Peter Vallentyne

John Locke (1690), libertarians, and others have held that agents are self-owners in the sense that they have private property rights over themselves in the same way that people can have private property rights over inanimate objects. This private ownership is typically taken to include (1) control rights over (power to grant and deny permission for) the use of their persons (e.g., what things are done to them), (2) rights to transfer the rights they have to others (by sale, rental, gift, or loan), and (3) tax immunities for the possession and exercise of these rights (so that, unlike renters, for example, they owe no payment for these rights). The property rights in question are moral rights, and need not be legally recognized. Thus, a country that allows involuntary slavery fails to recognize the (moral) self-ownership of the slaves.

Puzzles can arise in value theory and deontic (permissibility) theory when infinity is involved. These puzzles can arise for ethics, for prudence, or for any normative perspective. For the sake of simplicity, we focus on the ethical versions of these problems. We start by addressing problems that can arise in determining what is permissible, either in a given choice situation when there are an infinite number of options or in infinite sequence of choice situations, each with only finitely many options. There is a common theme here: standard and plausible decision rules, such as the dominance principle or maximising principles, run into conflict with other plausible principles. We then address problems that can arise in determining whether one option is more valuable than another, when the options have infinite, or undefined, value. This includes cases where a single bearer of value has infinite or undefined value, as well as cases where each bearer of value is finite but the total for the collection is infinite or undefined totals. Our focus is on introducing the puzzles, rather than canvassing potential solutions.

I shall develop and defend a view of the reparation (e.g., rights to compensation) and enforcement rights (i.e., rights to use force) that individuals have in response to rights-transgressions. The general nature of the account is intermediate to two well-developed alternatives. Pure responsibility accounts hold that reparation and enforcement rights hold only to the extent that the transgressor is culpable, or in some way responsible, for the transgression or resulting harm. Strict liability accounts hold that reparation and enforcement rights hold merely in virtue of the transgression and independently of the agent’s culpability orresponsibility. I shall defend an account according to which: (1) in agreement with pure responsibility accounts, there are reparation rights against a transgressor only to the extent that the transgressor is responsible for transgression-harm (i.e., harm from a transgression), and (2) in agreement with strict liability accounts, there are enforcement rights even against innocent transgressors—although, in agreement with pure responsibility accounts, the extent of the enforcement rights depends in general on the extent to which the transgressor is responsible for the harm and for acting wrongfully. The central feature of the proposed account is that reparation and enforcement rights in a particular context are sensitive to the extent to which their implementation will reduce (in a way specified below) direct transgression-harm.

Can material Egalitarianism (requiring, for example, the significant promotion of fortune) include animals in the domain of the equality requirement? The problem can be illustrated as follows: If equality of wellbeing is what matters, and normal mice are included in this egalitarian requirement, then normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because their wellbeing is much lower than that of normal humans. Thus, equality of wellbeing requires a massive shift of resources away from most humans to mice. This view, however, seems crazy. I explore this problem and propose a solution.

This book contains the historically most important discussions of the philosophical foundations of left-libertarianism. Like the more familiar right-libertarianism (such as that of Nozick), left-libertarianism holds that agents own themselves (and thus owe no service the others expect as the result of voluntary action). Unlike right-libertarianism, however, left-libertarianism holds that natural resources are owned by the members of society in some egalitarian manner, and may be appropriated only with their permission, or with a significant payment to them.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have argued that justice is concerned, at least in part, with the distribution of capabilities (opportunities to function). Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, and John Roemer have argued that justice is concerned with something like the distribution of opportunities for well-being. I argue that, although some versions of the capability view are incompatible with some versions of the opportunity for well-being view, the most plausible version of the capability view is identical to a slight generalization of the opportunity for well-being view.

François Huet (1814-1869), a French philosopher, sought to reconcile the principles of Christianity with those of socialism. He argues that each person is entitled to the wealth he/she produces and to an equal share of the wealth from natural resources and from artifacts inherited from previous generations. Unlike Colins, Huet holds that agents have the right to give and bequeath wealth that they have created, but no such right with respect to wealth they inherited or received as a gift. (This view was later endorsed and modified by Rignano.).

Act teleological theories are theories that judge an action permissible just in case its outcome is maximally good.[1] It is usually assumed that act teleological theories cannot be @i, i.e., make the permissibility of actions depend on what the past was like (e.g., on what promises were made, what wrong doings were done, and more generally on what actions were performed).[2] I shall argue that this is not so. Although @u act teleological theories, such as classical act utilitarianism, are not past-regarding, there are other types of act teleological theories that are past-regarding.

I came late to philosophy and even later to normative ethics. When I started my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto in 1970, I was interested in mathematics and languages. I soon discovered, however, that my mathematical talents were rather meager compared to the truly talented. I therefore decided to study actuarial science (the applied mathematics of risk assessment for insurance and pension plans) rather than abstract math. After two years, however, I dropped out of university, went to work for a life insurance company, and started studying on my own for the ten professional actuarial exams. When not studying, I would often go to the public library and I was drawn to the philosophy section—although I had no idea of what philosophy was about. I there saw Logical Positivism, edited by A.J. Ayer. I was interested in logical thinking and I also favored an optimistic attitude towards life (!) and so I thought that the book might be interesting. I checked it out and was absolutely enthralled with the writings of Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Hempel and others (if I’m remembering correctly). Of course, I didn’t really understand much of what they were doing, but I did see that they were addressing important problems in a systematic and rigorous manner. I liked it!

000000001. Introduction Call a theory of the good—be it moral or prudential—aggregative just in case (1) it recognizes local (or location-relative) goodness, and (2) the goodness of states of affairs is based on some aggregation of local goodness. The locations for local goodness might be points or regions in time, space, or space-time; or they might be people, or states of nature.1 Any method of aggregation is allowed: totaling, averaging, measuring the equality of the distribution, measuring the minimum, etc.. Call a theory of the good finitely additive just in case it is aggregative, and for any finite set of locations it aggregates by adding together the goodness at those locations. Standard versions of total utilitarianism typically invoke finitely additive value theories (with people as locations). A puzzle can arise when finitely additive value theories are applied to cases involving an infinite number of locations (people, times, etc.). Suppose, for example, that temporal locations are the locus of value, and that time is discrete, and has no beginning or end.2 How would a finitely additive theory (e.g., a temporal version of total utilitarianism) judge the following two worlds? Goodness at Locations (e.g. times) w1:..., 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, ..... w2:..., 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ..... Example 1 At each time w1 contains 2 units of goodness and w2 contains only 1. Intuitively, we claim, if the locations are the same in each world, finitely additive theorists will want to claim that w1 is better than w2. But it's not clear how they could coherently hold this view. For using standard mathematics the sum of each is the same infinity, and so there seems to be no basis for claiming that one is better than the other.3 (Appealing to Cantorian infinities is of no help here, since for any Cantorian infinite N, 2xN=1xN.)

In Child versus Childmaker Melinda Roberts provides an enlightening analysis and a cogent defense of a version of the person-affecting restriction in ethics. The rough idea of this restriction is that an action, state of affairs, or world, cannot be wrong, or bad, unless it would wrong, or be bad for, someone. I shall focus solely on Roberts’s core principles, and thus shall not address her interesting chapter-length discussions of wrongful life cases and of human cloning cases. The person-affecting intuition can be spelled out in a deontic and in an axiological form: Deontic Person-Affecting Restriction: An action, state of affairs, or world is wrong only if it would wrong someone. Axiological Person-Affecting Restriction: An action, state of affairs, or world is worse than another only if it is worse for someone. Roberts develops and defends the deontic version of the person-affecting restriction. Indeed, as her discussion (and those of others) makes clear, it is quite unlikely that there is a coherent version of the axiological form of the intuition (e.g., because of problems of transitivity). Roberts rightly rejects any appeal to impersonal ranking of worlds, and appeals only to the (many) personal rankings of worlds of the individuals involved. Roberts defends the view that worlds in which a person does not exist can be ranked in terms of that person’s well-being (how good that world would be for him/her) along with the worlds in which he/she does exist. Worlds in which the person has a life worth living are ranked more highly for that person than worlds in which he/she doesn’t exist (along with some worlds with indifferent existence), and the latter worlds are ranked more highly than worlds in which the person exists but doesn’t have a life worth living. Although this is somewhat controversial (some would deny that we can assess how good a world is for a person who doesn’t exist in it), it seems exactly right to me. Throughout I shall assume, as does Roberts, that non-existence has a value of zero (and thus that lives worth living have positive values, and that lives not worth living have negative values). In what follows I shall formulate Roberts’s theory as a theory of the permissibility of actions. In most of the book, Roberts formulates her theory as one of the permissibility of worlds, but, as I shall argue below, such assessments have little normative relevance, since they ignore the probabilities of realization (which depend on what actions are performed). The core of Roberts’s theory is just as plausible, and in some ways more powerful, when (as is sometimes the case in the book) it takes actions to be the objects of assessment. To start with, however, I shall make a highly restrictive assumption (not made by Roberts) that will effectively eliminate the difference between assessing actions and assessing worlds within the sort of welfaristic consequentialist framework that Roberts presupposes. I shall assume that if a given action were performed, then a specific world would be realized. We shall assume, that is, that there are no uncertainties involved. Everything is completely determined by which of the feasible actions is performed. Later in this paper, I will address the problems that arise once this simplifying assumption is dropped.

In a recent review essay of a two volume anthology on left-libertarianism (edited by two of us), Barbara Fried has insightfully laid out most of the core issues that confront left-libertarianism. We are each left-libertarians, and we would like to take this opportunity to address some of the general issues that she raises. We shall focus, as Fried does much of the time, on the question of whether left-libertarianism is a well-defined and distinct alternative to existing forms of liberal egalitarianism. More specifically, we shall address the following fundamental issues raised by Fried (and others): (1) Does the notion self-ownership have any determinate content? (2) What is the relation between self-ownership and world ownership? (3) How is left-libertarianism different from other forms of liberal egalitarianism (e.g., those of Rawls and Dworkin)?

die). In recent years the problem of moral dilemmas has received the attention of a number of philosophers. Some authors1 argue that moral dilemmas are not conceptually possible (i.e., that they are incoherent, given the nature of the concepts involved) because they are ruled out by certain valid principles of deontic logic. Other authors2 insist that moral dilemmas are conceptually possible, and argue that therefore the principles of deontic logic that rule them out must be rejected. In arguing for or against the conceptual possibility of moral dilemmas authors have been almost exclusively concerned with obligation dilemmas, i.e., situations in which more than one action is obligatory. Almost no one has been explicitly concerned with prohibition dilemmas, i.e., situations in which no feasible action is permissible.3 I shall argue that the two types of dilemmas are distinct, and that a much stronger case can be made against the conceptual possibility of obligation dilemmas than against the conceptual possibility of prohibition dilemmas.

Egalitarian theories of justice hold that equality should be promoted. Typically, perfect equality will not be achievable, and it will be necessary to determine which of various unequal distributions is the most equal. All plausible conceptions of equality hold that, where perfect equality does not obtain, (1) any benefit (no matter how small) to a worst-off person that leaves him/her still a worst-off person has priority (with respect to equality promotion) over any benefit (no matter how large) to a best-off person, and (2) any benefit to a worse-off person (even if not a worst-off person) has priority over a benefit of the same size to a better off person (even if not a best-off person). Beyond that there is much disagreement.

At various universities across the country, philosophers are organizing faculty development workshops for non-philosophy faculty members who want to incorporate critical thinking about ethical and social justice issues into their courses. The demand for such programs is reasonably strong. In part this is due to the increasing pressure from professional associations (e.g., those of nursing and accounting) for the inclusion of ethics in the curriculum. In part, however, it is simply due to the recognition by faculty members across the university that an adequate education must include some reflection on ethical issues. In this article we discuss some of the reasons for philosophers to become involved, describe a faculty development program that we are running, and offer some advice about how to succeed in such endeavors.

A contractarian moral theory states that an action (practice, social structure, etc.) is morally permissible if and only if it (or rules to which if conforms) would be agreed to by the members of society under certain circumstances. What people will agree to depends on what their desires are like. Most contractarian theories - for example those of Rawls (1971) and Gauthier (1986) - specify that parties to the agreement are mutually unconcerned (take no interest in each other's interests). Contractarian theorists, do not, of course, believe that this is true of real people, but they insist (with Kant) that the basic moral constraints on conduct (if there are any) apply independently of whether individuals care about each other. I shall here argue against the appropriateness of the assumption of mutual unconcern for contractarian theories, such as Gauthier's, that are supposed to ground morality solely in rationality.