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13The animal entertainment industry includes different practices. Some consist in torturing an animal to death, as in bullfighting and countless other popular traditions, while others involve watching an animal in captivity, which can be another form of torture. Perhaps the most profitable practice is forcing very intelligent animals to perform the same routine several times daily in zoos and aquariums containing marine mammals, or in circuses containing terrestrial mammals. These businesses then …Read more
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16Gender, Social Justice and PublicityEthics and Politics 23 171-186. 2021.Suppose that the basic structures of two societies conform to Rawls’s principles of justice. One of these societies, however, includes—in addition to a just basic structure—an egalitarian ethos that further reduces inequalities that do not benefit the least advantaged. G. A. Cohen and others have argued that the second society is more just, thus rejecting any restriction of Rawls’s principles of justice to the basic structure. Andrew Williams has revived the basic structure restriction in the fo…Read more
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11G. A. Cohen’s Historical Materialism: A Feminist CritiqueJournal of Political Ideologies 25 (3): 316-333. 2020.Forty years on, G. A. Cohen’s reconstruction and defence of Marx’s theory of history is still widely, and justifiably, considered the best of its kind, and it remains unsurpassed in clarity, argumentation and textual support. This article presents an under-explored critique of the theory that arises once we recognize that it is meant to apply to the circumstances of women as well as men. The article argues that, when extended to women, the reconstructed theory’s predictions fail to materialize, …Read more
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7Human iPSC-Chimera Xenotransplantation and the Non-Identity ProblemJournal of Clinical Medicine 8 (1): 95. 2019.Xenotransplantation is often deemed morally objectionable because of the costs it imposes on the organ donor and the risks it imposes on the recipient. For some, involving human–pig chimeras as donors makes the practice more objectionable or even abhorrent from the start. For others, by contrast, using such chimeras weakens recipient-based objections because it reduces the risk of organ rejection and malfunctioning, and cancels donor-based objections because the practice does not harm chimeras b…Read more
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Love Not War: On the Chemistry of Good and EvilIn Axel Gosseries & Yannick Vanderborght (eds.), Arguing about Justice: Essays for Phillippe Van Parijs, Presses Universitaires De Louvain. pp. 145-157. 2011.
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11Progressive Environmental Taxation: A DefencePolitical Studies 60 (2): 419-433. 2012.The need to use green taxes to protect the environment is urgent, particularly because of climate change, and can be justified via sound deontological and consequence-based arguments. One very influential criticism of such taxes, however, claims that they disproportionately burden relatively poor individuals who tend to contribute to environmental problems far less than wealthier persons. Critics can also object that because of the link between economic inequality and environmental destruction i…Read more
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14Equality of Resources and Procreative JusticeIn Justine Burley (ed.), Dworkin and His Critics, Blackwell. 2004-01-01.This chapter contains section titled: I Welfarist and Resourcist Egalitarianism II Resource Egalitarianism and Procreation III Equality of Fortune IV Procreation and the Appeal to Fairness V Internalizing the Effects of Procreation VI Tolerating Externalities Acknowledgement.
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70Rights, Equality and ProcreationAnalyse & Kritik 17 (1): 93-116. 1995.Individual decisions about how to exercise the legal right to procreative liberty may generate either positive or negative externalities. From within a resource egalitarian perspective, such as that of Ronald Dworkin, it can be argued that procreative justice is asymmetric in the following respect. Justice need not require that parents be subsidised if they produce a public good, yet its ideal achievement may require their activities be taxed if they threaten to produce a public bad.
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42Rational RightsAnalyse & Kritik 17 (1): 3-11. 1995.A rational moral code must satisfy the condition of completeness. This same condition applies to a set of moral rights, where it takes the form of requiring that all the rights in that set be compossible: that their respective correlatively entailed duties be jointly fulfillable. Such joint fulfillability is guaranteed only by a set of fully differentiated individual domains. And if moral rights are to play any independent role in moral reasoning - any role logically independent of the values th…Read more
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17The Threat of Great Ape Extinction From COVID-19Journal of Animal Ethics 11 (2): 6-11. 2021.The current pandemic could give several ape species the final push into extinction. Besides the direct harm the virus may cause to species that are very susceptible to human respiratory pathogens, the pandemic has also brought an economic crisis with lockdowns and absence from usual workplaces, resulting in increased poaching and habitat encroachment. The countries where the remaining apes live cannot shoulder alone the cost of conservation. Other countries with more resources have also contribu…Read more
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29Whaling, Bullfighting, and the Conditional Value of TraditionRes Publica 27 (3): 467-490. 2020.The paper develops an account of the value of tradition that completes that of Samuel Scheffler and employs it to discuss whaling and bullfighting. The discussion, however, is applicable to many other practices the paper describes, and its relevance extends also beyond animal ethics. Some of the arguments discussed here for maintaining these traditions appeal to their positive aspects, such as their contribution to social or environmental harmony; other arguments focus on the impermissibility of…Read more
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98Marx, Rawls, Cohen, and FeminismHypatia 30 (4): 811-828. 2015.Although G. A. Cohen's work on Marx was flawed by a lack of gender-awareness, his work on Rawls owes much of its success to feminist inspiration. Cohen appeals effectively to feminism to rebut the basic structure objection to his egalitarian ethos, and could now appeal to feminism in response to Andrew Williams's publicity objection to this ethos. The article argues that Williams's objection is insufficient to rebut Cohen's ethos, inapplicable to variants of this ethos, and in conflict with plau…Read more
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36Unjust Gender InequalitiesLaw, Ethics and Philosophy 3 74-78. 2015.Introduction to special issue on justice and gender (in)equality in Law, Ethics and Philosophy.
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80Occupational choice and the egalitarian ethosEconomics and Philosophy 29 (1): 3-20. 2013.G. A. Cohen proposes to eradicate inequality without loss of efficiency or freedom by relying on an egalitarian ethos requiring us to undertake socially useful occupations we would rather not take, and work hard at them, without requesting differential incentive payments. Since the ethos is not legally enforced, Cohen denies it threatens our occupational freedom. Drawing on the work of Joseph Raz, the paper argues that Cohen's proposal threatens our occupational autonomy even if it leaves our le…Read more
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22Ideas para una teoría de la justicia universal con una intención cosmopolitaIsegoría 22 153-164. 2000.
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50On not taking men as they are: reflections on moral bioenhancementJournal of Medical Ethics 41 (4): 340-342. 2015.
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17Los derechos homínidos. Una defensa ecuménicaDaimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 73 7. 2018.
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17Reform, not destroy: reply to McMahan, Sparrow and TemkinJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (12): 741-742. 2013.I'm very grateful to receive such long and thoughtful responses from some of the world's most creative and influential moral philosophers. Since I largely agree with Jeff McMahan and Larry Temkin, I will devote most of my scarce space to Rob Sparrow.Sparrow earlier claimed that since women gestate and live longer, enhancers are committed to parents conceiving only girls. To avoid this absurdity, we must reject enhancement and endorse what Sparrow calls “therapy”. I noted we first need to know wh…Read more
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28Sea for the landlocked: a sustainable development goal?Journal of Global Ethics 11 (3): 270-279. 2015.Outside Europe landlocked states are poor: 16 are extremely poor and another 16 very poor. The Sustainable Development Goals recognise their lack of sea-access as a major cause of their reduced chances of escaping poverty and reaching the stated goals. This paper proposes including corridors to the sea and other forms of sea-access among the SDGs. It also discusses objections to doing so that appeal to the rejection of global egalitarian arguments, to the possibility of compensating those countr…Read more
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77Mill, Rawls and Cohen on Incentives and Occupational FreedomUtilitas 29 (4): 375-397. 2017.G. A. Cohen's critique of Rawls's defence of economic incentives echoes some of J. S. Mill's insights on the subject. Some of Cohen's arguments, however, clash not only with those of Rawls but also with each other as well as with Mill's. A similar charge, however, may be made against Rawls. This article has conciliatory ambitions. It suggests reconciling each author with himself, as well as with each other, by focusing onthe worthof liberty. It stresses the importance of non-pecuniary occupation…Read more
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67Sexual dimorphism and human enhancementJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (12): 722-728. 2013.Robert Sparrow argues that because of women's longer life expectancy philosophers who advocate the genetic modification of human beings to enhance welfare rather than merely supply therapy are committed to favouring the selection of only female embryos, an implication he deems sufficiently implausible to discredit their position. If Sparrow's argument succeeds, then philosophers who advocate biomedical moral enhancement also seem vulnerable to a similar charge because of men's greater propensity…Read more
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25" Ethics into action: Spira and the Animal Liberation Movement", de Peter SingerTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 18 (3): 201-202. 1999.
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34From unilineal to universal historical materialismPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 60 131-152. 1998.
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41Distributive Justice and Female LongevityLaw, Ethics and Philosophy 3 90-106. 2015.This paper discusses Philippe Van Parijs’ claim that men’s lack of female longevity constitutes an injustice, whether this is caused by asocial factors or by gendered lifestyles. This response argues that, like others, such as John Kekes and Shlomi Segall, Van Parijs underestimates the resources of egalitarian liberalism to avoid this implication. One explanation treats individuals as liable for gendered life-shortening behavior, for example, when they value either life-shortening lifestyles or …Read more
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14El evolucionismo y las ideologías políticasAgora 32 (2): 49-65. 2013.Este artículo discute las implicaciones ético-políticas que han seguido atribuyéndose al darwinismo en las numerosas obras publicadas a raíz del bicentenario del nacimiento de Darwin. Analiza la relación del darwinismo con el materialismo, el marxismo, el darwinismo social, la eugenesia, el conservadurismo, el creacionismo y el ateísmo, distinguiendo las justificadas asociaciones de ciertas hipótesis biológicas con varias tendencias políticas y la injustificada asociación del evolucionismo con d…Read more