bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Redistribution Without Egalitarianism
Authors: Brody Baruch 
Published: January 2009

I will, in this paper, set out the philosophical foundations and the basic structure of a new theory of justice. I will argue that both these foundations and the theory which is based upon them are intuitively attractive and theoretically sound. Finally, I will argue that both are supported by the fact that they lead to attractive implications such as the following:(1) One can justify at least some governmental redistributive programs which presuppose that those receiving the wealth have a right to it, without being committed to any form of egalitarianism.(2) The justification for these redistributive programs respects property entitlements; it argues, in effect, that property entitlements and rights to some redistribution of wealth presuppose each other, rather than being in conflict with each other.(3) The amount of redistribution to which each indigent person is entitled is directly proportional to the wealth of the society in question (the wealthier the society, the greater the entitlement) and inversely proportional to the number of indigents in the society in question (the more indigents, the less to which each is entitled).There are at this stage in the history of Western thought few entirely new ideas in philosophy. Too much has been written about the important issues to allow for entirely new approaches. My theory is no exception to these generalizations, for it draws upon the tradition of John Locke, of the agrarian reforms such as Paine, Spence, and Ogilvie, and of libertarian writers such as Robert Nozick. Nevertheless, I will argue, the resulting theory is a significant advance over the ideas of these earlier writers.
Justice and Moral Bargaining
Authors: Harman Gilbert 
Published: January 2009

INTRODUCTIONIn my view, justice is entirely conventional; indeed, all of morality consists in conventions that are the result of continual tacit bargaining and adjustment. This is not to say social arrangements are just whenever they are in accordance with the principles of justice accepted inthatsociety. We can use our own principles of justice in judging the institutions of another society, and we can appeal to some principles we accept in order to criticize other principles we accept.To use David Hume's model of the relevant sort of convention, two people rowing a boat each continually adjusts his or her rate of rowing to the other so that they come to row at the same rate, a rate that is normally somewhere between the rate at which each would prefer to row. In the same way the basic principles of justice accepted by people of different powers and resources are the result of a continually changing compromise affecting such things as the relative importance attached to helping others as compared with the importance attached to not harming others.Hume's rowers provide an example of a “convention” that is normally completely tacit. There are other models in which the bargaining can be more explicit, for example when a seller comes to set prices that are acceptable to customers, when employers reach understandings with employees concerning wages, or when political groups influence legislation.I want eventually to consider the implications for moral reasoning and argument of the thesis that principles of justice are entirely the result of implicit bargaining and convention of this sort.
Distributive Justice and the Tensions of Lockeanism
Authors: Mack Eric 
Published: January 2009

An ongoing tension exists within the Lockean tradition in political philosophy between the claim that each individual is the “Proprietor of his own Person” and the claim that nature is “that which God gave to Mankind in common.” The former claim points to a realm of discrete individual entitlements only formally equal in the sense of each individual having jurisdiction over his own person and not over any other person, while the latter points either to a collective entitlement to nature or to individual entitlements to substantively equal shares of nature. Were the two realms, that of persons and that of extra-personal nature, separate and independent, no tension would arise from the union of these two claims. But the realms are manifestly interconnected. Individuals acquire, use, labor upon, invest their time and energy on, and transform, more or less in accordance with their purposes, elements of extra-personal nature. And Locke and his followers believe that at least certain of these interactions with segments of nature give rise to individual property rights to the segments thereby appropriated, labored upon, transformed, or whatever. The traditional bridging notion is each person's right to his own labor which is seen as part of each person's proprietorship over himself. According to this tradition, if the right of each individual over his own person is to be respected, individual titles to appropriated, labored upon, or transformed nature must also be respected.The task for anyone seeking to embrace all the strands within this Lockean heritage is to reconcile, a) this right to one's own labor and the (or some) system of private property rights tied to it (which system will include historical entitlement principles for legitimating later property configurations) plus the right of self-ownership (or some equivalent) which lies behind the right to one's own labor, with b) some distributionist ideal, at least with regard to natural resources.
Justice: Real or Social?
Authors: Flew Antony 
Published: January 2009

IAt one point inTaking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin sketches an argument which would today be widely acceptable. He writes: “The University of Washington might argue that, whatever effect minority preference will have on average welfare, it will make the community more equal, and therefore more just.” It is perhaps not certain that Dworkin himself accepts that immediate inference as sound. There can, however, be no doubt but that: first, many if not most people speaking or writing today in this area do indeed take ‘equality’ to be as near as makes no matter synonymous with ‘equity’; and, second, they do indeed also identify doing (at any rate social) justice with bringing about (ever more, if never perfect) equality of condition.
Contextualism, Pluralism, and Distributive Justice
Authors: Sidorsky David 
Published: January 2009

THE INAPPLICABILITY THESISThere is a gap between the idea of distributive justice and the many factors that are morally relevant for decision making on economic issues. Only to a degree can this gap be attributed to the distance between “ideal reach” and “practical grasp,” to the legitimate difference in detail between an abstractly delineated economic scenario and a concrete set of circumstances, and to the disparate idioms and metaphors of theoretical and practical discourse. Rather, the gap indicates a fundamental problem with the concept of distributive justice. The problem, that is here termed the “inapplicability thesis,” is that even if distributive justice in abstract formulation were to be accepted as a value, its application in economic decision making is indeterminate.
When Jack and Jill Make a Deal
Authors: Hausman Daniel M. 
Published: January 2009

In ordinary circumstances, human actions have a myriad of unintended and often unforeseen consequences for the lives of other people. Problems of pollution are serious examples, but spillovers and side effects are the rule, not the exception. Who knows what consequences this essay may have?This essay is concerned with the problems of justice created by spillovers. After characterizing such spillovers more precisely and relating the concept to the economist's notion of an externality, I shall then consider the moral conclusions concerning spillovers that issue from a natural rights perspective and from the perspective of welfare economics supplemented with theories of distributive justice. I shall argue that these perspectives go badly awry in taking spillovers to be the exception rather than the rule in human interactions.I.ExternalitiesEconomists have discussed spillovers under the heading of “externalities.” To say this is not very helpful, since there is so much disagreement concerning both the definition and significance of externalities.
Partial Wholes
Authors: Barnes Jonathan 
Published: January 2009

Individualists like to think of themselves as atoms, their trajectories causally dependent on collisions with other similar entities but their essence resolutely independent and autonomous. They are whole and entire in themselves: they are not elements or adjuncts of some greater whole. Collectivists take an opposite view. Their oddities and accidents may be individual and independent, their movements and machinations largely self-determined, but in their essence they are necessarily bound to others – for all are adjuncts and elements of a larger whole.In this essay I discuss one version of the collectivist philosophy, a version which has (I suspect) been as popular and as widely supported as any philosophy of human nature. In Section I, the constituent ideas are expounded, largely by way of citation from Alexander Pope. In Section II, the anthropological aspect of Pope's philosophy is subjected to scrutiny; and in Section III, the axiological side of the theory is examined.
Natural Virtues, Natural Vices
Authors: Baier Annette C. 
Published: January 2009

David Hume has been invoked by those who want to found morality on human nature as well as by their critics. He is credited with showing us the fallacy of moving from premises about what is the case to conclusions about what ought to be the case; and yet, just a few pages after the famous is-ought remarks in A Treatise of Human Nature, he embarks on his equally famous derivation of the obligations of justice from facts about the cooperative schemes accepted in human communities. Is he ambivalent on the relationship between facts about human nature and human evaluations? Does he contradict himself – and, if so, which part of his whole position is most valuable?Between the famous is-ought passage and the famous account of convention and the obligations arising from established cooperative schemes once they are morally endorsed, Hume discusses the various meanings of the term “natural.” “Shou'd it be ask'd, Whether we ought to search for these principles [upon which all our notions of morals are founded] in nature or whether we must look for them in some other origin? I wou'd reply, that our answer to this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal.” (T. 473–74) The natural can be opposed to the miraculous, the unusual, or the artificial. It is the last contrast that Hume wants, for his contrast between the “artificial” culturally variant, convention-dependent obligations of justice and the more invariant “natural virtues,” and what he says about that contrast in this preparation for his account of the “artificial” virtues, makes it clear why he can later refer to justice as “natural” and to the general content of the rules of justice – that is, of basic human conventions of cooperation – as “Laws of Nature” (T. 484).
The Biological Justification of Ethics: A Best-Case Scenario
Authors: Rosenberg Alexander 
Published: January 2009

Social and behavioral scientists — that is, students of human nature — nowadays hardly ever use the term ‘human nature’. This reticence reflects both a becoming modesty about the aims of their disciplines and a healthy skepticism about whether there is any one thing really worthy of the label ‘human nature’.For some feature of humankind to be identified as accounting for our ‘nature’, it would have to reflect some property both distinctive of our species and systematically influential enough to explain some very important aspect of our behavior. Compare: molecular structure gives the essence or the nature of water just because it explains most of its salient properties. Few students of the human sciences currently hold that there is just one or a small number of such features that can explain our actions and/or our institutions. And even among those who do, there is reluctance to label their theories as claims about ‘human nature’.Among anthropologists and sociologists, the label seems too universal and indiscriminant to be useful. The idea that there is a single underlying character that might explain similarities threatens the differences among people and cultures that these social scientists seek to uncover. Even economists, who have explicitly attempted to parlay rational choice theory into an account of all human behavior, do not claim that the maximization of transitive preferences is ‘human nature’.I think part of the reason that social scientists are reluctant to use ‘human nature’ is that the term has traditionally labeled a theory with normative implications as well as descriptive ones.
Reply to Danto
Authors: Gewirth Alan 
Published: January 2009

I want to comment briefly on seven points in Professor Danto's discussion of my paper.1. He says that according to my conception of the existence of human rights, their esse est demonstrari – that is, for human rights to exist is for them to be demonstrated. He also says that, according to my thesis, “what one argues for cannot be separated from … the argument itself…”Now this is true in one sense but not in another. There is an ambiguity in Danto's use of words like “demonstrari” and “argument.” These words may refer either to particular, contingent attempts at demonstration and argument or to rationally necessary structures of demonstration and argument. Danto's remarks might suggest that it is in the former sense that I tie the existence of human rights to argument. But, on the contrary, it is obviously the latter meaning that I use when I say: “That human rights exist… is a proposition whose truth depends on the possibility, in principle, of constructing a body of moral justificatory argument from which that proposition follows as a logical consequence,” and that “for human rights to exist… means that there are conclusive moral reasons that justify or ground the moral requirements that constitute the Nature of human rights…” (emphasis added). The existence of such reasons is independent of whether this or that particular justificatory argument is successful; such reasons are discovered, not invented. Hence, what I argue for, that human rights exist, can be separated from my own or anyone else's attempts at argument.
Personal Projects as the Foundation for Basic Rights
Authors: Lomasky Loren 
Published: January 2009

A theory of basic moral rights ought to aim at telling us who the beings are that have rights and of what those rights consist. It may, however, seek to achieve that goal via an indirect route. In this paper I shall attempt a strategy of indirection. The first stage of the argument is a consideration of why moral theory can allow any place at all to rights. Acknowledging rights can be inconvenient. An otherwise desirable outcome is blocked if the only ways in which it can be attained involve the violation of rights. Why not jettison rights and thereby render these outcomes achievable? The answer that will be suggested trades on it being a deep fact about human beings that they can and do order their lives by reference to long-term commitments and aspirations. In my terminology, they are project pursuers. If people were rational animals all of whose interests were flickering and evanescent, an ethic entirely resting on maximization of impersonal value would be appropriate. But because projects entail commitments to values not subject to trade-offs, the introduction of rights is plausible.That is the first major stage of the argument. The second builds on it and tries to show that the recognition of rights or their equivalent is morally required, that only an ethic in which basic rights are acknowledged can be properly responsive to persons' status as project pursuers. More particularly, is suggested that rights take the form of constraints imposing minimal forbearance on others such that one has reasonable expectations of being able to pursue one's projects amidst a world of other project pursuers.
Indirect Utility and Fundamental Rights
Authors: Gray John 
Published: January 2009

A TRADITIONAL VIEW OF UTILITY AND RIGHTSAccording to a conventional view, no project could be more hopelessly misconceived than the enterprise of attempting a utilitarian derivation of fundamental rights. We are all familiar – too familiar, perhaps – with the arguments that support this conventional view, but let us review them anyway. We may begin by recalling that, whereas the defining value of utilitarianism – pleasure, happiness or welfare – contains no mention of the dignity or autonomy of human beings, it is this value which utilitarianism in all its standard forms invokes as the criterion of right action. Worse, insofar as utilitarian policy must have as its goal the maximization of welfare conceived as an aggregate summed over the utilities of everyone affected, legal and political utilitarianism seems bound to have a collectivist bias, trading on the dangerous fiction of a social entity and ignoring the distinctness of separate selves with their several incommensurable claims.It seems that, if individuals can appear in the utilitarian calculus at all, it will only be as ciphers, abstract place-holders for units of welfare. For, as an aggregative value, utility must be indifferent to distribution, and insensitive to the preeminently distributive considerations marked by claims about rights. So, if whatever has utility can be broken down into units or elements which are subject to measurement or at least comparison by a common standard, then it will always be possible that a very great loss of welfare for one man or a few men can be justified if it produces a great many small increments of welfare for a vast multitude of men.
Life, Liberty, and Property
Authors: Kelley David 
Published: January 2009

The words “liberty” and “liberalism” have a common root, reflecting the commitment of the original or classical liberals to a free society. Over the last century, the latter term has come to represent a political position that is willing to sacrifice liberty in the economic realm for the sake of equality and/or collective welfare. As a consequence, those who wish to reaffirm the classical version of liberalism – those who advocate liberty in economic as well as personal and intellectual matters – have invented a new word from the old root; they call themselves libertarians. Both in doctrine and in etymology, then, partisans of this view define themselves by their allegiance to liberty. Yet they spend most of their day-to-day polemical energies defending property rights and the economic system of laissez-faire capitalism that is based upon such rights. Evidently there is a strong link between liberty and property at work here. What is that link?The history of political thought is full of ideas and controversies about precisely this question. My goal here is to raise the question in a specific form, one that I think captures a basic difference in approach between classical liberals and most libertarians today. The difference is not in the substance of the position – it is not a disagreement about how the ideal society would be constituted – but rather in the way the position is to be defended. The key question is: can the right to property be derived from the right to liberty?Of course a property right is a right to kind of freedom.
Comment on Flathman Difficulties With Flathman's Moderation Thesis
Authors: Beitz Charles R. 
Published: January 2009

Professor Flathman's main aim in this interesting paper is to set forth what we might call the “moderation thesis.” It holds that there may be occasions when the best thing to do, all things considered, is to violate a right – at least if the violation takes the form of what Flathman calls “civil encroachment” or “civil non-enforcement.” Moreover, it would be desirable, in a society whose practices include rights, for this belief to be generally accepted, so that those who engaged with good reason in “civil encroachment” would receive the sympathetic support of the community.Let me begin by trying to explain the source of the problem to which this thesis is a response. As Flathman notes, rights have a discretionary character: if I have a right to do or to have something, it is up to me whether to do it or to have it. Having a right, I am entitled to make a choice. Since we cannot say, in advance, what choice I will make, we cannot say, in advance, what will be the state of the world after I make it. But since it seems plain that some states of the world are more desirable than others, it will always be possible that the consequences of my choice will be worse, on the whole, than the consequences of some other choice that I might have made but did not. To moderate rights is apparently to act in ways that redress or compensate for the undesirable results of their exercise.
Acquisition of gender agreement in Lithuanian: Exploring the effect of diminutive usage in an elicited production task
Authors: SAVICKIENĖ INETA , KEMPE VERA , BROOKS PATRICIA J. 
Published: January 2009

ABSTRACTThis study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N=24, mean 3 ; 1, 2 ; 5–3 ; 8) and older (N=24, mean 6 ; 3, 5 ; 6–6 ; 9) children were shown pictures of animals and asked to describe them after hearing the animal's name. Animal names differed with respect to familiarity (novel vs. familiar), derivational status (diminutive vs. simplex) and gender (masculine vs. feminine). Analyses of gender-agreement errors based on adjective and pronoun usage indicated that younger children made more errors than older children, with errors more prevalent for novel animal names. For novel animals, and for feminine nouns, children produced fewer errors with nouns introduced in diminutive form. These results complement findings from several Slavic languages (Russian, Serbian and Polish) that diminutives constitute a salient cluster of word forms that may provide an entry point for the child's acquisition of noun morphology.
Etomoxir-induced partial carnitine palmitoyltransferase-I (CPT-I) inhibition in vivo does not alter cardiac long-chain fatty acid uptake and oxidation rates
Authors: Luiken Joost J. F. P. , Niessen Hanneke E. C. , Coort Susan L. M. , Hoebers Nicole , Coumans Will A. , Schwenk Robert W. , Bonen Arend , Glatz Jan F. C. 
Published: January 2009

Although CPT-I (carnitine palmitoyltransferase-I) is generally regarded to present a major rate-controlling site in mitochondrial β-oxidation, it is incompletely understood whether CPT-I is rate-limiting in the overall LCFA (long-chain fatty acid) flux in the heart. Another important site of regulation of the LCFA flux in the heart is trans-sarcolemmal LCFA transport facilitated by CD36 and FABPpm (plasma membrane fatty acid-binding protein). Therefore, we explored to what extent a chronic pharmacological blockade of the LCFA flux at the level of mitochondrial entry of LCFA-CoA would affect sarcolemmal LCFA uptake. Rats were injected daily with saline or etomoxir, a specific CPT-I inhibitor, for 8 days at 20 mg/kg of body mass. Etomoxir-treated rats displayed a 44% reduced cardiac CPT-I activity. Sarcolemmal contents of CD36 and FABPpm, as well as the LCFA transport capacity, were not altered in the hearts of etomoxir-treated versus control rats. Furthermore, rates of LCFA uptake and oxidation, and glucose uptake by cardiac myocytes from etomoxir-treated rats were not different from control rats, neither under basal nor under acutely induced maximal metabolic demands. Finally, hearts from etomoxir-treated rats did not display triacylglycerol accumulation. Therefore CPT-I appears not to present a major rate-controlling site in total cardiac LCFA flux. It is likely that sarcolemmal LCFA entry rather than mitochondrial LCFA-CoA entry is a promising target for normalizing LCFA flux in cardiac metabolic diseases.