Kimberley Brownlee

When the US Supreme Court rejected the constitutional right to abortion care, several US states enacted bans. This legal change exposed critical moral questions about pregnancy in childhood: What do adults owe to an impregnated girl? This article shows that both opponents of abortion and defenders of women’s rights make a mistake by overlooking that a girl is a child. Her caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it. This article presents a novel analysis of a previously unnamed injustice—antigirlism—to make sense of the mistreatment that girls endure in reproductive care.

Sometimes, we can gain new moral rights by acting wrongly. Sometimes, we can gain new moral rights (in addition to restitution rights) from other people acting wrongly. This chapter presents a typology of these rights. It then analyses why some wrongs can change the moral ballgame in this way to give us new rights, and other wrongs cannot. The chapter focuses on three factors that are relevant to moral ballgame-changing cases: (1) legitimate expectations; (2) personal investments; and (3) piggybacking on others’ interests. Finally, the chapter examines two ultimately unsuccessful strategies to resist this analysis of wrong-generated rights. The first strategy pertains to the defeasibility of rights. The second strategy pertains to their conditionality.

One putative test for human rights is feasibility. This chapter questions the merits of this test. First, it distinguishes two different notions of feasibility. One is that of in principle practicability. The other is that of easy present practicability. Both of these notions are distinct from the broader notion of in principle possibility. Second, the chapter argues that there are reasons to be sceptical about the easy-practicability notion of feasibility. Third, it shows that, to the extent that feasibility (i.e. in principle practicability) is a credible test for human rights, it must take a non-state-centred form that highlights the role that international institutions now play in human rights protection.

Each year, hundreds of people in high-income countries take their own lives while they are in prison. Thousands engage in self-harm and thousands abuse other prisoners. Such behaviours often correlate with mental health problems, but they are also often pleas for help and for hope. Some courts have invoked the ideas of hope and the right to hope in the context of life imprisonment, but they have neither subjected the concept of hope to sustained analysis nor specified the role that hope should play in our practices of lawful punishment overall. This article offers a preliminary investigation of the role for hope in lawful punishment. It argues that one standard that both individual modes of punishment and overall systems of punishment must meet to be morally justifiable is that they be compatible with a reasonable person retaining hope both in the present and for his future after punishment. Such a hope standard narrows the scope of legitimate modes of punishment.

To survive, let alone flourish, we need to be sure of—securely tied to—at least one other person. We also need to be sure of our general acceptance within the wider social world. This book explores the normative implications of taking our social needs seriously. Chapter 1 sketches out what our core social needs are, and Chapter 2 shows that they ground a fundamental, but largely neglected human right against social deprivation. Chapter 3 then argues that this human right includes a right to sustain the people we care about, and that often, when we are denied the resources to sustain others, we endure social contribution injustice. Chapters 4–6 explore the tension between our needs for social inclusion and our needs for interactional and associational freedom, showing that social inclusion must take priority. While Chapters 5 and 6 defend a narrow account of freedom of association, Chapter 7 shows that the moral ballgame changes once we have made morally messy associative decisions. Sometimes we have rights to remain in associations that we had no right to form. Finally, Chapter 8 exposes the distinct social injustices that we do to people whom we deem to be socially threatening. Overall, the book identifies ways to change our social and political practices, and our personal perspectives, to better honour the fact that we are fundamentally social beings.

Joseph Raz (1939–2022) was a towering figure in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century analytical philosophy. His work in moral, political, and legal philosophy profoundly influenced the discipline, informing debates about practical reasoning, value theory, foundations of liberalism, personal autonomy, perfectionism, the nature of authority, theories of rights, free expression, multiculturalism, the nature of promises, the rule of law, toleration and pluralism, and the nature of law, among others. This collection—the product of two highly selective, international conferences held in Raz’s honor soon after his passing—pays tribute to Raz’s enormous influence in moral, political, and legal philosophy. The collected essays all engage with Raz’s work, but not necessarily as critiques or interpretations of his work. The collection is a testament to Raz’s impact, direct and indirect, on a wide range of philosophical issues and on a large and diverse set of philosophical communities.

Ordinary interactions are the primary vehicle through which we show respect, give social pleasure, and grease the wheels of healthy sociality. When we do an interactional wrong to someone, we not only convey disrespect by disregarding their interactional needs, but also cause them social pain and erode healthy social relations. Interactional ethics – the study of the ethics of interacting – concerns both our conduct within our interactions and our broader interactional style. The existing philosophical literature in this area has not yet provided a detailed analysis of the three discrete stages of an ordinary interaction – the initiation stage, the execution stage, and the conclusion stage – or of the specific wrongs beyond disrespect that we can do at each stage. This article develops novel and useful tools to analyse interactional wrongs that both compromise our wellbeing by causing us social pain and threaten healthy sociality. It then distinguishes various patterns of interactional wrongdoing – i.e. interactional vices – that we can manifest as we seek to control with whom we interact and how.

This article shows that associative freedom is not what we tend to think it is. Contrary to standard liberal thinking, it is neither a general moral permission to choose the society most acceptable to us nor a content-insensitive claim-right akin to the other personal freedoms with which it is usually lumped such as freedom of expression and freedom of religion. It is at most (i) a highly restricted moral permission to associate subject to constraints of consent, necessity and burdensomeness; (ii) a conditional moral permission not to associate provided our associative contributions are not required; and (iii) a highly constrained, content sensitive moral claim-right that protects only those wrongful associations that honour other legitimate concerns such as consent, need, harm and respect. This article also shows that associative freedom is not as valuable as we tend to think it is. It is secondary to positive associative claim-rights that protect our fundamental social needs and are pre-conditions for any associative control worth the name.

This chapter explores the contours of our freedoms to enter into and leave particular associations with particular people. The chapter highlights the fact that often our associations with each other are morally complex and, indeed, morally wrong. This moral complexity stems partly from the fact that associations are necessarily intersubjective: they affect the social needs, claims, and freedoms of at least two people. When our associations are morally wrong, we must determine whether they can be protected nonetheless by our sphere of associative freedom. The chapter shows that our sphere of associative freedom depends greatly on the character and consequences of our associations (or dissociations). The chapter also shows that, under certain conditions, freedom of association is less important than other associative rights, such as the positive associative claim‐rights of utterly dependent people.

This Reply offers my answers to Cheshire Calhoun’s, Elizabeth Brake’s, and Monika Betzler’s wonderful contributions to the Criminal Law and Philosophy symposium on Being Sure of Each Other (2020). Their contributions focus respectively on the conceptual and normative foundations of my defence of our human rights to have adequate social inclusion, the harms that might flow from recognising such rights as human rights, and the impact such rights can have on our most intimate relations. My replies aim both to clarify and solidify the argumentative basis for my account and to show that whatever harms and wrongs might dog the recognition of social human rights are nothing compared to the injustices that flow–and have long-flowed–from ignoring or attacking these rights.

We face an epistemic problem in competently judging some types of experience. The problem arises when an experience either defies our efforts to assess its quality, such as a traumatic event, or compromises our abilities to assess quality in general, such as starvation. In the latter type of case, the competent judge problem is actually a paradox since the experience undermines our competence to judge at the same time that it gives us competence to judge it against other experiences. The problem is pressing because it arises for experiences at the more extreme ends of the spectrum, which are precisely the experiences we most want to judge competently. It also has implications for how we approach some practical ethical problems, such as solitary confinement. The paper explores a range of cases and explains why efforts to escape the competent judge problem may prove fruitless.

A parallel may be drawn between the communicative aspect of civil disobedience and the communicative aspect of lawful punishment by the state. In punishing an offender, the state seeks to communicate both its condemnation of the crime committed and its desire for repentance and reformation on the part of the offender. Similarly, in civilly disobeying the law, a disobedient seeks to convey both her condemnation of a certain law or policy and her desire for recognition that a lasting change in policy is required. When disobedients and authorities target each other, their confrontation allows for a direct comparison of the respective justifiability of their conduct. Their confrontation is explored in this paper with an eye to analysing how civil disobedients and authorities should engage with each other

In ‘Why Criminal Law: A Question of Content?’, Douglas Husak argues that an analysis of the justifiability of the criminal law depends upon an analysis of the justifiability of state punishment. According to Husak, an adequate justification of state punishment both must show why the state is permitted to infringe valuable rights such as the right not to be punished and must respond to two distinct groups of persons who may demand a justification for the imposition of punishment, namely, individuals subjected to punishment and the society asked to support the institution of punishment. In this discussion, I analyse Husak’s account of the right not to be punished with an eye to showing that the parameters of that right do not extend to the cases that would make it controversial. I also consider two other distinct groups of persons who have equal standing to alleged offenders and society to demand justification for the imposition of state punishment, namely, direct victims of crimes and criminal justice officials

My aim is to vindicate two distinct and important moral categories – ideals and aspirations – which have received modest, and sometimes negative, attention in recent normative debates. An ideal is a conception of perfection or model of excellence around which we can shape our thoughts and actions. An aspiration, by contrast, is an attitudinal position of steadfast commitment to, striving for, or deep desire or longing for, an ideal. I locate these two concepts in relation to more familiar moral concepts such as duty, virtue, and the good to demonstrate, amongst other things, first, that what is morally significant about ideals and aspirations cannot be fully accommodated within a virtue ethical framework that gives a central role to the Virtuous Person as a purported model of excellence. On a certain interpretation, the Virtuous Person is not a meaningful ideal formoral agents. Second, I articulate one sense in which aspirations are morally required imaginative acts given their potential to expand the realm of practical moral possibility.

This paper contributes to the debate on whether we can have reason to do what we are unable to do. I take as my starting point two papers recently published in Philosophical Studies, by Bart Streumer and Ulrike Heuer, which defend the two dominant opposing positions on this issue. Briefly, whereas Streumer argues that we cannot have reason to do what we are unable to do, Heuer argues that we can have reason to do what we are unable to do when we can get closer to success but cannot have reason to try to do what we are unable to do when we cannot get closer to success. In this paper, I reject both positions as they are presented, on the grounds that neither can accommodate an important category of reasons, which are the reasons to realise and to try to realise dimensions of value that lie at the boundary of what is realisable, specifically, genuinely valuable ideals. I defend a third view that we can have reason to do and to try to do what we are unable to do even when we cannot, in Heuer’s sense, get closer to success. Moreover, I argue that we can have reason to realise and to try to realise genuinely valuable ideals for their own sake and not simply for the sake of achieving mundane, realisable ends.

This article responds to the four contributors to the book symposium on Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience. Those four contributors are Thomas Hill Jr, David Lefkowitz, William Smith, and Daniel Weinstock. Hill examines the concepts of conviction and conscience ; Smith discusses conviction and then analyses the right to civil disobedience and my humanistic arguments for it ; Weinstock explores democratic challenges for civil disobedience ; and Lefkowitz assesses the merits of a legal demands-of-conviction excuse for civil disobedience. This ‘Reply to Critics’ addresses them in turn.