are the questions I wish to address, in a necessarily limited way. To many the questions will seem hopelessly old-fashioned or misguided. Some deontologists will wish to reverse my ordering of the good and the right, holding that the right constrains acceptable conceptions of the good. For many contractarians, neither the good nor the right will seem normatively basic, since both are to be derived from a prior conception of rationality. Finally, some theorists will reject the classification of moral theories in terms of their basic normative categories, arguing that the whole foundationalist enterprise in ethics should be abandoned.

In the face of these challenges to the priority of the good, and in light of the many current varieties of moral skepticism and relativism, I cannot provide a very convincing justification for raising the questions I intend to discuss.
Good Lives: Prolegomena
Authors: Becker Lawrence C.
Published: January 2009

A philosophical essay under this title faces severe rhetorical challenges. New accounts of the good life regularly and rapidly turn out to be variations of old ones, subject to a predictable range of decisive objections. Attempts to meet those objections with improved accounts regularly and rapidly lead to a familiar impasse — that while a life of contemplation, or epicurean contentment, or stoic indifference, or religious ecstasy, or creative rebellion, or self-actualization, or many another thing might count asagood life, none of them can plausibly be identified withthegood life, or thebestlife. Given the long history of that impasse, it seems futile to offer yet another candidate for the genus “good life” as if that candidate might be new, or philosophically defensible. And given the weariness, irony, and self-deprecation expected of a philosopher in such an impasse, it is difficult for any substantive proposal on this topic to avoid seeming pretentious.
The Advantages of Moral Diversity
Authors: Rorty Amélie Oksenberg
Published: January 2009

We are well served, both practically and morally, by ethical diversity, by living in a community whose members have values and priorities that are, at a habit-forming, action-guiding level, often different from our own. Of course, unchecked ethical diversity can lead to disaster, to chaos and conflict. We attempt to avoid or mitigate such conflict by articulating general moral and political principles, and developing the virtues of acting on those principles. But as far as leading a good life — the life that best suits what is best in us — goes, it is not essential that we agree on the interpretations of those common principles, or that we are committed to them, by some general act of the will. What matters is that they form our habits and institutions, so that we succeed in cooperating practically, to promote the state of affairs that realizes what we each prize. People of different ethical orientations can — and need to — cooperate fruitfully in practical life while having different interpretations and justifications of general moral or procedural principles. Indeed, at least some principles are best left ambiguous, and some crucial moral and ethical conflicts are best understood, and best arbitrated, as failures of practical cooperation rather than as disagreements about the truth of certain general propositions or theories.

This way of construing ethical conflict and cooperation carries political consequences. It appears to make the task of resolving ethical conflicts more modest and, perhaps, easier to accomplish. But it raises formidable problems about how to design the range of educative institutions that bridge public and private life.
Rationality and the Human Good
Authors: Quinn Warren
Published: January 2009

In this essay I want to look at some questions concerning the relation between morality and rationality in the recommendations they make about the best way to live our lives and achieve our good. Specifically, I want to examine ways in which the virtue of practical rationality (conceived in neo-Humean terms as the most authoritative practical excellence) and the various moral virtues might be thought to part company, giving an agent conflicting directives regarding how best to live his (or her) life. In conducting this enquiry, I shall at some crucial points be presupposing something of an Aristotelian perspective, but only in the most general way.

I

In what follows, I shall distinguish reason, the faculty or power, from rationality, the excellence or virtue (taken in the broadest sense) of that faculty. By practical reason I mean that part of reason that tells us what to do and how to live. By practical rationality (or, henceforth, rationality) I mean the excellence of that part of reason in virtue of which an agent is practically rational as opposed to irrational. By a neo-Humean conception of rationality I mean one that makes the goal of practical reason the maximal satisfaction of an agent's desires and preferences, suitably corrected for the effects of misinformation, wishful thinking, and the like. There are various versions of neo-Humean theory, and I shall not here be concerned with their specific differences. Their common essence lies in an appeal (1) to a notion of basic desires or preferences, which are not subject to intrinsic criticism as irrational and are subject to extrinsic criticism only by ways in which their joint satisfaction may not be possible, and (2) to a notion of derived desires or preferences, which are criticizable only instrumentally.
The Human Good and the Ambitions of Consequentialism
Authors: Griffin James
Published: January 2009

I want to look at one aspect of the human good: how it serves as the basis for judgments about the moral right. One important view is that the right is always derived from the good. I want to suggest that the more one understands the nature of the human good, the more reservations one has about that view.

I. OneRoute toConsequentialism

Many of us think that different things make a life good, with no one deep value underlying them all. My own list includes: enjoyment, accomplishing something with one's life, deep personal relations, certain sorts of understanding, and the elements of a characteristically human existence (autonomy, liberty).

Most of us also think that moral right and wrong are based, in some way or other, in how well individual lives go, and that the moral point of view is, in some sense or other, impartial between lives. Utilitarianism is a prominent, but not the only, way of spelling out this intuition. There is no reason why an account of the human good needs to be confined, in the classical utilitarian way, to happiness or to fulfillment of desire (on the usual understanding of that notion). Nor is there any reason why impartiality has to be confined to maximizing the good, counting everybody for one and nobody for more than one. We may generalize.

Let us broaden the notion of the good. We might say, for instance, that though happiness is a good, so are the other items on my list. But though broadened, this notion of the good stays within the confines of individual goods; it still has to do with human well-being, with what promotes the quality of one person's life.
Virtue as Loving the Good
Authors: Hurka Thomas
Published: January 2009

In a chapter of The Methods of Ethics entitled “Ultimate Good”, Henry Sidgwick defends hedonism, the theory that pleasure and only pleasure is intrinsically good, that is, good in itself and apart from its consequences. First, however, he argues against the theory that virtue is intrinsically good. Sidgwick considers both a strong version of this theory — that virtue is the only intrinsic good — and a weaker version — that it is one intrinsic good among others. He tries to show that neither version is or can be true.

Against the strong version of the theory, Sidgwick argues as follows. Virtue is a disposition to act rightly, and right action is identified by the good it promotes. (He believes the second, consequentialist premise has been justified by his lengthy critique of nonconsequentialist moralities in Book III of The Methods of Ethics.) But this means that treating virtue as the only intrinsic good involves a “logical circle”: virtue is a disposition to promote what is good, where what is good is itself just a disposition to promote what is good. Virtue turns out to be a disposition to promote virtue.

As Hastings Rashdall notes in a commentary on Sidgwick, one can accept many of this argument's premises yet reject its conclusion. One can agree that right action is identified by its consequences but still hold that virtue is the only intrinsic good. One can do this if one denies that the relevant consequences are good. This is the Stoic view: certain states are “preferred”, and thus supply the criterion of right action, but are not themselves intrinsically good.
Moral Agency, Commitment, and Impartiality
Authors: Badhwar Neera K.
Published: January 2009

Liberal political philosophy presupposes a moral theory according to which the ability to assess and choose conceptions of the good from a universal and impartial moral standpoint is central to the individual's moral identity. This viewpoint is standardly understood by liberals as that of a rationalhuman(nottranscendental) agent. Such an agent is able to reflect on her ends and pursuits, including those she strongly identifies with, and to understand and take into account the basic interests of others. From the perspective of liberalism as a political morality, the most important of these interests is the interest in maximum, equal liberty for each individual, and thus the most important moral principles are the principles of justice that protect individuals' rights to life and liberty.

According to the communitarian critics of liberalism, however, the liberal picture of moral agency is unrealistically abstract. Communitarians object that moral agents in the real world neither choose their conceptions of the good nor occupy a universalistically impartial moral standpoint. Rather, their conceptions of the good are determined chiefly by the communities in which they find themselves, and these conceptions are largely “constitutive” of their particular moral identities. Moral agency is thus “situated” and “particularistic,” and an impartial reflection on the conception of the good that constitutes it is undesirable, if not impossible. Further, communitarians contend, the good is “prior” to the right in the sense that moral norms are derived from, and justified in terms of, the good. An adequate moral and political theory must reflect these facts about moral agency and moral norms.
Capitalism and Community
Authors: Conway David
Published: January 2009

Is capitalism inimical to community? Yes, say communitarians, a large part of whose body of writing is given over to the elaboration and defense of various forms of this thesis. The aim of the present essay is to contest this answer. Not only, I will argue, is there no good reason for supposing capitalism inimical to community, but there is reason to think it more conducive to community than are the feasible alternatives to it.
The Postmodern Self and The Politics of Liberal Education
Authors: Kautz Steven
Published: January 2009

Richard Rorty is one of the principal architects of a new way of thinking about liberalism. He calls his way “liberal ironism”: it is a postmodern liberalism, without Enlightenment rationalism, without the hopeless and finally enervating aspiration to discover an a historical philosophical foundation (“natural rights”) for liberal principles and practices. The postmodern liberal ironist, unlike the classical liberal rationalist, “faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” says Rorty, including the characteristic liberal belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Such postmodern liberals frankly admit the apparently unhappy consequence of that essential “contingency,” that “there is noneutral, noncircular way to defend” liberal ways, no good argument to deploy against “Nazi and Marxist enemies of liberalism”; but no such argument is needed, says Rorty, since loyalty to one's own community is morality enough, even where that loyalty is without foundation. Here, I begin with a few words about Rorty's postmodern liberalism, as preface to a discussion of the effects of postmodern doctrines on liberal moral psychology.
What Liberalism Means
Authors: Beiner Ronald
Published: January 2009

My purpose in this essay is to give an account of the kind of robust social criticism that I associate with the very enterprise of theory and to explain why the liberal philosophy that prevails in the contemporary academy is averse to this sort of social criticism. My purpose, then, is both to explore a certain conception of radical socialtheory and to defend this conception against familiar objections posed by those who represent the dominant liberal political philosophy.
Against Tradition
Authors: Sunstein Cass R.
Published: January 2009

In recent years many people have suggested that rights come from traditions. More particularly, many people interested in American constitutional law have said that constitutional rights should be developed with close reference to American traditions. In this essay, I mean to challenge these claims. I argue that the enterprise of defining rights, including constitutional rights, should not be founded on an inquiry into tradition. Traditions should be assessed, not replicated. I also try to unpack some of the complexities in the idea that rights should be based on traditions.

The topic is highly relevant to the debate over “communitarianism.” Manycommunitarians appear to be traditionalists, at least implicitly; they are concerned to defend social practices against abstract, acontextual claims about what is to be done, or about “rights.” It is important to ask why and when communitarians believethat a community's practices deserve insulation from rights–based claims. Often the best or most interesting answer has a Burkean dimension. It involves the extent to which a community—perhaps a local community resisting national efforts, perhaps a nation resisting international goals—owes its practices to long traditions that, precisely because of their longevity, might seem to make special sense. Ideas of this sort might be thought to have special strength when we think about rights in general or about constitutional rights in particular.
An American Civic Forum: Civil Society Between Market Individuals and the Political Community
Authors: Barber Benjamin R.
Published: January 2009

The polarization of the individual and the community that underlies much of the debate between individualists and communitarians is made possible in part by the literal vanishingof civil society—the domain whose middling terms mediate the stark opposition of state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is both voluntary and public. Modern democratic ideology and the reality of our political practices sometimesseem to yield only a choice between elephantine and paternalistic government or a radically solipsistic and nearly anarchic private market sector—overnment gargantuanism or private greed.

Americans do not much like either one. President Clinton's callfor national service draws us out of our selfishness without kindling any affection for government. Private markets service our avarice without causing us to like ourselves. The question of how America's decentralized and multi-vocal public can secure a coherentvoice in debates over public policy under the conditions precipitated by so hollow and disjunctive a dichotomy is perhaps the most important issue facing both the political theory and social science of democracy and the practice of democratic politics in America today. Two recent stories out of Washington suggest just how grave the situation has become. Health-care reform failed in a paroxysm of mutual recrimination highlighted by the successful campaign of the private sector (well represented in Congress) against a presidential program that seemed to be widely misunderstood. The public at large simply went missing in the debates.
Beyond Self and Other
Authors: Rogers Kelly
Published: January 2009

Today there is a tendency to do ethics on the basis of what I should like to call the “self-other model.” On this view, an action has no moral worth unless it benefits others–and not even then, unless it is motivated by altruism rather than selfishness. This radical rift between self-interest and virtue traces back at least to Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 b.c.–50 a.d.), according to whom, “lovers of self, when they have stripped and prepared for conflict with those who value virtue, keep up the boxing and wrestling until they have either forced their opponents to give in, or have completely destroyed them.” More recently, the distinction between those who value themselves and those who “value virtue” has been drawn sharply by Bernard Williams: “[I]n moral theory … it is not the Kantian leap from the particular and the affective to the rational and universal that makes all the difference; it is rather the Humean step–that is to say, the first Humean step–from the self to someone else.”
Reasonable Self-Interest
Authors: Hill Thomas E.
Published: January 2009

Philosophers have debated for millennia about whether moral requirements are always rational to follow. The background for these debates is often what I shall call “the self-interest model.” The guiding assumption here is that the basic demand of reason, to each person, is that one must, above all, advance one's self-interest. Alternatively, debate may be framed by a related, but significantly different, assumption: the idea that the basic rational requirement is to develop and pursue a set of personal ends in an informed, efficient, and coherent way, whether one's choice of ends is based on self-interested desires or not. For brevity I refer to this as “the coherence-and-efficiency model.” Advocates of both models tend to think that, while it is sufficiently clear in principle what the rational thing to do is, what remains in doubt is whether it is always rational to be moral. They typically assume that morality is concerned, entirely or primarily, with our relations to others, especially with obligations that appear to require some sacrifice or compromise with the pursuit of self-interest.
Who is Rational Economic Man?
Authors: Morse Jennifer Roback
Published: January 2009

There is, in Sarajevo, a man who comes out into the streets each day and plays his cello on the sidewalk. He does this at the same time each day, no matter how much shooting or shelling is going on, no matter how great the danger to himself. He describes himself as having decided to take a stand for beauty in the face of horror. Can the rational choice paradigm, as currently practiced in the various disciplines of economics, philosophy, political science, and law, offer an account of this man's decision and his behavior?

This admirable man seems to be a rebuke to the philosophies of calculated self-interest. Can we offer some account of his behavior, without descending into the tautological claim that he did what he did because he wanted to? Can we offer some insight into his wants that will make him intelligible? And not only intelligible, but can we account for him in a way that highlights his admirability, rather than suggesting that he is in some way an aberration, or perhaps even a fool?

There is a deep disorder within the human condition. All of the essays in the present volume point to this fact in one way or another. Some characterize the disorder as a conflict between virtue and self-interest. Others point to the dichotomy between the individual and other persons as being the source of the tension between morality and self-interest. Some of the essays attempt to resolve the tension by collapsing the two categories into each other.
Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life
Authors: Wolf Susan
Published: January 2009

The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one's own good. Though it may be difficult to tell whether a person is motivated by self-interest in a particular instance, and difficult also to determine whether a given act or decision really is in one's self-interest, the meaning of the claims in question seems unproblematic.

My main concern in this essay is to make a point about the content of self-interest. Specifically I shall put forward the view that meaningfulness, in a sense I shall elaborate, is an important element of a good life. It follows, then, that it is part of an enlightened self-interest that one wants to secure meaning in one's life, or, at any rate, to allow and promote meaningful activity within it. Accepting this substantial conception of self-interest, however, carries with it a curious consequence: the concept of self-interest which formerly seemed so clear begins to grow fuzzy. Fortunately, it comes to seem less important as well.

InReasons and Persons,Derek Parfit distinguishes three sorts of theories about self-interest–hedonistic theories, preference theories, and what he calls “objective-list theories."Hedonistic theorieshold that one's good is a matter of the felt quality of one's experiences.
The Virtue in Self-Interest
Authors: Slote Michael
Published: January 2009

As a motive, self-interest is constituted by a certain kind of concern for oneself; but we also use the term “self-interest” to refer to the object of such a motive, to the well-being or good life sought by a self-interested agent. In this essay, I want to concentrate on self-interest in the latter sense and say something about how self-interest or well-being relates to virtue. One reason to be interested in this relationship stems from our concern to know whether virtue pays, i.e., is in the moral agent's self-interest, a question which Plato notably asks in the Republic and which has been of concern to moral philosophers ever since. But the importance for ethics of notions like virtue and self-interest is hardly exhausted by their role in the debate over whether virtue pays; indeed, any large-scale ethical theory will presumably have something to say about how these major notions relate, so we have reason to want to understand this relationship independent of the particular desire to show that morality or virtue is in the self-interest of the (virtuous) agent.

It will be a background assumption of this essay that some ways of connecting virtue and well-being/self-interest redound to the advantage of the larger theories that incorporate them. If, in particular, we believe in the bona fides of ethical theory, then unifying power is a desideratum in ethics and it stands in favor of utilitarianism (and Epicureanism) that it offers us a way of unifying our understanding of virtue and well-being. To be sure, that advantage may to some extent or ultimately be undercut if unification leads to counterintuitive ethical consequences.
Self-Interest, Altruism, and Virtue
Authors: Hurka Thomas
Published: January 2009

My topic in this essay is the comparative moral value of self-interest and altruism. I take self-interest to consist in a positive attitude toward one's own good and altruism to consist in a similar attitude toward the good of others, and I assess these attitudes within a general theory of the intrinsic value of attitudes toward goods and evils. The first two sections of the essay apply this theory in a simple form, one that treats self-interest and altruism symmetrically. The third section examines whether the theory can be revised to accommodate an apparent asymmetry in our common-sense thinking about self-interested and altruistic attitudes.

I will start by assuming that each person has a good, or that certain states of the person are intrinsically desirable and others undesirable. Of course, philosophers have disagreed for centuries about what this good consists in, or what particular states are desirable. Welfarists take each person's good to consist in pleasure, the fulfillment of her preferences, or something describable as “welfare” or “happiness.” Perfectionists hold that certain states of a person are good apart from any connection with happiness. Thus, some perfectionists hold that knowledge, achievement, and deep personal relations are good independently of how much a person wants or enjoys them. For the purposes of this essay it does not matter much which initial claims about the good we accept. To discuss issues about self-interest and altruism we need only some initial theory of each person's good, whatever its specific content. Consequently, and to cover as many bases as possible, I will start by assuming a mixed welfarist-perfectionist theory of the good, one claiming that pleasure, knowledge, and achievement are all intrinsically good.
The G.I. Bill and U.S. Social Policy, Past and Future
Authors: Skocpol Theda
Published: January 2009

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived only months after the 1994 U.S. elections brought to power conservative Republican congressional majorities determined to reverse key legacies of Roosevelt's New Deal. At this juncture of special poignancy for many of those assembled at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1995, President Bill Clinton offered remarks on “Remembering Franklin D. Roosevelt.” “Like our greatest presidents,” Clinton eulogized, Roosevelt “showed us how to be a nation in time of great stress” and “taught us again and again that our government could be an instrument of democratic destiny.”
Freedom and Moral Diversity: The Moral Failures of Health Care in the Welfare State
Authors: Engelhardt H. Tristram
Published: January 2009

In his 1993 health-care reform proposal, Bill Clinton offered health care as a civil right. If his proposal had been accepted, all Americans would have been guaranteed a basic package of health care. At the same time, they would have been forbidden to provide or purchase better basic health care, as a cost of participating in a national system to which they were compelled to contribute. A welfare entitlement would have been created and an egalitarian ethos enforced. This essay will address why such egalitarian proposals are morally unjustifiable, both in terms of the establishment of a uniform health-care welfare right, and in terms of the egalitarian constraints these proposals impose against the use of private resources in the purchase of better-quality basic health care, not to mention luxury care.
The Problem of Forfeiture in the Welfare State
Authors: Epstein Richard A.
Published: January 2009

Political theory has a good deal to say both for and against the establishment of the modern welfare state. As one might expect, most of that discussion is directed toward the expanded set of basic rights that the state confers on its members. In its most canonical form, the welfare state represents a switch in vision from the regime of negative rights in the nineteenth century to the regime of positive rights so much in vogue today. Negative rights—an inexact and somewhat misleading term— stress the right of an individual to be free from certain kinds of external interventions. These rights arrange themselves on two basic lists. The first list generates a set of civil capacities that all individuals enjoy over their own labor and property: the right to contract, to make wills, to sue and be sued, to give evidence, and the like. The second list, from which the term “negative rights” derives, protects all persons from interference, either by force or by fraud, in the conduct of their own affairs. The resulting set of rights is short, snappy, and knowable; it is internally consistent; and it prepares the stage for productive human behavior (exchange) while limiting destructive forms of behavior (theft). Even though it is not couched in explicit utilitarian language, it can surely be defended on general functional grounds.
Why Even Egalitarians Should Favor Market Health Insurance
Authors: Shapiro Daniel
Published: January 2009

Socialism is dead, though many of its academic proponents take no notice of its demise. With its death, private property in the means of production is not generally in dispute, and the action in political philosophy centers on the justification of the welfare state. The heart of the welfare state is social insurance programs, such as government managed and subsidized health insurance, retirement pensions, and unemployment insurance. The arguments about health insurance will arguably be among the most ferocious, difficult, and important of the welfare-state debates: Ferocious, because proposals to alter government managed or subsidized health care strike at people's fears and concerns in a way matched by few other proposals. Difficult, because people can often not even conceive of a (genuine) market alternative to the status quo in health insurance, and there is no real existing alternative to hold up as a model. Important, because if an intellectually solid case for market health insurance can be established, then supporters of the welfare state should be on the defensive, since social health insurance is an institution central to their vision of the just or good society.
Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice
Authors: Arnold N. Scott
Published: January 2009

This essay is about the moral and political justification of affirmative action programs in the United States. Both legally and politically, many of these programs are under attack, though they remain ubiquitous. The concern of this essay, however, is not with what the law says but with what it should say. The main argument advanced in this essay concludes that most of the controversial affirmative action programs are unjustified. It proceeds in a way that avoids dependence on controversial theories of justice or morality. My intention is to produce an argument that is persuasive across a broad ideological spectrum, extending even to those who believe that justice requires these very programs. Though the main focus of the essay is on affirmative action, in the course of making the case that these programs are illegitimate, I shall defend some principles about the conditions under which it is appropriate for the state to impose on civil society the demands of justice. These principles have broader implications for a normative theory of social change in democratic societies.
Regulation of Foods and Drugs and Libertarian Ideals: Perspectives of a Fellow-Traveler
Authors: Polsby Daniel D.
Published: January 2009

For one with libertarian sympathies, the official regulation of foods and drugs is presumptively a bad thing. One is most accustomed to seeing the argument in debates about legalizing marijuana and other hedonic drugs. And it remains a very good if by now well-trafficked question, which will be more well-trafficked still by the time this essay ends, why government should be in the business of telling people what sorts of chemical moodenhancers they may take. But as the criminologist James Jacobs has pointed out, to ask this question is to put in play matters far larger and more important than marijuana. What business is it of government to say what medicines may be sold and by whom they may be sold? Why should certain chemical agents be available to willing buyers only with a doctor's scrip, and other agents, such as unproved drugs or devices, forbidden to all, even with medical permission? If libertarians answer these questions impatiently, then admirers of the administrative welfare state (“statists”) will be happy to play rope-a-dope with them, chattering on about the endearing eccentricities of libertarians' assumptions and avoiding the challenge to articulate and defend their own increasingly shabby-looking principles. Those principles are much in need of defense. Food and drug laws are among the most well-established offices of regulatory government. They are complicated, hypertechnical, mysterious, and expensive to administer and maintain. One is entitled to suspect that a number of them are carried on more out of habit and routine than out of any authentic conviction that they are the best way, or among the better ways, to provide for the welfare of citizens.
Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail
Authors: Ehman Robert
Published: January 2009

For classical liberals, natural property rights are the moral foundation of the market and of individual freedom. They determine the initial position from which persons legitimately make contracts and assess the validity of collective action. Since they establish the initial conditions of legitimate agreements, they cannot be dependent upon agreements. Persons possess these rights apart from social institutions. Natural rights typically not only prohibit interference with a person's body and mind but also forbid interference with a person's appropriation of unowned natural resources and with his freedom to do as he chooses with the products that he makes from them, so long as he does not infringe upon the equal rights of others. These rights prescribe, as Locke put it, that persons be free “to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit … without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man”.
Imitations of Libertarian Thought
Authors: Epstein Richard A.
Published: January 2009

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery. Socially, the proposition may well be true. But in the world of ideas it is false: to the extent that two incompatible traditions use the same words or symbols to articulate different visions of legal or social organization, imitation begets confusion, not enlightenment. The effects of that confusion, moreover, are not confined to the world of ideas, but spill over into the world of politics and public affairs. Words are more than tools of description: they work also as tools of persuasion and transformation. Let a term have a favorable connotation in one context, and its imitative use can mislead people into thinking that a major departure from established practice is merely the extension or updating of an old principle to deal with new circumstances.
Legal Conventionalism in the U.S. Constitutional Law of Privacy
Authors: Tushnet Mark
Published: January 2009

Drawing on themes important in moral and political philosophy, much of the scholarship on the constitutional law of privacy in the United States distinguishes between privacy understood as a person's control over information and privacy understood as a person's ability to make autonomous decisions. For example,Katz v. United States(1967) established the framework for analyzing whether police activity constituted a “search” subject to the Fourth Amendment's requirement that the police either obtain a warrant before conducting a search or otherwise act reasonably. The defendant was a professional gambler who knew enough about police techniques to use a public telephone to make his business calls. Police agents attached a listening device to the outside of the phone booth, and sought to use the recordings against the defendant. The Supreme Court agreed with the defendant that the Fourth Amendment had been violated. Justice John Marshall Harlan's influential concurring opinion asserted that a person's privacy, in the sense of control over information, depended on two factors: “that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” Fourth Amendment cases likeKatzinvolve informational control; they define the circumstances under which the government may acquire information from or about a person without first obtaining the person's agreement. In contrast, cases likeGriswold v. Connecticut(1965), which barred the state from making it a criminal offense to use contraceptives, andRoe v. Wade(1973), which restricted the state's power to prohibit or regulate abortions, used the language of privacy rights to protect a much broader interest in autonomous decision-making. Seeing these cases and related ones through lenseees provided by moral and political philosophy, scholars have attempted to describe what a morally sound constitutional law of privacy would be, and the broadest sense, dworkinian. That is, they seek to provide an account of privacy with two characteristics: it is broadly consistent with the relevant constitutional decisions, and it is the most morally attractive account possible that satisfies the requirement of consistency with the decisions.
Privacy and Technology
Authors: Friedman David
Published: January 2009

The definition above nicely encapsulates two of the intertwined meanings of ‘privacy’. In the first sense—physical seclusion—the level of privacy in modern developed societies is extraordinarily high by historical standards. We take it for granted that a bed in a hotel will be occupied by either one person or a couple—not by several strangers. At home, few of us expect to share either bed or bedroom with our children. In these and a variety of other ways, increased physical privacy has come as a byproduct of increased wealth.
Genetics and Insurance: Accessing and Using Private Information
Authors: Capron A. M.
Published: January 2009

Is information about a person's genome, whether derived from the analysis of DNA or otherwise, protected by the right to privacy? If it is, why and in what manner? It often appears that some people believe that the answer to this question is to be found in molecular genetics itself. They point to the rapid progress being made in basic and applied aspects of this field of biology; this progress has remarkably increased what is known about human genetics. Since knowledge of a particular person's genetic makeup entails a potential intrusion into that person's most private realms and exposes him or her to dire results if revealed to others, they argue, the law needs to protect “genetic privacy.” There is nothing inherently wrong with this account, but it certainly presupposes that we know—and agree about—what it means to protect privacy and, indeed, what interests are implicated in the concept and why they matter. Rather than make this assumption, in this essay I first elaborate a concept of privacy before turning to the potential privacy implications that arise at the intersection of human genetics and the field of insurance. I argue that the core value here is self-determination broadly conceived—that control over one's genetic information may be important for achieving self-determination—but that at least in the context of contracts for life insurance, we should be reluctant to recognize “rights” that would permanently preclude the use of genetic data by insurers.
Can Public Figures Have Private Lives?
Authors: Schauer Frederick
Published: January 2009

A rash of very public scandals, of which the behavior of President Clinton and the activities of the late Princess Diana are merely the most famous examples, has raised the question of the appropriateness of the disclosure, or the newsworthiness, of the so-called “private” lives of so-called “public” figures or “public” officials. That is the question I address in this essay.
Human Flourishing and the Appeal to Human Nature
Authors: Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: January 2009

If “perfectionism” in ethics refers to those normative theories that treat the fulfillment or realization of human nature as central to an account of both goodness and moral obligation, in what sense is “human flourishing” a perfectionist notion? How much of what we take “human flourishing” to signify is the result of our understanding of human nature? Is the content of this concept simply read off an examination of our nature? Is there no place for diversity and individuality? Is the belief that the content of such a normative concept can be determined by an appeal to human nature merely the result of epistemological naiveté? What is the exact character of the connection between human flourishing and human nature?

These questions are the ultimate concern of this essay, but to appreciate the answers that will be offered it is necessary to understand what is meant by “human flourishing.” “Human flourishing” is a relatively recent term in ethics. It seems to have developed in the last two decades because the traditional translation of the Greek term eudaimonia as “happiness” failed to communicate clearly thateudaimoniawas an objective good, not merely a subjective good.
The Idea of a Life Plan
Authors: Larmore Charles
Published: January 2009

When philosophers undertake to say what it is that makes life worth living, they generally display a procrustean habit of thought which the practice of philosophy itself does much to encourage. As a result, they arrive at an image of the human good that is far more controversial than they suspect. The canonical view among philosophers ancient and modern has been, in essence, that the life lived well is the life lived in accord with a rational plan. To me this conception of the human good seems manifestly wrong. The idea that life should be the object of a plan is false to the human condition. It misses the important truth which Proust, by contrast, discerned and made into one of the organizing themes of his great meditation on disappointment and revelation,A la recherche du temps perdu: The happiness that life affords is less often the good we have reason to pursue than the good that befalls us unexpectedly.
Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction
Authors: Arneson Richard J.
Published: January 2009

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?

This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?
Happiness and Human Flourishing in Kant's Ethics
Authors: Hill Thomas E.
Published: January 2009

Ancient moral philosophers, especially Aristotle and his followers, typically shared the assumption that ethics is primarily concerned with how to achieve the final end for human beings, a life of “happiness” or “human flourishing.” This final end was not a subjective condition, such as contentment or the satisfaction of our preferences, but a life that could be objectively determined to be appropriate to our nature as human beings. Character traits were treated as moral virtues because they contributed well toward this ideal life, either as means to it or as constitutive aspects of it. Traits that tended to prevent a “happy” life were considered vices, even if they contributed to a life that was pleasant and what a person most wanted. The idea of “happiness” (or human flourishing) was central, then, in philosophical efforts to specify what we ought to do, what sort of persons we should try to become, and what sort of life a wise person would hope for.
Aristotle's ElusiveSummum Bonum
Authors: Broadie Sarah
Published: January 2009

The philosophy of Aristotle (384–322,b.c.e.) remains a beacon of our culture. But no part of Aristotle's work is more alive and compelling today than his contribution to ethics and political science — nor more relevant to the subject of the present volume. Political science, in his view, begins with ethics, and the primary task of ethics is to elucidatehuman flourishing. Aristotle brings to this topic a mind unsurpassed in the depth, keenness, and comprehensiveness of its probing.
Human Flourishing and Universal Justice
Authors: Pogge Thomas W.
Published: January 2009

The question of what constitutes human flourishing elicits an extraordinary variety of responses, which suggests that there are not merely differences of opinion at work, but also different understandings of the question itself. So it may help to introduce some clarity into the question before starting work on one answer to it.
The Irrelevance of Responsibility
Authors: Long Roderick T.
Published: January 2009

Responsibility is often thought of as primarily alegalconcept. Even when it ismoralresponsibility that is at issue, it is assumed that it is above all in moralities based on law-centered patterns and models that responsibility takes center stage, so that responsibility is a legal concept at its core, and is applicable to the realm of private morality only by extension and analogy.
Why Citizens Should Vote: A Causal Responsibility Approach
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: January 2009

Why should a citizen vote? There are two ways to interpret this question: in a prudential sense, and in a moral (or quasi-moral) sense. Under the first interpretation, the question asks why—or under what circumstances—it is in a citizen's self-interest to vote. Under the second interpretation, it asks what moral (or quasi-moral) reasons citizens have for voting. I shall mainly try to answer the moral version of the question, but my answer may also, in some circumstances, bear on the prudential question. Before proceeding to my own approach, let me briefly survey alternatives in the field.