Sarah Roberts-Cady

In December of 2017, President Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Monuments by 2 million acres. Conservatives rejoiced, and progressives railed. Yet neither side has clearly identified the moral facets of the situation. The crucial moral question is this: How ought public property be regulated to protect landscapes with cultural significance? We offer criteria for determining when something has cultural value and argue that the moral merits of the present case turn on whether the reduction adequately addresses the cultural interests at play.

From the article's conclusion: "This article does not challenge the coherence of retributive theory nor does it challenge the consistency of a retributive theorist who supports the death penalty. I have only argued that one cannot justify the death penalty simply by establishing the claim that wrongdoers deserve punishment which fits the crime. Unless one is willing to condone all sorts of barbaric punishments, then one must appeal to additional ethical considerations to establish which equivalent (or roughly equivalent or proportional) punishments are morally acceptable."

In 1996, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a proposal to restore and preserve 30,000 acres of wetlands in Indiana's Kankakee River basin. Local farmers opposed this, expressing concerns about how a wildlife refuge would affect farming communities along the Kankakee River. Undergirding what seems to be a simple conflict between incompatible environmental and economic interests is a more fundamental conflict between competing ethical frameworks for evaluating public policy. One helpful approach is to examine the normative issues in the Kankakee dispute in terms of the contrast between consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical frameworks. This article attempts to establish that a failure to recognize alternatives to the consequentialist framework has resulted in a failure of opposing parties to recognize and address each other's ethical concerns. An analysis of the Kankakee wetlands dispute will reveal why it is important for environmentalists to be cognizant of alternatives to consequentialist ethical frameworks.

Private industry funds more than half of all medical research in the United States. While industry involvement in research has benefits, it can also create conflicts of interest. The most common policies adopted to address conflict of interest in medical research are focused primarily on the ways in which industry sponsorship may undermine a clinician’s judgment regarding patient care. Insufficient attention has been given to the ways in which industry sponsorship may undermine judgment relative to the goal of scientific integrity in research. The most common conflict of interest policies do not adequately address this problem. Disclosure policies alone will not remove or ameliorate all conflicts. Further, severing or monitoring ties between clinicians and industries will not adequately address the problem, since in many cases it is not the clinicians who are making the relevant research judgments. In order to address the problem of conflict of interest inindustry-sponsored research, fundamental changes in strategy and practice must be adopted which either remove the power to make research decisions from industry employees, or increase the review of those decisions by independent investigators.

John Rawls is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, and his highly original and influential works play a central role in contemporary philosophical debates. Given the vast scholarship written in response to his work, students and scholars need some guidance in finding and understanding the central debates and arguments. This book meets this need like no other collection has before. This collection of original essays is divided into ten parts, with each part covering a major area of philosophical debate inspired by Rawls's work. In each part, there is an introductory essay, providing an overview of the relevant arguments from Rawls's work and the historical contours of the debate that ensued. Each introductory essay is followed by two essays written by scholars who take opposing positions on the debate, moving the debate forward in a fruitful way.

There is widespread agreement among political philosophers that there is a core set of civil and political liberties that ought to be given special protections by any state. In contrast, there is significant disagreement about whether (and which) economic liberties deserve the same level of protection and priority. To what extent should freedom in economic activities be protected by and from the government? To what extent is it justifiable for government to interfere with economic activities for the sake of equalizing opportunities and protecting the welfare of society’s vulnerable? John Rawls famously held that only a narrow range of economic liberties are basic liberties deserving special protections, though he never offered a full defense of that claim. In _Free Market Fairness_ John Tomasi argued against Rawls, claiming it follows from Rawls’s own assumptions that we ought to protect a broad range of economic liberties as basic liberties. This paper attempts to provide the missing argument in favor of Rawls’s position in this debate and against Tomasi’s. First, I argue for a novel interpretation of Rawls’s criterion for basic liberties. Second, I use that interpretation to argue that Rawls was correct and consistent to exclude contract rights and productive property rights from the scheme of basic liberties.

In the United States, there continue to be significant gender and racial wage gaps. The causes of these earnings gaps are complex. Some people argue that, to the extent that the wage gaps are due to individual career and family choices, as opposed to employer discrimination, they are not the appropriate object of policy change. Other people respond by claiming that this underestimates the role of discriminatory norms influencing and limiting family and career choices. I agree with that response, but I think the argument makes another mistake as well. In this paper, I argue that it is incorrect to assume that only the aspects of the wage gaps caused by discrimination or discriminatory norms are the appropriate object of policy.

Rawls’s theory does not, as many philosophers assume, rule out the possibility of justice for nonhuman animals. A careful reading of Rawls shows that the issue hinges on the answer to this question: Would it be reasonable for moral agents to agree to terms of social cooperation that include protections for animals? To establish that it is reasonable, one must make an argument for these legal protections which is grounded in public reason alone. Such arguments exist and, indeed, dominate discussions of the status of animals. As such, a Rawlsian framework can be used to argue for justice for animals.

The emerging field of eco-ability draws attention to important connections between the injustices faced by people with disabilities and the injustices faced by non-human animals and the rest of the natural world (Nocella et al. 2012). Recognizing the common roots of different forms of injustice can be illuminating and unifying, creating powerful allies in the quest for a just society. At the same time, Anthony Nocella rightly cautions that one should be careful not to exaggerate commonalities, intersections, and analogies between different forms of oppression (2015). To overstate connections between different forms of discrimination risks misrepresenting that discrimination, thereby perpetuating it or at least failing to address it adequately. This cautiousness about analogizing oppressions is all the more important for eco-activists who exist within a privileged position in civil society. The potential for eco-ability studies to build lasting coalitions hinges on scholars’ ability to strike the right balance between drawing connections and acknowledging differences in a thoughtful way. In this paper, I explore some of the connections and differences between ableism, speciesism and ecocide by focusing on two oft-cited themes: reason and normalcy. My hope in doing so is to illuminate some of the more compelling connections that can move us forward on the path toward a more just world.

This collection of original essays explores major areas of debate inspired by the political philosophy of John Rawls. The volume is divided into ten parts, exploring ten distinct questions: Can Rawls's conception of public reason offer determinate answers to major questions of justice? Is ideal theory useful or relevant to resolving issues of justice in the nonideal world? Are libertarians correct to criticize Rawls's work for failing to prioritize economic liberty? Should the problems of distributive justice be understood in terms of luck egalitarian or relational egalitarian assumptions? When institutions aim at equality, what is it that they should seek to equalize-primary goods, capabilities, or welfare? Does Rawls's theory of justice have the resources to address justice for people who are significantly dependent on others and their caregivers? Is Rawls's theory adequate for addressing gender injustice? Can or should Rawls's theory include justice for nonhuman animals? Should the principles of economic justice that hold at the global level be similar to the egalitarian principles of justice that hold at the domestic level? Is Rawls's theory of global justice too tolerant of nonliberal societies? For each question, there is an introductory essay, providing an overview of the relevant arguments from Rawls's work and the historical contours of the debate that ensued. Each introductory essay is followed by two essays written by scholars who take opposing positions, moving the discussion forward in a fruitful way.