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27Mazor on Indirect Obligations to Conserve Natural Resources for Future GenerationsEthics, Policy and Environment 16 (2). 2013.Many of us have the intuition that we are duty-bound to conserve natural resources for the benefit of future generations. Yet there is a well-known difficulty in trying to identify the source of th...
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159Why coercion is wrong when it’s wrongAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1). 2013.It is usually thought that wrongful acts of threat-involving coercion are wrong because they involve a violation of the freedom or autonomy of the targets of those acts. I argue here that this cannot possibly be right, and that in fact the wrongness of wrongful coercion has nothing at all to do with the effect such actions have on their targets. This negative thesis is supported by pointing out that what we say about the ethics of threatening (and thus the ethics of coercion) constrains what we …Read more
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178The limits of fair equality of opportunityPhilosophical Studies 160 (2): 323-343. 2012.The principle of fair equality of opportunity is regularly used to justify social policies, both in the philosophical literature and in public discourse. However, too often commentators fail to make explicit just what they take the principle to say. A principle of fair equality of opportunity does not say anything at all until certain variables are filled in. I want to draw attention to two variables, timing and currency. I argue that once we identify the few plausible ways we have at our dispos…Read more
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28The Case for Evidence-Based Rulemaking in Human Subjects ResearchAmerican Journal of Bioethics 10 (6): 3-13. 2010.Here I inquire into the status of the rules promulgated in the canonical pronouncements on human subjects research, such as the Declaration of Helsinki and the Belmont Report. The question is whether they are ethical rules or rules of policy. An ethical rule is supposed to accurately reflect the ethical fact (the fact that the action the rule prescribes is ethically obligatory), whereas rules of policy are implemented to achieve a goal. We should be skeptical, I argue, that the actions prescribe…Read more
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43Lingering Problems of Currency and Scope in Daniels's Argument for a Societal Obligation to Meet Health NeedsJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 35 (4): 402-414. 2010.Norman Daniels's new book, Just Health, brings together his decades of work on the problem of justice and health. It improves on earlier writings by discussing how we can meet health needs fairly when we cannot meet them all and by attending to the implications of the socioeconomic determinants of health. In this article I return to the core idea around which the entire theory is built: that the principle of equality of opportunity grounds a societal obligation to meet health needs. I point, fir…Read more
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