Judith Lichtenberg

Many philosophers argue that reasonably well-off people have very demanding moral obligations to assist those living in dire poverty. I explore the relevance of demandingness to determining moral obligation, challenging the view that “morality demands what it demands” and that if we cannot live up to its demands that’s our problem, not morality’s. I argue that not only for practical reasons but also for moral-theoretical ones, the language of duty, obligation, and requirement may not be well-suited to express the nature of our responsibilities in these matters. But it is nevertheless morally imperative to reduce global poverty and inequality. Distinguishing between the Ought of states of affairs and the Ought of moral obligation, I defend an approach that looks to institutions to alter the environment within which people make choices and that employs our understanding of human psychology to encourage changes in behavior.

In this volume a group of distinguished legal and political theorists and experts on journalism discuss how to reconcile our values concerning freedom of the press with the enormous power of the media - especially television - to shape opinions and values. The policy issues treated concern primarily the extent of justifiable government regulation of the media and the justification for regulating television differently from newspapers. The volume contains some highly original and groundbreaking analyses of philosophical issues surrounding the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights. This is a book for anyone seriously interested in the rights to free speech and expression in technologically advanced societies.

Having learned my just war theory at Michael Walzer’s figurative knee, for many years I accepted the independence of jus in bello from jus ad bellum unthinkingly. Just war theory consists of two separate parts, one concerning the legitimate grounds for going to war and the other the rules of engagement once war had begun. This two-part view, the “independence thesis,” went hand in hand with the “symmetry thesis,” or “the moral equality of soldiers”: soldiers whose cause is unjust have the same rights to fight and to kill as those whose cause is just. But troubling questions sometimes crowded in. Doesn’t the justice of a country’s cause affect what actions it can legitimately take? Can’t victims of aggression legitimately do things aggressors cannot? Most fundamentally, “how can there be permissibly violent means of pursuing impermissible ends?”[1] Walzer casts glances at these problems when he proposes the idea of a “sliding scale,” in which the rules of war yield “slowly to the moral urgency of the cause: the rights of the righteous are enhanced, and those of their enemies devalued.”[2] He rejects the sliding scale in favor of the weaker qualification, “supreme emergency,” in which the rules of war are overridden “only in the face of an imminent catastrophe.”.