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741Ethics, organ donation and tax: a proposalJournal of Medical Ethics 38 (8): 451-457. 2012.Five arguments are presented in favour of the proposal that people who opt in as organ donors should receive a tax break. These arguments appeal to welfare, autonomy, fairness, distributive justice and self-ownership, respectively. Eight worries about the proposal are considered in this paper. These objections focus upon no-effect and counter-productiveness, the Titmuss concern about social meaning, exploitation of the poor, commodification, inequality and unequal status, the notion that there a…Read more
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659Does overruling Roe discriminate against women (of colour)?Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (12): 952-956. 2022.On 24 July 2022, the landmark decision Roe v. Wade (1973), that secured a right to abortion for decades, was overruled by the US Supreme Court. The Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation severely restricts access to legal abortion care in the USA, since it will give the states the power to ban abortion. It has been claimed that overruling Roe will have disproportionate impacts on women of color and that restricting access to abortion contributes to or amounts to structura…Read more
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553Immigrants, Multiculturalism, and Expensive Cultural Tastes: Quong on Luck Egalitarianism and Cultural Minority RightsLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 6 (2): 176-192. 2011.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 …Read more
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430An introduction to contemporary egalitarianismIn Nils Holtug & Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (eds.), Egalitarianism: New Essays on the Nature and Value of Equality, Clarendon Press. pp. 1--37. 2006.
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372Indirect Discrimination is Not Necessarily UnjustJournal of Practical Ethics 2 (2): 33-57. 2014.This article argues that, as commonly understood, indirect discrimination is not necessarily unjust: 1) indirect discrimination involves the disadvantaging in relation to a particular benefit and such disadvantages are not unjust if the overall distribution of benefits and burdens is just; 2) indirect discrimination focuses on groups and group averages and ignores the distribution of harms and benefits within groups subjected to discrimination, but distributive justice is concerned with individu…Read more
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288The badness of discriminationEthical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2): 167-185. 2006.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…Read more
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258The Benefits of Injustice and Its Correction: A Challenge to the Duty Not to Benefit Innocently from InjusticeWiley: Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (3): 395-408. 2021.Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 395-408, September 2022.
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246“We are all Different”: Statistical Discrimination and the Right to be Treated as an IndividualThe Journal of Ethics 15 (1): 47-59. 2011.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 o…Read more
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243Intentions and Discrimination in HiringJournal of Moral Philosophy 9 (1): 55-74. 2012.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 discrimin…Read more
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240Against self-ownership: There are no fact-insensitive ownership rights over one's bodyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 36 (1). 2008.
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191Can Relational Egalitarians Supply Both an Account of Justice and an Account of the Value of Democracy or Must They Choose Which?Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Construed as a theory of justice, relational egalitarianism says that justice requires that people relate as equals. Construed as a theory of what makes democracy valuable, it says that democracy is a necessary, or constituent, part of the value of relating as equals. Typically, relational egalitarians want their theory to provide both an account of what justice requires and an account of what makes democracy valuable. We argue that relational egalitarians with this dual ambition face the justic…Read more
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189Identification and responsibilityEthical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (4): 349-376. 2003.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 identifica…Read more
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188Estlund on Epistocracy: A Critique (review)Res Publica 18 (3): 241-258. 2012.An influential anti-democratic argument says: ‘(1) Answers to political questions are truth-apt. (2) A small elite only—the epistocrats—knows these truths. (3) If answers to political questions are truth-apt, then those with this knowledge about these matters should rule. (4) Thus, epistocrats should rule.’ Many democrats have responded by denying (1), arguing that, say, answers to political questions are a matter of sheer personal preference. Others have rejected (2), contending that knowledge …Read more
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186The Benefits of Injustice and Its Correction: A Challenge to the Duty Not to Benefit Innocently from InjusticeWiley: Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (3): 395-408. 2021.Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 395-408, September 2022.
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147Why killing some people is more seriously wrong than killing othersEthics 117 (4): 716-738. 2007.
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144Egalitarianism: new essays on the nature and value of equality (edited book)Clarendon Press. 2007.The contributors to the volume are: Richard Arneson, Linda Barclay, Thomas Christiano, Nils Holtug, Susan Hurley, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Dennis McKerlie, ...
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141Responsible nations: Miller on national responsibilityEthics and Global Politics 2 (2): 109-130. 2009.In National Responsibility and Global Justice, David Miller defends the view that a member of a nation can be collectively responsible for an outcome despite the fact that: (i) she did not control it; (ii) she actively opposed those of her nation’s policies that produced the outcome; and (iii) actively opposing the relevant policy was costly for her. I argue that Miller’s arguments in favor of this strong externalist view about responsibility and control are insufficient. Specifically, I show th…Read more
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140Born Free and Equal? A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Nature of DiscriminationOxford University Press. 2013.This book addresses these three issues: What is discrimination?; What makes it wrong?; What should be done about wrongful discrimination? It argues: that there are different concepts of discrimination; that discrimination is not always morally wrong and that when it is, it is so primarily because of its harmful effects.
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138Scanlon on the Doctrine of Double EffectSocial Theory and Practice 36 (4): 541-564. 2010.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 ponder…Read more
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136Luck egalitarians versus relational egalitarians: on the prospects of a pluralist account of egalitarian justiceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (2): 220-241. 2015.Pluralist egalitarians think that luck and relational egalitarianism each articulates a component in a pluralist account of egalitarian justice. However, this ecumenical view appears problematic in the light of Elizabeth Anderson's claim that the divide arises because two incompatible views of justification are in play, which in turn generates derivative disagreements – e.g. about the proper currency of egalitarian justice. In support of pluralist egalitarianism I argue that two of Anderson's de…Read more
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135A Critical Take on Procreative JusticeBioethics 38 (4): 367-374. 2024.Herjeet Kaur Marway recently proposed the Principle of Procreative Justice, which says that reproducers have a strong moral obligation to avoid completing race and colour injustices through their selection choices. In this article, we analyze this principle and argue, appealing to a series of counterexamples, that some of the implications of Marway's Principle of Procreative Justice are difficult to accept. This casts doubt on whether the principle should be adopted. Also, we show that there are…Read more
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128Kamm on inviolability and agent-relative restrictionsRes Publica 15 (2): 165-178. 2009.Agent-relative restrictions prohibit minimizing violations: that is, they require us not to minimize the total number of their violations by violating them ourselves. Frances Kamm has explained this prohibition in terms of the moral worth of persons, which, in turn, she explains in terms of persons’ high moral status as inviolable beings. I press the following criticism of this account: even if minimizing violations are permissible, we need not have a lower moral status provided other determinan…Read more
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124In What Way are Constraints Paradoxical?Utilitas 11 (1): 49. 1999.It is impermissible to violate a constraint, even if by doing so a greater number of violations of the very same constraint were to be prevented. Most find this puzzling. But what makes the impermissibility of such minimizing violations puzzling? This article discusses some recent answers to this question. The article's first aim is to make clear in what way these answers differ. The second aim is to evaluate the answers, along with Kamm's and Nagel's proposed solutions of what they see as the p…Read more
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123Racial profiling versus communityJournal of Applied Philosophy 23 (2). 2006.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 incentiv…Read more
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105Why the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame failsAnalysis 80 (4): 666-674. 2020.It is commonly believed that blamees can dismiss hypocritical blame on the ground that the hypocrite has no standing to blame their target. Many believe that the feature of hypocritical blame that undermines standing to blame is that it involves an implicit denial of the moral equality of persons. After all, the hypocrite treats herself better than her blamee for no good reason. In the light of the complement to hypocrites and a comparison of hypocritical and non-hypocritical blamers subscribing…Read more
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105Democratic Egalitarianism versus Luck Egalitarianism: What Is at Stake?Philosophical Topics 40 (1): 117-134. 2012.This paper takes a fresh look at Elizabeth Anderson’s democratic egalitarianism and its relation to luck egalitarianism in the light of recent trends toward greater socioeconomic inequality. Anderson’s critique of luck egalitarianism and her alternative ideal of democratic equality are set out. It is then argued that the former is not very powerful, and that the latter is vulnerable to many of Anderson’s criticisms of luck egalitarianism. The paper also seeks to show that, on many of the issues …Read more
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103‘To Serve and Protect’: The Ends of Harm by Victor Tadros (review)Criminal Law and Philosophy 9 (1): 49-71. 2015.In The Ends of Harm Victor Tadros develops an alternative to consequentialist, and non-consequentialist retributivist, accounts of the justifiability of punishment: the duty view. Crucial to this view is the claim that wrongdoers incur an enforceable duty to remedy their wrongs. They cannot undo them, but they can do something that is almost as good—namely, by submitting to appropriate punishment, which will deter potential wrongdoers in the future, reduce their victim’s risk of suffering simila…Read more