bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Nuclear Deterrence and Arms Control: Ethical Issues for the 1980s
Authors: Pfaltzgraff Robert L. 
Published: January 2009

The threat of atomic destruction has heightened the criminal irresponsibility of aggression, the employment of war as an instrument of national or bloc policy. Correspondingly, the moral obligation to discourage such a crime or, if it occurs, to deny it victory, has been underscored. The consequences of a successful defense are fearful to contemplate, but the consequences of a successful aggression, with tyrannical monopoly of the weapons of mass destruction, are calculated to be worse. While the avoidance of excessive and indiscriminate violence, and of such destruction as would undermine the basis for future peace, remain moral imperatives in a just war, it does not seem possible to draw a line in advance, beyond which it would be better to yield than to resist. Reinhold Neibuhr.… the person who deeply desires peace rejects any kind of pacifism which is cowardice or the simple preservation of tranquility. In fact, those who are tempted to impose their domination will always encounter the resistance of intelligent and courageous men and women, prepared to defend freedom in order to promote justice. Pope John Paul IIFor two generations the United States has maintained with its principal adversary, the Soviet Union, a security relationship based upon the deterrence of war by the possession of means deemed adequate to inflict unacceptable levels of damage in response to a Soviet attack upon the United States or its allies. Against the Soviet Union, the world's largest land power, in possession of superior conventional forces that could be launched against Western Europe and other peripheral regions of the continents of Europe and Asia, the United States has held nuclear capabilities as the ultimate weapon to be invoked in support of those interests deemed to be most vital to American security.
Morality and Paradoxical Deterrence
Authors: Lee Steven 
Published: January 2009

Nuclear deterrence is paradoxical. One paradox of nuclear deterrence we may call the rationality paradox:(RP) (1) While it is a rational policy to threaten nuclear retaliation against an opponent armed with nuclear weapons, it would not be rational to carry out the retaliation should the threat fail to deter; and (2) what would not be rational to do is not, in the circumstances characteristic of nuclear deterrence, rational to threaten to do.This is a paradox in the standard sense that it involves contradictory claims, for it implies that adopting a policy of nuclear deterrence is both rational and not rational, yet we have strong reason to believe that each of the claims is true. Claim (1) is a recognition that, though we believe nuclear deterrence works, there would seem to be no reason to carry out the threat if it were to fail. Claim (2) is part of the logic of all forms of deterrence, military and nonmilitary, and it relates to the important notion of credibility: if an opponent knows that one has no reason to carry out a threat, the threat would not be credible and so one would have no reason to make it. Further, it is characteristic of a state of nuclear deterrence that the opponent would recognize that one would have no reason to carry out the threat.The rationality paradox is but one of the paradoxes raised by nuclear deterrence. Some other of the paradoxes of nuclear deterrence have the same form as the rationality paradox: for a certain set of predicates x,(PND) (1) the act of threatening nuclear retaliation (against an opponent with nuclear weapons) is x, while the act of carrying out the threat would be not-x; and (2) if it is not-x to perform some action, then, in the circumstances generally characteristic of a situation of nuclear deterrence, it is not-x to threaten to perform that action.
No War Without Dictatorship, No Peace Without Democracy: Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics
Authors: Wildavsky Aaron 
Published: January 2009

I wish to consider the possibility that a good part of the opposition to the main lines of American foreign policy is based on deep-seated objections to the political and economic systems of the United States. This is not to say that existing policy is necessarily wise or that there may not be good and sufficient reasons for wishing to change it. Indeed, at any time and place, the United States might well be overestimating the threat from the Soviet Union or using too much force. What I wish to suggest is that across-the-board criticism of American policy as inherently aggressive and repressive, regardless of circumstance – a litany of criticism so constant that it does not alert us to the need for explanation – has a structural basis in the rise of a political culture that is opposed to existing authority.To the extent that this criticism is structural, that is, inherent in domestic politics, the problem of fashioning foreign policies that can obtain widespread support is much more difficult than it is commonly perceived to be. For if the objection is to American ways of life and, therefore, “to the government for which it stands,” only a transformation of power relationships at home, together with a vast redistribution of economic resources, would satisfy these critics. If the objection is not only to what we do but, more fundamentally, to who we are, looking to changes in foreign policy to shore up domestic support is radically to confuse the causal connections and, therefore, the order of priorities.
Marxism-Leninism and its Strategic Implications for the United States
Authors: Seabury Paul 
Published: January 2009

My central concern in this paper is with the implications of Marxist-Leninist ideology for Western defense policy and for United States strategic policy in particular. However, this is an extremely complex issue, and consideration of it will lead me to examine the ways in which ideas are related to interests, interests to strategy, and strategy to actions.II begin with an important observation: Americans in general, and for various reasons, have not taken Marxism-Leninism seriously for a long time. This is true even of many experts who consider the Soviet challenge to be very serious, affecting our very survival as a free society. At the risk of oversimplification, I would claim that many quite well-informed Americans, hardened to the realities of the Soviet “empire” and its activities, have come around to the view that Marxist-Leninist ideology has simply degenerated into a rigid system of enforced belief administered by authorities who have no particular commitment to it other than to employ it in order to remain in power. In this regard, “Marxism” (like “God” in America in the 1960s) is deemed “dead,” surviving only in the publicity offices of formal establishments as a means of maintaining their authority. Marxism-Leninism is thought to be no different from the moribund “divine right of kings,” which undergirded the monarchical establishments of 17th Century Europe.Oddly enough, the “socialism-is-dead” theme is today found in the writings of such prominent American neo-conservatives as Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and many others. It is also echoed in Europe in the writings of such eminent philosophers as Leszek Kolakowski of Poland and Paul Johnson of England.
Tocqueville On War
Authors: Cohen Eliot A. 
Published: January 2009

The title of this article has been chosen deliberately, for we find interesting parallels in the careers and outlooks of Alexis de Tocqueville and the great Prussian theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz whose master work,On War, remainssui generis. They overlapped in time (Tocqueville lived from 1805 to 1859, Clausewitz from 1780 to 1831), but, more importantly, their major theoretical works dealt in large measure with the same problem – the democratic revolution and its impact on politics. As Clausewitz argued, the warfare of the new era wascaused by the new political conditions which die French Revolution created both in France and in Europe as a whole, conditions that set in motion new means and new forces, and have thus made possible a degree of energy in war diat odierwise would have been inconceivable.It follows that the transformation of the art of war resulted from the transformation of politics.
Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life
Authors: Elster Jon 
Published: January 2009

In arguments in support of capitalism, the following propositions are sometimes advanced or presupposed: (i) the best life for the individual is one of consumption, understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense; (ii) consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good; (iii) since there are not enough opportunities for consumption to provide satiation for everybody, some principles of distributive justice must be chosen to decide who gets what; (iv) the total to be distributed has first to be produced. What is produced depends, among other things, on the motivation and information of the producers. The theory of justice must take account of the fact that different principles of distribution have different effects on motivation and information; (v) economic theory tells us that the motivational and informational consequences of private ownership of the means of production are superior to those of the various forms of collective ownerships.In the traditional controversy over the relative merits of capitalism and economic systems, the focus has been on proposition (v). In this paper, I consider instead propositions (i) and (ii). Before one can even begin to discuss how values are to be allocated, one must consider what they are – what it is that ought to be valued. I shall argue that at the center of Marxism is a specific conception of the good life as one of active self-realization, rather than passive consumption.
Law's Halo
Authors: Regan Donald H. 
Published: January 2009

Like many people these days, I believe there is no general moral obligation to obey the law. I shall explain why there is no such moral obligation – and I shall clarify what I mean when I say there is no moral obligation to obey the law – as we proceed. But also like many people, I am unhappy with a position that would say there was no moral obligation to obey the law and then say no more about the law's moral significance. In our thinking about law in a resonably just society, we have a strong inclination to invest law with a sort of moral halo. It does not feel right to suggest that law is a morally neutral social fact, nor to suggest that law is merely a useful social technique.In this essay, I shall try to account in part for law's moral halo. (Let me emphasize “in part”; I do not purport to say everything that could be said.) Because I share the widespread inclination to invest law with this halo, I shall not be interested in a merely historical account of how we come to see law with a halo – a pure “error theory” of law's halo, if you will. I want to justify the halo. On the other hand, the main way to justify the halo is to get clear just what law's moral significance is. It is unlikely that at the end of the process of clarification the halo will have exactly the shape or luminance that it had at the beginning.
Constitutional Interpretation and Original Meaning
Authors: Lyons David 
Published: January 2009

I. CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALISMBy “originalism” I mean the familiar approach to constitutional adjudication that accords binding authority to the text of the Constitution or the intentions of its adopters. At least since Marbury, in which Chief Justice Marshall emphasized the significance of our Constitution's being a written document, originalism in one form or another has been a major theme in the American constitutional tradition.
Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in Harming
Authors: Feinberg Joel 
Published: January 2009

I shall be concerned in this paper with some philosophical puzzles raised by so-called “wrongful life” suits. These legal actions are obviously of great interest to lawyers and physicians, but philosophers might have a kind of professional interest in them too, since in a remarkably large number of them, judges have complained that the issues are too abstruse for the courts and belong more properly to philosophers and theologians. The issues that elicit this judicial frustration are those that require the application to border-line cases of such philosophically interesting concepts as acting, causing, and the one that especially interests me, harming.I first became interested in the concept of harming in my work on the moral limits of the criminal law, where I had to come to terms with John Stuart Mill's famous “harm principle”–the principle that it is always a good reason in support of a criminal prohibition, indeed, the only legitimate reason, that it will prevent harm to persons other than the actor. I could not very well criticize that principle until I decided what the word “harm” must mean in its formulation. I gave what I took to be the requisite analysis of harm in my book Harm to Others. Here I wish to improve that analysis, examine its implications for civil as well as criminal liability, and test it on conceptually hard cases, especially cases of prenatal harming, that is, cases in which the wrongful causative conduct occurs before the victim's birth, and the harmed state that is its upshot consists in being born in an impaired condition.
Contract Remedies and Inalienable Rights
Authors: Barnett Randy E. 
Published: January 2009

I. IntroductionTwo kinds of remedies have traditionally been employed for breach of contract: legal relief and equitable relief. Legal relief normally takes the form of money damages. Equitable relief normally consists either of specific performance or an injunction – that is, the party in breach may be ordered to perform an act or to refrain from performing an act. In this article I will use a “consent theory of contract” to assess the choice between money damages and specific performance. According to such a theory, contractual obligation is dependent on more fundamental entitlements of the parties and arises as a result of the parties' consent to transfer alienable rights.My thesis will be that the normal rule favoring money damages should be replaced with one that presumptively favors specific performance unless the parties have consented to money damages instead. The principal obstacle to such an approach is the reluctance of courts to specifically enforce contracts for personal services. The philosophical distinction between alienable and inalienable rights bolsters this historical reticence, since a right to personal services may be seen as inalienable.I will then explain why, if the subject matter of a contract for personal services is properly confined to an alienable right to money damages for failure to perform, specific enforcement of such contracts is no longer problematic. Finally, I shall consider whether the subject matter of contracts for corporate services is properly confined to money damages like contracts for personal services, or whether performance of corporate services can be made the subject of a valid rights transfer and judicially compelled in the same manner as contracts for external resources.
Practical Wisdom and Professional Character
Authors: Kronman Anthony 
Published: January 2009

IThe existence of the legal profession is something most lawyers take for granted. Lawyers of course do many different things, and lead different sorts of lives, but those who make their living in the law tend to assume, without much reflection, that they have a bond or association of some sort with others who do the same and believe they share something important in common with them. It is not at all clear, however, what this common element is, and the great diversity of tasks that lawyers perform – representing litigants, counseling clients, advising legislators, administering government programs, and deciding cases – can easily make one doubt whether the search for a link leads to anything but empty generalities.One may, of course, conclude that the main law jobs, as Karl Llewellyn called them, have nothing important in common, and that the legal profession is only a name for a disconnected collection of pursuits with no substance or reality of its own. This is not, however, a very satisfying view, to lawyers at least, and is likely to provoke the quick reply that what lawyers share in common is after all quite easy to discern. All lawyers, regardless of the nature of their work, possess a general knowledge of the law which they have acquired through a specialized program of instruction; laypersons lack such knowledge and it is this, one might argue, which marks the line between those who are lawyers and those who are not and, thus, defines the scope and nature of the profession.
The Role of Private Philanthropy in a Free and Democratic State
Authors: Brody Baruch 
Published: January 2009

This paper will attempt to defend the thesis that it is impossible to understand the proper role of private philanthropy in a free and democratic society without examining certain fundamental questions about the proper roles of the state and about the rights and obligations of owners of private property. It will defend that thesis by presenting arguments for four subordinate theses: (a) there are historical and philosophical reasons for being skeptical about the role of private philanthropy in a free and democratic state; (b) these reasons can be met by certain familiar responses, but these responses are not fully satisfactory; (c) certain radical libertarian views, and more moderate versions of those views, would provide a basis for an alternative understanding of the role of private philanthropy in a free and democratic state; (d) whether or not one accepts those views, one can also better understand that role if one adopts a view of the state which emphasizes its role in the promotion of the virtues.(1) Historical and Philosophical DoubtsThe skeptical challenge to the claim that there is an important role for private philanthropy in a free and democratic state can be put very simply. It is the challenge that the emergence of strong but democratic states, with the concurrent emergence of a proper understanding of the extensive nature of legitimate state functions, has undercut the need for private philanthropy and its corresponding favorable tax treatment. It is the further claim that these developments, both historical and conceptual, have left private philanthropy with no significant role.
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.
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.
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.