Juha Räikkä

This article asks whether a country that suffers from serious environmental problems caused by another country could have a just cause for a defensive war? Danish philosopher Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen has argued that under certain conditions extreme poverty may give a just cause for a country to defensive war, if that poverty is caused by other countries. This raises the question whether the victims of environmental damages could also have a similar right to self-defense. Although the article concerns justice of war, we will concentrate only on the issue of what can be just causes of war, instead of evaluating the entire justification of war. This is to say that we will limit our discussion to the question concerning just cause and leave aside more general questions concerning justness and moral permissibility of war. Our aim is to list the questions that must be made and settled if defensive war in the case of serious environmental problems is said to have (or not to have) a just cause. We will argue that there are three questions that are most important in this context. They are the question concerning liability, the question of collective responsibility, and the question whether environmental harms may create a “sufficient reason” for raising a war.

In this article I shall undertake a preliminary exploration of the notion of second best. I shall follow a three-step strategy. First, I shall introduce some applications of the theorem of the second best in different fields of philosophy and social sciences. Secondly, I shall make several conceptual distinctions related to the theorem. I aim to show that there are certain theoretical results that are similar but not identical to the theorem of the second best, and that the notion of second best is often used quite loosely. Finally, I shall try to shed some light on the question of how the theorem is description-sensitive. The overall aim of the paper is to pay attention to the generality of the problem of the second best and stress the importance of the theorem in political theory in particular.

I will argue that the fairly common assumption that brain imaging may compromise people’s privacy in an undesirable way only if moral crimes are committed is false. Sometimes persons’ privacy is compromised because of failures of privacy. A normal emotional reaction to failures of privacy is embarrassment and shame, not moral resentment like in the cases of violations of right to privacy. I will claim that if (1) neuroimaging will provide all kinds of information about persons’ inner life and not only information that is intentionally searched for, and (2) there will be more and more application fields of fMRI and more and more people whose brains will be scanned (without any coercion), then, in the future, shame may be an unfortunately common feeling in our culture. This is because failures of privacy may dramatically increase. A person may feel shame strongly and long, especially if his failure is witnessed by people who he considers relatively important, but less than perfectly trustworthy.

A person raised in a religious family may have been taught that going to the theater is not allowed, and even if he has rejected this taboo years ago, he still feels guilty when attending theater. These kinds of cases may not be rare, but they are strange. Indeed, one may wonder how they are even possible. This is why an explanation is needed, and in my paper I aim to give such an explanation. In particular, I will first provide a brief review of the explanations of irrational guilt that are compatible with the cognitive theories of emotions, that is, theories that presuppose that there is a causal or a constitutional connection between emotions and cognitive factors, such as judgments, beliefs or thoughts. Following many other reviewers, I found most of the explanations of irrational guilt unsatisfactory, although my reasons for critical conclusions will partly differ from the usual ones. After the review, I will defend a solution according to which it is possible to believe that an act does not have any moral costs and at the same time to have an impression that is has, which explains the guilty feelings.

Thomas Pogge has recently defended additional ways in which to eradicate poverty from the developing world. In this article, Pogge's argument is discussed. First the premises on which Pogge relies are summarized and the logic of 'international borrowing privilege' introduced. Then it is argued that Pogge's solutions to the poverty problem would face similar difficulties to many other solutions - that is, in order to work properly they all must gain extensive international support and political willingness, which they will not easily obtain. The final section looks at how the solutions might gain more support and why people tend to resist new suggestions.

Guilt feelings are an important part of our emotional life that is relevant to moral philosophy, and guilt feelings raise many theoretically interesting questions. One such question is the problem of how it is possible that sometimes people seem to feel guilty because of an act they have committed even if they believe that the act is not wrong and that it does not have any moral costs. A person raised in a religious family may have been taught that going to the theater is wrong, and even if she has rejected this taboo years ago, she may still feel guilty when attending theater. At least, this seems to be the case. If it is the case, then one must explain how it is possible that a person may feel guilty without believing that she is guilty, i.e. that (1) she is responsible for the act and that (2) the act is wrong or has moral costs. Suppose, however, that it is not possible to feel guilty while believing that one is not guilty. Then one must explain why it seems that sometimes—in taboo cases—one can feel that she is guilty and at the same time believe that she is not guilty. In this paper I evaluate some of the usual solutions to the problem and explicate their problems.

In the discussion of such social questions as how should alcoholics be treated by society? and what kind of people are responsible in the face of the law?, is disease a value-free or value-laden notion, a natural or a normative one? It seems, for example, that by the utterance alcoholism should be classified as a disease we mean something like the following: the condition called alcoholism is similar in morally relevant respects to conditions that we uncontroversially label diseases, and therefore we have a moral obligation to consider alcoholism a disease. So there are grounds to think that, in the discussion of social questions, our concept of disease is strongly value-laden. However, it does not follow that the medical concept of disease is likewise value-laden. In this paper I distinguish between the medical and social concepts of disease, arguing that the naturalist-normativist debate is concerned with the former, but not the latter. Therefore, we need not settle the naturalist-normativist debate in order to conclude that the social concept of disease is value-laden.

Do all methods of moral justification resemble the method of reflective equilibrium in presupposing that moral judgment's being justified depends at least in part on its being appropriately related to our actual substantial moral views? Can a moral judgment be justified without such a presupposition? I shall distinguish three versions of the no-option argument According to any version of the no-option argument, there is certain fact which characterizes moral theories, and that fact implies that there is no option other than to justify moral judgments by presupposing that their justification depends at least in part on their being appropriately related to our actual substantial moral views. Versions of the no-option argument differ in their specification of the characterizing fact that proves that in ethics there is only one option. I shall argue that the most common versions of the no-option argument are indefensible, while the defensibility of a more sophisticated version depends on the meaning of a notion of moral argument in philosophical ethics.

The article discusses burden of proof rules in social criticism. By social criticism I mean an argumentative situation in which an opponent publicly argues against certain social practices; the examples I consider are discrimination on the basis of species and discrimination on the basis of one's nationality. I argue that burden of proof rules assumed by those who defend discrimination are somewhat dubious. In social criticism, there are no shared values which would uncontroversially determine what is the reasonable presumption and who has the burden of proof, nor are there formal rules which would end the debate and determine the winner at a specific point

According to Derek Parfit's well‐known argument, a version of utilitarian moral theory implies the so‐called Repugnant Conclusion. This version of utilitarianism states that other things being equal, it is better if there is a greater total sum of whatever makes life worth living. This view appears to implicate that a world where there is an immense total sum of whatever makes life worth living but where individual people have an exceedingly low quality of life is better than a world where there are considerably less people and a smaller total sum of whatever makes life worth living but where individual people have a high quality of life. Parfit finds the conclusion hard to accept. However, a Swedish philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö has recently replied to Parfit, arguing that, in fact, the Repugnant Conclusion is perfectly acceptable. Tännsjö's reply, in turn, has been criticized by another Swede, Gustaf Arrhenius. In my paper I evaluate both Tännsjö's reply and Arrhenius' criticism and find both of them insufficient.

The question of who has the burden of proof is often important in practice. We must frequently make decisions and act on the basis not of conclusive evidence but of what is reasonable to presume true. Consequently, it happens that a given practical question must be solved by referring to principles that explicitly or implicitly determine, at least partly, where the burden of proof should rest. In this essay, I consider the role of the logic of the burden of proof in a debate on global justice. In particular, I ask how the logic of the burden of proof is seen by those who defend conservative positions in a debate and deny our obligations to reduce poverty beyond borders. I argue that defenders of conservative positions tend to shift the burden of proof in an unjustified way.

This is the first collection of essays of philosophical thanatology that explicitly connects the metaphysical and the ethical questions of death, including some bioethical questions. The volume has four sections, and the discussion moves from historical and theoretical problems to practical issues of bioethics. However, as the editor of the book, James Stacey Taylor, has surely intended, the practical questions discussed are closely related to traditional metaphysical problems, most notably to the questions such as whether death is a harm to the person who dies, whether posthumous harm is possible, and whether the dead can be wronged. Of course, the central idea is not to claim that the discussion of bioethical problems related to death commits us always to consider deeper metaphysical questions first. Rather, the point is simply that in many cases the metaphysical and the (bio)ethical questions of philosophical thanatology are in fact linked. Therefore, a collection that involves deba

According to the so-called presumption of equality, a person who does not know whether there is an acceptable reason for differential treatment should just presume the similarity of the cases and treat them equally. If we assume that the presumption of equality is an acceptable moral principle, at least when the allocation cannot be postponed and an equal distribution of goods is possible, then an important question arises: when exactly does the allocator have sufficient reasons for differential treatment and is not relevantly ignorant? This is a question about the required strength of the “acceptable reasons” for differential treatment. It has been commonplace to think that the presumption of equality demands that the reasons that refute the presumption must be very strong and that differential treatment requires that there is a proper justification for the claim that the cases are relevantly different. I will argue, however, that refuting the presumption and solving the issue are two separate matters. A person can have good enough reasons for rejecting the presumption that the cases are relevantly similar without having reasons that she could present as a full justification for the claim that the cases are relevantly different. A precondition of the applicability of the presumption of equality is ignorance, but not ignorance in the sense of “not having a full justification”.

Black magic (henceforth BM) is acting in an attempt to harm human beings through supernatural means. Examples include the employment of spells, the use of special curses, the burning of objects related to the purported victim, and the use of pins with voodoo dolls. For the sake of simplicity, we shall focus on attempts to kill through BM. The moral attitude towards BM has not been, as far as we know, significantly discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy. Yet the topic brings up interesting questions and poses challenges, occasionally even reaching the level of paradoxes. Ideas of respecting persons, in particular, will be seen to be challenged by this form of magic. The notion of respecting persons will be treated here broadly and pluralistically. Indeed part of the interest in the discussion will be the unfolding of the diverse ways in which this term should be understood, and the contrasts between its various uses. Often, as we shall see, respect for persons and disrespect for them, in different senses, will co‐exist, and the dilemma will be one where avoiding some forms of disrespect will involve us in disrespect in other senses.

The article discusses the relationship between the notion of a moral right to personal self‐determination, the notion of a moral right to know and the notion of a moral right not to know. In particular, the author asks under what conditions, if any, the right to self‐determination implies a right to have information or a right not to have information. The conclusions he defends are theoretical in character rather than concrete norms and directions, and they are intended to be relevant in many contexts, not only in the context of information concerning, say, medical decisions. Yet the author restates the question concerning the right to have and especially the right not to have genetic knowledge about one's own genes on the basis of a right to self‐determination. He argues that a right (not) to have genetic information can be defended on the ground of a right to self‐determination, but that this kind of defense presupposes several normative, and controversial, arguments.

Cultural appropriation, also called cultural borrowing, has been the topic of much discussion in recent years. Roughly speaking, cultural appropriation happens when someone outside of a cultural or ethnic group takes or uses some object that is characteristic or in some way important to the group without the group’s permission. Individuals who find cultural appropriation unproblematic have often argued that if we express moral criticism of the use of traditional Sami outfits by non-Sami, then we are logically committed to criticize all kinds of habits that are clearly acceptable –such as using jeans, eating pizza or drinking tea. However, we will argue that in many cases that objection is problematic. We point out that if one social habit or practice is prohibited by existing social conventions but another is not, then there is a convention difference between the cases. The convention difference is in turn a morally relevant difference, or so we aim to show. We refer to “moderate conventionalism,” according to which existing social conventions are morally relevant facts that should be taken into account when choosing how to act, whatever the content of the conventions happens to be. The claim is analogous with the traditional view that laws have some moral relevance and binding force independent of their content. _Keywords:_ cultural appropriation, conventionalism, moderate conventionalism, convention difference

It has often been argued that one of the reasons why we should value privacy is that it enables self-presentation and impression management. According to this approach, it is valuable to be able to govern the impression one gives, as the capacity to govern impressions is an instrument by which people take care of their various social relationships. In this paper I will take a closer look at that approach on privacy, with specific reference to the alleged threats to privacy created by brain imaging technologies. I will argue that brain imaging can threaten our capacity for self-presentation, but that the link between privacy and self-presentation is only contingent, although their relation is strong. The conclusion is that brain privacy cannot be grounded only on the importance of self-presentation, although self-presentation provides an important reason for respecting the privacy of our inner lives.

The topic of the paper is the justness of the so-called global redistributive wars — wars whose prime purpose would be the correction of global economic and power structures that are said to cause suffering in poor countries. My aim is to comment on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument concerning the implications of Thomas Pogge’s theory of global poverty. Pogge has argued that affluent coun-tries uphold global institutional structures that have a significant causal role in leading to the poverty-related deaths of millions of peo-ple who live in poor countries. According to Pogge, rich countries harm the citizens of poor countries. The argument by Lippert-Rasmussen is important, as it suggests that Pogge’s theory of the causes of global poverty, if correct, has a strange implication, namely, the implication that poor countries are or at least could be entitled to a military attack against rich countries. In this paper I will try to show that Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument is not fully compelling, and I will argue that it is not clear whether a global redistributive war would meet the principle of just cause. (The paper is here: http://www.kantiana.ru/upload/iblock/0ff/2014_12_01_raikka.pdf)

In this paper I will briefly discuss the role and function of the ethical advisory committees and other ethics bodies that are supposed to take care of the ethical dimension of the biotechnology strategies. The expert ethical advice has created colourful discussion in many contexts, but here I aim to analyze the role and relevance of ethical expertise in the context of national and regional biotechnology strategies. I will argue that it may be quite unproblematic that the work of the ethics committees and other governmental and semi-governmental ethics bodies concerns only a relatively narrow range of issues and do not directly concern all the important social and economic realignments that accompany biotechnology. Many important decisions concerning national and regional biotechnology strategies are political, and typically ethics committees can be only indirectly useful in political decision-making. The committees should be free to refrain from extending their work to the areas where they are not already involved. However, the ethics committees and other ethics bodies can promote public debate that forms the basis for political decision-making