Online research in philosophy

: It has recently become known that, in Liverpool and elsewhere, parts of children's bodies were taken postmortem and used for research without the parents being told. But should parental consent be sought before using children's corpses for medical purposes? This paper presents the view that parental consent is overrated. Arguments are rejected for consent from dead children's interests, property rights, family autonomy, and religious freedom. The only direct reason to get parental consent is to avoid distressing the parents, which carries implications for the consent process, secret harvesting of body parts, and the weight to be given to parental feelings.

This paper challenges the malleability of the idea of property as a relative, indeterminate "bundle of rights", which appears to dominate property doctrine at least since Ronald Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost". Focusing on the core goals of property regimes, the paper proposes an alternative view of property rights - one that is centered on the ability of owners to appropriate the benefits of their assets in the face of a threat from numerous potential adversaries, rather than their ability to contract such assets away within a bilateral context. The paper demonstrates how the shift to a multilateral, appropriability-based analysis allows for a fuller account of what must be the "core" or "baseline" of property rights. Using this account, the paper offers an evaluation of the relationship between such "core" rights and other types of rights traditionally associated with property doctrine, such as rights that have historically been granted to owners under the guise of property rights, contractual rights vis-a-vis third parties and constitutional rights against the public at large.

Consent theories of political obligation draw upon the unique powers consent exhibits in everyday dealings, but they are frustrated by the "problem of massive nonconsent." Expansions of what is counted as consent, such as tacit or hypothetical consent, have seemed untrue to the core concept of giving willing consent. David Estlund proposes a novel conception, "normative consent," to address the problem of massive nonconsent while being true to "the idiom of consent." This comment details consent’s virtues and shows that consent theories cannot claim enough of them to vindicate political obligation.

The preservationist duties that conservationists would lay upon landowners to protect the natural environment obviously interfere with what those people do with their land. That is often taken to be an equally obvious ? albeit possibly justifiable ? violation of their rights in that property. But to say that, as landowners often do, would be to imply that property rights somehow embrace a ?right to destroy?. Closer inspection suggests that they do not. That would be a further right, additional to and independent of all the component rights standardly associated with the right to private property. A right to destroy is implicit neither in the concept nor in the justifications of property rights, as they are standardly conceived. Conservationist policies cannot, therefore, properly be opposed on the grounds that they would necessarily violate people's property rights.

Corporate property rights present an interesting challenge to the liberal conception of property rights, for it is unclear that the self-respect of individuals is promoted by the existence of a system of property rights for corporations. I argue that it is difficult even to identify who the individuals are who are the owners of large corporations, and why these individuals should be given the same claims, protections and immunities as other property rights holders since the liabilities of corporate property rights holders are not the same as of those, for instance, who own their own homes. In this paper I first try to understand who it is who owns the large corporation. Secondly, I show that the limited liability of these corporate property owners makes the justification of corporate property rights quite difficult, from the classical liberal perspective. I end with a few brief remarks on changes in legal policy which would be consistent with my arguments on the nature and justification of corporate property rights.

This essay scrutinizes political obligation in the Second Treatise by analyzing the natural liberty Locke attributes to children, savages, some foreigners, and other tacit consenters. Both natural liberty and the voluntarism of consent require certain conditions to be actualized, one of the most important of which is room enough: unoccupied space like that found in America in which it is possible to exit from the potentially coercive dilemmas of tacit consent and perhaps to originate a founding (express) consent. Insofar as consent and natural liberty rely on the availability of open space, though, Lockean liberalism justifies, maybe requires, settler colonialism.

In this article I argue that, despite the views of such theorists as Locke, Hart and Raz, most of a person's property rights cannot be individualistically justified. Instead most property rights, if justified at all, must be justified on non-individualistic (e.g. consequentialist) grounds. This, I suggest, implies that most property rights cannot be morally fundamental ‘human rights’.

Many people take for granted an absolute conception of property rights. According to this conception, if I own a piece of property I have a moral right to do with it as I please, irrespective of the needs of others.This paper articulates an argument against this conception of property rights. First, it shows that there are many possible conceptions of property rights, and that there are significant differences among the models of ownership which have prevailed in different societies. Then, it argues that there are decisive grounds to refuse to grant that property owners have a moral right to exercise absolute control over their property, and that ownership implies not only rights but also duties and limits.

Locke appears to be committed to the peculiar views that native-born residents and visiting aliens have the same political status (since both are tacit consenters) and that real political societies have very few "members" with full rights and duties (since only express consenters seem to be counted as "members"). Locke, however, also subscribes to a principle governing our understanding of the content of vague or inexplicit consent: such consent is consent to all and only that which is necessary to the purpose for which the consent is given. Using this principle, we can see that Locke's commitments are to far more reasonable positions.

No natural rights theory justifies strong intellectual property rights. More specifically, no theory within the entire domain of natural rights thinking – encompassing classical liberalism, libertarianism and left-libertarianism, in all their innumerable variants – coherently supports strengthening current intellectual property rights. Despite their many important differences, all these natural rights theories endorse some set of members of a common family of basic ethical precepts. These commitments include non-interference, fairness, non-worsening, consistency, universalisability, prior consent, self-ownership, self-governance, and the establishment of zones of autonomy. Such commitments have clear applications pertaining to the use and ownership of created ideas. I argue that each of these commitments require intellectual property rights to be substantially limited in scope, strength and duration. In this way the core mechanisms of natural rights thinking ensure a robust public domain and categorically rule out strong intellectual property rights.