Stephen Wall

Reciprocity is a moral value that concerns the accommodation of conflicting claims. This paper argues that the demands of reciprocity can come into conflict with the requirements of justice. This conflict is most readily apparent when reciprocity is viewed as a rooted notion, one that addresses the concerns and claims of actual people in less than ideal circumstances. Reciprocity is a value that figures prominently in the writings of those who call themselves political liberals. But political liberals, the paper also contends, have oversimplified the relationship between reciprocity and justice. Taking the rooted dimension of reciprocity seriously and thinking hard about the potential conflicts between reciprocity and justice moves us beyond the confines of the political liberal project and allows us to view reciprocity as a notion that illuminates the moral dimension of political compromise.

The ethical standards that regulate clinical research have multiple rationales. Among them is the need to protect potential subjects from making imprudent decisions, which extends beyond the soft paternalistic concern to protect people from making uninformed decisions to participate in trials. This article argues that a plausible risk/benefit restriction on clinical trials is presumptively justified by hard paternalism, which in turn is supported by a deeper fairness-based rationale. This presumptive case for hard paternalism in research is not defeated by the alleged right to participate in clinical trials, by concerns about insult or status, by the need to conduct early phase trials that promise little to no benefit to participants, or by the recognition that some potential subjects are altruistically motivated.

Abstract In his early work in political philosophy, Amartya Sen advanced an interesting and provocative thesis ? the egalitarian thesis. This is the claim that every conception of social justice that has received support in recent times is egalitarian. This paper argues that Sen's account of capabilities and his more recent critique of transcendental justice have implications for the truth of the egalitarian thesis. It also discusses how the rejection of the egalitarian thesis bears on the larger, and more general, issue of the overall plausibility of egalitarian conceptions of social justice

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols.

The allocation of vaccines and therapeutics for Covid‐19 obviously raises ethical questions, and physicians and ethicists have begun to address them. Writers have identified various criteria that should guide allocation decisions, but the criteria often conflict and need to be balanced against one another. This article proposes a model for thinking about how different considerations that are relevant to the distribution of vaccines and scarce treatments for Covid‐19 could be integrated into an allocation procedure. The model employs the construct of a weighted lottery, which is a construct that has been employed in other contexts that involve the distribution of scarce resources. The article highlights the advantages of applying a weighted lottery to the Covid‐19 context and offers an illustration for how it might work in practice. The primary aim of the article is to articulate the structural features of a weighted lottery for this context and to bring out its advantages over other methods for allocating Covid‐19 medications.

What are our reasons for acting? Morality purports to give us these reasons, and so do norms of prudence and the laws of society. The theory of practical reason assesses the authority of these potentially competing claims, and for this reason philosophers with a wide range of interests have converged on the topic of reasons for action. This volume contains eleven essays on practical reason by leading and emerging philosophers. Topics include the differences between practical and theoretical rationality, practical conditionals and the wide-scope ought, the explanation of action, the sources of reasons, and the relationship between morality and reasons for action. The volume will be essential reading for all philosophers interested in ethics and practical reason.

This is Volume 9 of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. It contains papers on democracy, the law, political liberalism, voting, social experimentation, state neutrality, equality and incentives, self-ownership, drugs and prostitution, and Lincoln. Chapters include: “Challenging Democratic Commitments: On Liberal Arguments for Instrumentalism About Democracy” (Daniel Viehoff); “Emotional Abuse and the Law” (Elizabeth Brake); “Practical Political Liberalism” (Caleb Perl); “Beyond the Voting Debate” (Brookes Brown); “Social Experimentation in an Unjust World” (Jacob Barrett and Allen Buchanan); “State Neutrality and the Dismantling of the Gendered Division of Labour” (Anca Gheaus); “If It’s Not Your Talent, How Come You’re Getting an Incentive?” (Peter Dietsch); “(Owning) our Bodies, (Owning) our Selves?” (Sean Aas); “Self-Sovereignty, Drugs, and Prostitution” (Peter de Marneffe); “Lincoln as Political Philosopher” (William A. Edmundson).

This chapter presents a critical assessment of Rawls's rejection of perfectionist politics. It advances both a negative and a constructive thesis. The negative thesis targets Rawls's account of political legitimacy. The constructive thesis contends that there are resources within Rawls's own theory of justice for vindicating state perfectionism. A key part of the constructive thesis appeals to what Rawls terms as the Aristotelian Principle (AP). A legitimate society is a society that satisfies a general test, one that is articulated by Rawls's liberal principle of legitimacy. Rawls noted that the exclusion of perfectionist considerations from justice might prove on reflection to be unacceptable. Rawls's endorsement of the AP provides a footing for a form of state perfectionism that can strengthen the overall case for Rawlsian justice by enabling it to respond to the criticism that it is insufficiently responsive to the claims of human excellence.

This is the second volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. The papers in this volume address a range of central topics and represent cutting edge work in the field. They are grouped into three main themes: ideal theory, the moral assessment of states, and issues in social reliations.