Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

A standard formulation of luck-egalitarianism says that ‘it is [in itself] bad – unjust and unfair – for some to be worse off than others [through no fault or choice of their own]’, where ‘fault or choice’ means substantive responsibility-generating fault or choice. This formulation is ambiguous: one ambiguity concerns the possible existence of a gap between what is true of each worse-off individual and what is true of the group of worse-off individuals, fault or choice-wise, the other concerns the notion of fault. I show that certain ways of resolving these ambiguities lead to counterintuitive results; and that the most plausible way of resolving them leads to a theory of distributive justice in which responsibility plays a role significantly different from that in standard luck-egalitarian thinking. My main conclusion here is that luck-egalitarianism is best formulated as the view that it is [in itself] bad – unjust and unfair – for an individual to be worse off than others if, and only if, her being worse off does not fit the degree to which she is at fault in a not purely prudential sense.

PhD, Institute of Public Health, Unit of Medical Philosophy and Clinical Theory, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, P.O. Box 2099 1014 Copenhagen. Tel: +45 30 32 33 63; Email: s.lauridsen{at}pubhealth.ku.dk ' + u + '@ ' + d + ' '/ /- ->Citizens’ consent to political decisions is often regarded as a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Consequently, legitimate allocation of healthcare has seemed almost unattainable in contemporary pluralistic societies. The problem is that citizens do not agree on any single principle governing priorities among groups of patients. The Accountability for Reasonableness framework suggests an ingenious solution to this problem of moral disagreement. Rather than advocating any substantive distributive principle, its advocates propose a feasible set of conditions, which, if met by decision makers at the institutional level, provide, so it is promised, legitimate decisions. While we agree that A4R represents an important contribution to the priority-setting debate, we challenge the framework in two respects. First, we argue that A4R, and more specifically the relevance condition of A4R, does not enable healthcare institutions to generally distinguish between relevant and irrelevant reasons for priority-setting. Second, we criticize Daniels’ and Sabin's argument that A4R and deliberative democracy constitute necessary and sufficient conditions of a feasible procedure for setting legitimate limits within healthcare. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Fundamentally, intentions do not matter to the permissibility of actions, according to Thomas Scanlon (among others). Yet, discriminatory intentions seem essential to certain kinds of direct discrimination in hiring and firing, and appear to be something by virtue of which, in part at least, these kinds of discrimination are morally impermissible. Scanlon's account of the wrongness of discrimination attempts to accommodate this appearance through the notion of the expressive meaning of discriminatory acts and a certain view about how permissibility relates to the meaning of actions. This paper explores the scope, strengths and weaknesses of this account. Specifically, it challenges the view that discrimination reflecting hierarchical value judgments necessarily involves a wrong that renders such discrimination more objectionable than other forms

In recent work, T.M. Scanlon has unsuccessfully challenged the doctrine of double effect (DDE). First, comparing actions reflecting faulty moral deliberations and involving merely foreseen harm with actions reflecting less faulty moral deliberations involving intended harm suggests that proponents of DDE do not confuse the critical and the deliberative uses of moral principles. Second, Scanlon submits that it is odd to say to a deliberating agent that the permissibility of the actions she ponders depends on the intention with which she will act. I argue that this can be explained without appeal to the claim that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility.

With regard to intrinsically morally relevant factors it is natural to suppose that if a variation in a given factor makes a moral difference anywhere, then it makes the same moral difference everywhere (henceforth: the constancy assumption). Jonathan Dancy (and other moral particularists) reject the constancy assumption. Partly on the basis thereof, they infer that ethical decisions should be made “case by case, without the comforting support of moral principles”. In this article, I challenge Dancy's defence and use of a denial of the constancy assumption on three points. First, Dancy's appeal to moral intuitions do not justify denying a significant version of the constancy assumption. Second, if we reject the constancy assumption, surprisingly, it may in one crucial respect be very hard to defend moral particularism as commonly articulated. Third, rejecting the constancy assumption does not motivate seeing moral reasoning as essentially a case‐by‐case matter.

In this critical review, I address two themes from Shelly Kagan’s path-breaking The Geometry of Desert. First I explain the so-called “bell motion” of desert mountains—a notion reflecting that, ceteris paribus, as people get more virtuous it becomes more important not to give them too little of whatever they deserve than not to give them too much. Having argued that Kagan’s defense of it is unsatisfactory, I offer two objections to the existence of the bell motion. Second, I take up an unrelated issue—the relation between comparative and non-comparative desert. I argue that, given a certain disaggregationist view of comparative desert, it is possible that comparative desert is not satisfied, even if non-comparative desert is perfectly so. Unlike my objections to the bell motion, this possibility adds further complexity to an already complex Kaganian account of desert.

Kymlicka has offered an influential luck egalitarian justification for a catalogue of polyethnic rights addressing cultural disadvantages of immigrant minorities. In response, Quong argues that while the items on the list are justified, in the light of the fact that the relevant disadvantages of immigrants result from their choice to immigrate, (i) these rights cannot be derived from luck egalitarianism and (ii) that this casts doubt on luck egalitarianism as a theory of cultural justice. As an alternative to Kymlicka’s argument, Quong offers his own justification of polyethnic rights based on a Rawlsian ideal of fair equality of opportunity. I defend luck egalitarianism against Quong’s objection arguing that if choice ever matters, it matters in relation to cultural disadvantages too. Also, the Rawlsian ideal of fair equality of opportunity cannot justify the sort of polyethnic rights that Quong wants it to justify, once we set aside an unwarranted statist focus in Quong’s conception of fair equality of opportunity. Whatever the weaknesses of luck egalitarianism are, the inadequacy of the position in relation to accommodating cultural disadvantages of immigrants is not among them.

Some form of agent-relative constraint against the killing of innocent personsis a central principle in deontological moraltheories. In this article I make two claimsabout this constraint. First, I argue that somekillings of innocents performed incircumstances usually not taken to exculpatethe killer are not even pro tanto wrong.Second, I contend that either there is noagent-relative constraint against the killingof innocents or this constraint has a verydifferent shape from that which deontologistsnormally take it to have. My defence of theseclaims rests on two propositions. First, inkilling someone one may actually prolong thatperson''s life. Roughly, life-prolongingkillings are possible, because to kill someoneis to perform an act that causes someone''sdeath and it might well be true that, had onenot performed this act, one''s ``victim'''' wouldhave died earlier. Second, all other thingsbeing equal, killing and causing a person to beunconscious are morally equivalent. Both ofthese propositions are defended in thearticle

Gene therapy research and its clinical application raise a large number of ethical, legal, and social questions. Many of these are discussed in Nordgren's anthology. The contributions come from a number of different disciplines, including bioethics, genetics, social science, and theology. The book is divided into five main sections (following a short introduction): scientific aspects of gene therapy; the history of, and prospects for, gene therapy; conceptual issues; gene therapy in a German and Japanese context, and a section on the uses of gene therapy in relation to, for example, testing and screening. The contributions are quite diverse and mostly well worth reading. From the perspective of medical ethics the contributions by LeRoy Walters, Eric Juengst, Karen Lebacqz, Nikolaus Knoepffler, and Christian Munthe are of particular interest. Walters's contribution focuses in part on the issue of …

abstract A police technique known as racial profiling draws on statistical beliefs about crime rates in racial groups. Supposing that such beliefs are true, and that racial profiling is effective in fighting crime, is such profiling morally justified? Recently, Risse and Zeckhauser have explored the racial profiling of African‐Americans and argued that justification is forthcoming from a utilitarian as well as deontological point of view. Drawing on criticisms made by G. A. Cohen of the incentives argument for inequality, I argue that, assuming that crime rates between different racial groups would converge in the absence of racial discrimination and unjust inequality, racial profiling is comprehensively unjustified. I also explain that, because Risse and Zeckhauser simply compare the status quo with an outcome that differs from it only in respect of the practice of racial profiling, they fail to show that such profiling is non‐comprehensively justified. And, exploring the problem from the point of view of a deontological concern for fairness, I identify a number of situations in which it would be non‐comprehensively unjustified to implement racial profiling (as well as some in which it might be non‐comprehensively unjustified not to implement racial profiling).

What makes killing morally wrong? And what makes killing morally worse than letting die? Standard answers to these two questions presuppose that killing someone involves shortening that person's life. Yet, as I argue in the first two sections of this article, this presupposition is false: Life-prolonging killings are conceivable. In the last two sections of the article, I explore the significance of the conceivability of such killings for various discussions of the two questions just mentioned. In particular, I show why the conceivability of life-prolonging killings renders Frances M. Kamm's attempt to provide an answer to the second question problematic.

There are many objections to statistical discrimination in general and racial profiling in particular. One objection appeals to the idea that people have a right to be treated as individuals. Statistical discrimination violates this right because, presumably, it involves treating people simply on the basis of statistical facts about groups to which they belong while ignoring non-statistical evidence about them. While there is something to this objection—there are objectionable ways of treating others that seem aptly described as failing to treat them as individuals—it needs to be articulated carefully. First, most people accept that many forms of statistical discrimination are morally unproblematic, let alone morally justified all things considered. Second, even treating people on the basis of putative non-statistical evidence relies on generalizations. Once we construe treating someone as an individual in a way that respects this fact, it becomes apparent: (1) that statistical discrimination is compatible with treating people as individuals, and (2) that one may fail to treat people as individuals even without engaging in statistical discrimination. Finally, there are situations involving the expression of messages of inclusion where we think it is good, morally speaking, that we are not treated as individuals.

It is sometimes asserted that enabling harm is morally equivalent to allowing harm. In this article, I criticize this view. Positively, I show that cases involving self-defence and cases involving people acting on the basis of a reasonable belief to the effect that certain obstacles to harm will remain in place, or will be put in place, show that enabling harm is harder to justify than allowing it. Negatively, I argue that certain cases offered in defence of the moral equivalence thesis fail, because either their similarity with the archetypal trolley case limits their relevance to an assessment of this thesis, or they are compromised by their reliance on the elusive notion of a situation being completely stable

Real-self accounts of moral responsibility distinguish between various types of motivational elements. They claim that an agent is responsible for acts suitably related to elements that constitute the agent's real self. While such accounts have certain advantages from a compatibilist perspective, they are problematic in various ways. First, in it, authority and authenticity conceptions of the real self are often inadequately distinguished. Both of these conceptions inform discourse on identification, but only the former is relevant to moral responsibility. Second, authority and authenticity real-self theories are unable to accommodate cases in which the agent neither identifies nor disidentifies with his action and yet seems morally responsible for what he does. Third, authority and authenticity real-self theories are vulnerable to counterexamples in which the provenance of the agent's real self undermines responsibility.

The most blatant forms of discrimination are morally outrageous and very obviously so; but the nature and boundaries of discrimination are more controversial, and it is not clear whether all forms of discrimination are morally bad; nor is it clear why objectionable cases of discrimination are bad. In this paper I address these issues. First, I offer a taxonomy of discrimination. I then argue that discrimination is bad, when it is, because it harms people. Finally, I criticize a rival, disrespect-based account according to which discrimination is bad regardless of whether it causes harm.