bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Optimal Deterrence
Authors: Brams Steven J. , Kilgour D. Marc 
Published: January 2009

1. IntroductionThe policy of deterrence, at least to avert nuclear war between the superpowers, has been a controversial one. The main controversy arises from the threat of each side to visit destruction on the other in response to an initial attack. This threat would seem irrational if carrying it out would lead to a nuclear holocaust – the worst outcome for both sides. Instead, it would seem better for the side attacked to suffer some destruction rather than to retaliate in kind and, in the process of devastating the other side, seal its own doom in an all-out nuclear exchange.Yet, the superpowers persist in their adherence to deterrence, by which we mean a policy of threatening to retaliate to an attack by the other side in order to deter such an attack in the first place. To be sure, nuclear doctrine for implementing deterrence has evolved over the years, with such appellations as “massive retaliation,” “flexible response,” “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), and “counterforce” giving some flavor of the changes in United States strategic thinking.All such doctrines, however, entail some kind of response to a Soviet nuclear attack. They are operationalized in terms of preselected targets to be hit, depending on the perceived nature and magnitude of the attack. Thus, whether U.S. strategic policy at any time stresses a retaliatory attack on cities and industrial centers (countervalue) or on weapons systems and armed forces (counterforce), the certainty of a response of some kind to an attack is not the issue.
Immoral Risks: A Deontological Critique of Nuclear Deterrence
Authors: Lackey Douglas P. 
Published: January 2009

I. Beyond UtilitarianismIn the summer of 1982, I published an article called “Missiles and Morals,” in which I argued on utilitarian grounds that nuclear deterrence in its present form is not morally justifiable. The argument of “Missiles and Morals” compared the most likely sort of nuclear war to develop under nuclear deterrence (DET) with the most likely sort of nuclear war to develop under American unilateral nuclear disaramament (UND). For a variety of reasons, I claimed diat the number of casualties in a two-sided nuclear war developing under DET would be at least fifteen times greater than the number of casualties in a one-sided nuclear attack developing under UND. If one assumes that human lives lost or saved is the principal criterion by which nuclear weapons policies should be measured, it follows that DET is morally superior to UND on utilitarian grounds only if the chance of a two-sided nuclear war under DET is more than fifteen times less dian the chance of a one-sided nuclear attack under UND. Since I did not believe that the chance of nuclear war under deterrence is fifteen times less than the chance of nuclear war under unilateral nuclear disarmament, I inferred diat utilitaranism failed to justify DET. Indeed, on utilitarian grounds, DET stood condemned.
Justice in Settlements
Authors: Coleman Jules , Silver Charles 
Published: January 2009

INTRODUCTIONIn any society relatively few disputes are brought to judges for resolution. Most are handled informally or forgotten. Fewer still are cases that go to trial. Most are settled. Compromises are reached even in cases where issues are hotly contested and where millions or billions of dollars in damages are claimed. Recently, for example, one of the most controversial lawsuits of our time, the Agent Orange case, was settled. In that case, veterans of the Vietnam War, their spouses, and their children alleged that a defoliant — Agent Orange – used in Southeast Asia contained dioxin and was responsible for deaths, debilities, miscarriages, and birth defects suffered by members of the plaintiff class. Class members argued that the manufacturers of the defoliant, seven major chemical companies, knew that it was tainted and should be made to compensate them for their injuries, claiming billions of dollars in damages. The case received national exposure and became a rallying point for veterans, a means they hoped to use to publicize their plight and to spur Congress to come to their aid. On the eve of trial, the case was settled. The defendants, who denied liability throughout the pretrial period, agreed to pay the veterans $180 million. In turn, the plaintiff class agreed to drop the suit. Thus ended a controversy which not only presented novel legal issues and tested the ability of the federal courts to handle complex lawsuits, but concerned the well-being of a large number of veterans, their spouses, and their handicapped children as well.
Philanthropy and Selfishness
Authors: O'Connor John 
Published: January 2009

The question I want to discuss is “How can I say ‘No’ to a fund-raising appeal?” Since many people apparently find it easy to say “No,” it is not clear what the problem is. Put briefly, the problem is this: I do not want to think of myself as uncaring, unfeeling, and insensitive to the needs of others. And yet, within the last year I have not responded to appeals for funds from a wide variety of causes: medical research, famine relief, freedom of speech, environmental protection. I have turned down requests for support of scholarly magazines, research institutes, and other good causes. My only moderate-sized contribution during that time has been to the capital campaign of an organization of which I am a member. I have enough to have made (very) small contributions to all of the organizations from which I received appeals, but not enough so that my contributions to any single cause would be of major significance. How can I justify not giving?The problem arises because these appeals (some of them, at least) apparently put moral claims upon me: they say that people are suffering and have needs, and you can help to meet them. Or they say that the intellectual and cultural life of our society will be enriched if you help.One traditional philosophic view holds that moral claims have a special status. They override political, economic, social, and other claims. The only thing, according to this view, that can free one from a moral claim is another moral claim.
From Here to There; or, If Cooperative Ownership Is So Desirable, Why are There So Few Cooperatives?
Authors: Elster Jon 
Published: January 2009

In this paper I want to discuss a well-known but poorly understood problem: how can socialists reconcile the observed paucity of cooperatives in capitalist societies with their alleged superiority on normative grounds? If cooperatives are so desirable, why don't workers desire them? If one's ideal of socialism is central planning, it is clear enough that it cannot emerge gradually within the womb of the capitalist economy. If instead it is something like market socialism, it is not clear that a discontinuous transformation of society is required. If workers want (market) socialism, they can start up here and now. If they don't, doesn't it prove that they do not want it?I shall proceed as follows. Section I argues that the usual explanation - that cooperatives are not economically viable or that workers prefer working in capitalist firms – is not necessarily correct. The explanation may lie elsewhere, in endogenous preference formation, adverse selection, discrimination, or externalities.Section II is concerned with the variety of cooperative arrangements. Only rarely do we find cooperatives in their pure form, with all workers and only workers having equal ownership rights. Non-working owners, non-owning workers and unequal distribution of shares are frequent. When the deviations become sufficiently large, the firms cease to become cooperatives in any meaningful sense.Section III extends the argument of Section I by surveying the causes of cooperative failure. Some fail by success: profitable cooperatives often attract or turn into private ownership. Others fail outright, partly because they tend to be established under unfavorable circumstances and partly because of intrinsic difficulties of management.
Choice, Character, and Excuse
Authors: Moore Michael S. 
Published: January 2009

Freud justified his extensive theorizing about dreams by the observation that they were “the royal road” to something much more general: namely, our unconscious mental life. The current preoccupation with the theory of excuse in criminal law scholarship (including my own) can be given a similar justification, for the excuses are the royal road to theories of responsibility generally. The thought is that if we understand why we excuse in certain situations but not others, we will have also gained a much more general insight into the nature of responsibility itself. Nowhere has this thought been more evident than in the century-old focus of criminal law theoreticians on the excuse of insanity, a focus that could not be justified by the importance of the excuse itself.In this paper I wish to isolate two theories of excuse, each of which instantiates its own distinctive theory of responsibility. One is what I shall callthe choice theory of excuse, according to which one is excused for the doing of a wrongful action because and only because at the moment of such action's performance, one did not have sufficient capacity or opportunity to make the choice to do otherwise. Such a choice theory of excuse instantiates a more general theory of responsibility, according to which we are responsible for wrongs we freely choose to do, and not responsible for wrongs we lacked the freedom (capacity and opportunity) to avoid doing. The second I shall callthe character theory of excuse, according to which one is excused for the doing of a wrongful action because and only because such action is not determined by (or in some other way expressive of) those enduring attributes of ourselves we call our characters.
The Matrix of Contractarian Justice
Authors: Buchanan James M. , Lomasky Loren E. 
Published: January 2009

There are no first principles etched in stone from which all moral philosophers must take their bearings. We must deliberatelychooseour point of departure in any attempt to respond to the question: “Must any defensible theory of justice incorporate both a commitment to personal liberty and to economic equality?” Basic to our own approach is a suspicion of seers and visionaries who espy an external source of values independent from human choices. We presuppose, instead, that political philosophy commences withindividualevaluation.1A near-corollary of this presupposition is thateachindividual's preferences ought to be taken into account equally with those of others. That is, we suppose that there is noprivileged evaluator, whose preferences are accorded decisive weight.Conceptual unanimityas a criterion for institutional evaluation follows naturally from the other two presuppositions. If there is neither an external standard of value nor a corps of resident value experts, only unanimity can ultimately be satisfactory as a test of social desirability. Our perspective then issubjectivist, individualist, andunanimitarian.These presuppositions inform ourcontractariananalysis. There are, however, two separate contractarian traditions that we shall find useful to distinguish, the “Hobbesian” and the “Rawlsian.” In the first, persons find themselves in the anarchistic war of each against all. They contract away their natural liberties in exchange for the order that civil society – through its sovereign – affords. In this contracting process, individuals are assumed to possess full self-knowledge; they know who they are, what conceptions of the good they hold, and what their endowments are.
What's So Special about Rights?
Authors: Buchanan Allen 
Published: January 2009

Future historians of moral and political philosophy may well label our period the Age of Rights. In moral philosophy it is now widely assumed that the two most plausible types of normative theories are Utilitarianism and Kantian theories and that the contest between them must be decided in the end by seeing whether Utilitarianism can accommodate a prominent role for rights in morality. In political philosophy even the most bitter opponents in the perennial debate over conflicts between liberty and equality often share a common assumption: that the issue of liberty versus equality can only be resolved (or dissolved) by determining which is the correct theory of rights. Some contend that equal respect for persons requires enforcement of moral rights to goods and services required for the pursuit of one's own conception of the good, while others protest that an enforced system of ‘positive’ rights violates the right to liberty whose recognition is the essence of equal respect for persons. The dominant views in contemporary moral and political philosophy combine an almost unbounded enthusiasm for the concept of rights with seemingly incessant disagreement about what our rights are and which rights are most basic. Unfortunately, that which enjoys our greatest enthusiasm is often that about which we are least critical.My aim in this essay is to take a step backward in order to examine the assumption that frames the most important debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy – the assumption that the concept of a right has certain unique features which make rights so especially valuable as to be virtually indispensable elements of any acceptable social order.
Rousseau on Equality
Authors: Cranston Maurice 
Published: January 2009

Rousseau has the reputation of being a radical egalitarian. I shall suggest that a more careful reading of his work shows him to have been hardly more egalitarian than Plato. He was undoubtedly disturbed by existing inequalities, especially as he observed them in France. He had an original and interesting theory about how inequality among men came into being; he also set out what he considered to be the connections between equality and freedom. As a champion of a certain idea of freedom, he wrote in favor of specific sorts of equality; even as Plato, as the champion of a certain idea of justice, wrote in favor of putting every man in his place. The great difference is that Plato believed that men were never equal, whereas Rousseau believed they had once been equal but no longer were.To the proposition that all men are born equal he could be said to subscribe only in the sense that “all men were originally equal”. Rousseau argued that equality prevailed in the state of nature; but he also said it would be wrong to expect, even to desire such equality in civil society. In the final footnote to his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (hereinafter called the Second Discourse) he wrote (in 1753): “Distributive justice would still be opposed to that rigorous equality of the state of nature, even if it were practicable in civil society.”1Commentators eager to claim Rousseau as an egalitarian, or proto-Marx, ignore this footnote; as for the opinions expressed in the Dedication to the Second Discourse, opinions no less at variance with egalitarian ideology, they tend to be dismissed as empty hyperbole, designed to ingratiate the philosopher with the authorities of Geneva at a time when he wanted to recover his rights as a citizen and burgess.
Liberty, Equality, Honor
Authors: Kristol William 
Published: January 2009

As today's battles rage between those who march under the banner of liberty and those who unfurl the flag of equality, even an engaged partisan might be forgiven for occasionally wondering whether the game is, after all, worth the candle. For one thing, neither party simply rejects the other's principle – properly understood. Egalitarians routinely emphasize that their concern for equality is, also, a concern for true liberty; thus Michael Walzer, writing “In Defense of Equality,” finds it “worth stressing that equality as I have described it does not stand alone, but is closely related to the idea of liberty.”1Libertarians tend to be less enthusiastic in their embrace of equality, but almost all endorse some form of equality or other – for example, equality of political rights or equality before the law. It would seem, then, that the differences between egalitarians and libertarians are really over the meaning and scope of equality and liberty, and that putting the issue as one of equalityvs.liberty may be misleading.More important, one can wonder whether either the egalitarian or the libertarian combination of the principles of liberty and equality is worthy of support. What society has exalted personal liberty, has taken rights more seriously, than ours? Yet who can easily dismiss Solzhenitsyn's charge that our worship of freedom has resulted in “destructive and irresponsible freedom” being granted “boundless scope,” leaving us defenseless against “the corrosion of evil”?2The cause of liberty against tyranny surely continues to command our support; but what conclusion ought we to draw from the facts that libertyin absentiaseems so markedly more attractive than liberty in practice, and that the qualities manifested in the struggle for liberty seem so superior to those that come to the fore once liberty is secured?
The No Reason Thesis
Authors: Thomson Judith Jarvis 
Published: January 2009

Moral theorists often say such things as “But surely A ought to do such and such,” or “Plainly it is morally permissible for B to do so and so,” and do not even try to prove that those judgments are true. Moreover, they often rest weight on the supposition that those judgments are true. In particular, they often rest theories on them: they take them as data.Others object. They say that nobody is entitled to rest any weight at all on judgments such as those. They say, not that the judgments are false, but that there is no reason to believe them true. They say, more generally, that there is no reason to think of any moral judgment that it is true. I will call this The No Reason Thesis.Is there reason to think The No Reason Thesis true? There are lots of arguments for it in the literature, but I want to focus on one of them in particular. I think that the one I will focus on lies behind all the others, but no matter if it does not: I suggest that if this argument fails, they all fail.
The Nature of Immorality
Authors: Hampton Jean 
Published: January 2009

This article is concerned with the nature of individual moral failure. This has not been a standard issue for exploration in moral philosophy, where questions surrounding moral success have been more popular: in particular, the questions “What is it to do the moral thing (i.e., how do I identify moral success)?” and “Why am I supposed to do the moral thing (i.e., what is morality's authority)?” I want to change the subject and pursue answers to three importantly related questions about people's failure to be moral.First, I want to explore an issue in moral psychology: why do people behave immorally? I suspect this question has been largely ignored by philosophers because they have thought it a question for psychologists, and one that, at any rate, has an easy surface answer. Isn't it our immorality simply the result of our excessive self-interest? Yet we shall see in what follows that this answer is not nearly good enough, and that philosophers have a lot to contribute in determining what would count as a satisfactory answer. We shall also see that different meta-ethical theories purporting to explain the authority of moral action implicitly assume different and often mutually inconsistent accounts of why (and when) we fail to be moral, and our analysis will show that none of these accounts of moral failure is unproblematic.
Why Markets Don't Stop Discrimination
Authors: Sunstein Cass R. 
Published: January 2009

Markets, it is sometimes said, are hard on discrimination. An employer who finds himself refusing to hire qualified blacks and women will, in the long run, lose out to those who are willing to draw from a broader labor pool. Employer discrimination amounts to a self-destructive “taste” – self-destructive because employers who indulge that taste add to the costs of doing business. Added costs can only hurt. To put it simply, bigots are weak competitors. The market will drive them out.On this account, the persistence of employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex presents something of a puzzle. And if markets are an ally of equality and a foe of employment discrimination, perhaps discrimination persists because of something other than markets. Perhaps labor unions are to blame; perhaps the real culprit is the extensive federal regulation of the employment market, including minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws and unemployment compensation. If competitive markets drive out discrimination, the problem for current federal policy lies not in the absence of aggressive anti-discrimination law, but instead in the absence of truly competitive markets.If this account is correct, the prescription for the future of anti-discrimination law is to seek ways to free up employers from the wide range of governmental disabilities – including, in fact, anti-discrimination law itself. The argument seems to be bolstered by the fact that some groups subject to past and present prejudice – most notably, Jews and Asian-Americans – have made substantial progress in employment at least in part because of the operation of competitive markets.
The Message of Affirmative Action
Authors: Hill Thomas E. 
Published: January 2009

Affirmative action programs remain controversial, I suspect, partly because the familiar arguments for and against them start from significantly different moral perspectives. Thus I want to step back for a while from the details of debate about particular programs and give attention to the moral viewpoints presupposed in differenttypesof argument. My aim, more specifically, is to compare the “messages” expressed when affirmative action is defended from different moral perspectives. Exclusively forward-looking (for example, utilitarian) arguments, I suggest, tend to express the wrong message, but this is also true of exclusively backward-looking (for example, reparation-based) arguments. However, a moral outlook that focuses on cross-temporal narrative values (such as mutually respectful social relations) suggests a more appropriate account of what affirmative action should try to express. Assessment of the message, admittedly, is only one aspect of a complex issue, but it is a relatively neglected one. My discussion takes for granted some common-sense ideas about the communicative function of action, and so I begin with these.Actions, as the saying goes, oftenspeaklouder than words. There are times, too, when only actions can effectively communicate the message we want to convey and times when giving a message is a central part of the purpose of action. What our actions say to others depends largely, though not entirely, upon our avowed reasons for acting; and this is a matter for reflective decision, not something we discover later by looking back at what we did and its effects. The decision is important because “the same act” can have very different consequences, depending upon how we choose to justify it.