Travis Joseph Rodgers

responsibility one might bear for bringing about death is, as a result, an important ethical question. Indeed the right to life is often regarded as the bedrock upon which all other rights of persons are supported.1 This right to life is often thought to be a negative right—a right of non-interference—a right, more or less, not to be killed.2 Additionally, many philosophers defend the Equivalence Thesis, according to which the bare difference between doing and allowing makes no moral difference. In the case of death, the Equivalence Thesis implies that a killing is not by that very fact at all morally worse (or better) than an allowing to die. Both the Equivalence Thesis and the view that the right to life is a negative right are plausible enough individually. In this paper, I argue that their conjunction implies an implausible (and generally unrecognized) third claim. Some doings (killings) will be morally equivalent to some allowings (lettings die) despite the facts that the killing will violate the right to life, the letting die will not, and these facts will be the only differences between the cases. In other words, defenders of these claims seem committed to the claim that violating one’s right to life is morally irrelevant to the wrongness of the actions in question. That is simply implausible.

Gordon Barnes accuses Robert Nozick and Eric Mack of neglecting, in two ways, the practical, empirical questions relevant to justice in the real world.1 He thinks these omissions show that the argument behind the Wilt Chamberlain example—which Nozick famously made in his seminal Anarchy, State, and Utopia—fails. As a result, he suggests that libertarians should concede that this argument fails. In this article, we show that Barnes’s key arguments hinge on misunderstandings of, or failures to notice, key aspects of the entitlement theory that undergirds Nozick’s and Mack’s work. Once the theory is properly understood, Barnes’s challenges fail to undermine the Chamberlain example, in particular, and the entitlement theory, in general.

Do humans lack character? Or if they possess it, is it very different from what most people think it is? While it has long been held that character plays an indispensible role in moral theory, recent work from social psychologists suggests that there is no such thing as character, at least as humans have traditionally thought of it. Some have argued that programs of moral education couched in terms of global traits (like honesty) are to be jettisoned in favor of those couched in terms of local traits (like honesty-with-family). I take responding to these challenges to be the focus of my research. I argue that the empirical work actually reveals differences in character, not a lack of character. I then offer an account of moral improvement that respects the empirical data but remains faithful to the traditional account of character. My goals are to rescue the importance of character to ethics, to develop the beginnings of an empirically-informed program of moral education, and finally to explore the limits of our responsibility for our character in light of the psychological research. Just as one might begin on a path toward a healthier diet by a combination of brute resolve (setting one's will) and skilled resistance (setting up obstacles to satisfying pernicious desires), and empirical work can recommend the ways best to combat such desires, so can empirical work supplement a moral theory in order to produce a program of moral improvement. Thanks to the wealth of empirical work on these matters, our resources are considerable, but so is our culpability should we not try

Matt Zwolinski argues that libertarians “should see the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)—a guarantee that all members will receive income regardless of why they need it—as an essential part of an ideally just libertarian system.” He regards the satisfaction of a Lockean proviso—a stipulation that individuals may not be rendered relevantly worse off by the uses and appropriations of private property—as a necessary condition for a private property system’s being just. BIG is to be justified precisely because it prevents proviso violations. We deem Zwolinski’s argument a “Direct Proviso-Based Argument” for BIG. We argue that because this sort of argument for the BIG is in tension with other principles libertarians within the Lockean tradition hold dear, specifically prohibitions on seizing legitimately held property and forcing individuals to labor, the Direct Proviso-Based Argument fails.

Javier Echenique presents a meticulous examination of Aristotle's doctrine of moral responsibility. The study focuses on the Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics, but in addition to these, and to the Magna Moralia, works that are not explicitly about ethics are also brought up and discussed where appropriate. The focus of Part I of the text, which comprises two chapters, is to establish that Aristotle indeed presents an account of moral responsibility. In the course of defending this line, it becomes necessary to establish what counts as an account of moral responsibility and to flesh out Aristotle's view, which Echenique calls ethical ascription, in detail. Echenique argues that Aristotle's is not simply one possible account of moral responsibility; it is, on his view, a plausible account. The view derives a good part of its plausibility from Part II, the consideration of the defeaters of ethical ascription.

Most discussions of John Doris’s situationism center on what can be called descriptive situationism, the claim that our folk usage of global personality and character traits in describing and predicting human behavior is empirically unsupported. Philosophers have not yet paid much attention to another central claim of situationism, which says that given that local traits are empirically supported, we can more successfully act in line with our moral values if, in our deliberation about what to do, we focus on our situation instead of on our moral character. Call this prescriptive situationism. In this paper, we will point toward a previously unrecognized tension between these two situationist theses and explore some ways for the situationist to address it.