Wendy Salkin

The foundation of the Kantian theory of right is the one innate right to freedom. Here, I offer a comprehensive philosophical comparison between Kantian rightful freedom and the conception of freedom as negative liberty or non-interference, a hugely influential view in terms of which Kantian rightful freedom is often understood. This fruitful comparison clarifies the fundamental differences between the two views, emphasizing the resources the Kantian approach offers for contributing to contemporary debates on freedom as a distinctive rights-based republican view. This Kantian perspective also offers a useful lens for critiquing negative-liberty-based views, revealing a dilemma they face.

This article examines the ethical considerations surrounding the incorporation of vaccination status into scarce medical resource allocation frameworks during infectious disease outbreaks. The authors analyze four distinct ethical objectives that guide allocation decisions: benefiting people and preventing harm, mitigating disadvantage, showing equal concern, and satisfying claims of reciprocity. They argue that vaccination status can legitimately inform allocation decisions under certain circumstances, challenging claims that such considerations are categorically inappropriate or impractical. Forward-looking rationales generally support prioritizing unvaccinated individuals for vaccines and antivirals based on expected benefit, while backward-looking reciprocity arguments may favor vaccinated individuals for certain scarce resources. The authors contend that vaccination status represents a voluntary decision rather than an immutable characteristic, distinguishing it from discriminatory practices. They conclude that context-specific empirical analysis is necessary to determine when vaccination status should influence allocation policies, rejecting both blanket prohibitions and universal applications of vaccination-sensitive allocation criteria.

In this paper, I seek to describe the ‘other’ harms and forms of wrongdoing that an affective stereotype with specific racial and gender content, has. I will focus on the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype (or ABW stereotype), and I will reveal its intrinsic and direct extrinsic harms. I’ll then argue that it is a stereotype threat prime whose harm as an ‘affective injustice’ can cause agents to underperform on real-life affective, social, and political tasks. I also think prescriptively with Black feminist Audre Lorde about stereotype threat and how to respond to it. In doing so, I hope to contribute to the conversation that began with Larry Blum by expanding the harms that stereotypes inflict, particularly affective stereotypes of marginalized groups.

I compare two different arguments for the importance of bringing new voices into science: arguments for increasing the representation of women, and arguments for the inclusion of the public, or for “citizen science”. I suggest that in each case, diversifying science can improve the quality of scientific results in three distinct ways: epistemically, ethically, and politically. In the first two respects, the mechanisms are essentially the same. In the third respect, the mechanisms are importantly different. Though this might appear to suggest a broad similarity between the cases, I show that the analysis reveals an important respect in which efforts to include the public are more complex. With citizen science programs, unlike with efforts to bring more women into science, the three types of improvement are often in conflict with one another: improvements along one dimension may come at a cost on another dimension, suggesting difficult trade-offs may need to be made.

Social norms forbidding rape jokes, blackface, and flag-burning exemplify a peculiar form of etiquette, which I call political etiquette. Just as compliance with ordinary etiquette expresses respect for the other individuals involved in a social encounter, compliance with political etiquette expresses respect for social groups. In this paper, I propose that we understand political etiquette as a system of conventions whereby we indicate our commitment to treating vulnerable social groups in accordance with their rightful status. Because we have a standing obligation to assure all members of our community that their rightful social status will be respected, we have a powerful moral reason to conform with all existing political etiquette norms whose target social groups lack such assurance, even when compliance with these norms is not antecedently morally valuable. Alongside our moral reasons to comply with some existing political etiquette norms, we also have moral reasons to fortify good political etiquette norms and to reform or erode bad ones.