Law and Philosophy

ISSNs: 0167-5249, 1573-0522

8 found

View year:

  1.  12
    Legislative Intent and the Hard Problem of Content.Krzysztof Poslajko - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 2025:1-30.
    The general aim of this paper is to investigate how philosophical problems with the notion of mental content affect the debate about legislative intent. Specifically, the aim is to define and criticize the metaphysically strongest-possible version of realism about legislative intent, namely “Strong Realism”: the idea that the content of legislation is objectively determined by legislatures that are treated as irreducible group agents that are bearers of corporate, functionalist intentions. Against this view, it will be argued that legislatures are insufficiently (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. The Lesser Evil Argument for (and Against) Political Obligation.Ben Jones & Tian Manshu - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (2):207-234.
    Defenses of political obligation—the pro tanto obligation to obey the law because the state commands it—often operate at or near the level of ideal theory. Critics, though, increasingly question that approach’s relevance for the imperfect states that exist. This article develops a lesser evil framework to evaluate political obligation with several advantages over more ideal approaches: (1) avoids the questionable assumption that some actual states are reasonably just, (2) recognizes that context matters for political obligation, (3) captures the complicity involved (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3.  9
    The Lesser Evil Argument for (and Against) Political Obligation.Ben Jones & Manshu Tian - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (2):207-234.
    Defenses of political obligation—the pro tanto obligation to obey the law because the state commands it—often operate at or near the level of ideal theory. Critics, though, increasingly question that approach’s relevance for the imperfect states that exist. This article develops a lesser evil framework to evaluate political obligation with several advantages over more ideal approaches: (1) avoids the questionable assumption that some actual states are reasonably just, (2) recognizes that context matters for political obligation, (3) captures the complicity involved (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4.  24
    Algorithmic and Non-Algorithmic Fairness: Should We Revise our View of the Latter Given Our View of the Former?Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (2):155-179.
    In the US context, critics of court use of algorithmic risk prediction algorithms have argued that COMPAS involves unfair machine bias because it generates higher false positive rates of predicted recidivism for black offenders than for white offenders. In response, some have argued that algorithmic fairness concerns, either also or only, calibration across groups–roughly, that a score assigned to different individuals by the algorithm involves the same probability of the individual having the target property across different groups of individuals–and that, (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  5.  31
    (1 other version)Paternalistic Discrimination.Søren Flinch Midtgaard & Viki Møller Lyngby Pedersen - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (2).
    Some policies are paternalistic and discriminatory at the same time (e.g., certain benevolent sexist policies). Such policies constitute an interesting, yet somewhat overlooked, category. We scrutinize what paternalistic discrimination is and account for its wrongness. First, we argue that paternalistic discrimination is pro tanto wrong because it is disrespectful. The disrespect consists in the selective negligence or denial of some people’s moral power over their own good. This applies even if the policies and actions in question benefit those interfered with. (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6.  8
    What it means for an event to harm: a historical baseline variant of the causal account of harming.Yan Kai Zhou - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (2):181-206.
    According to the causal account of harming, an event harms a person if and only if it causes the person to be worse off. This view has emerged as a popular alternative to the more traditional view, according to which an event harms a person if and only if the person would have been better off had the event not occurred. In this paper, my primary aim is to motivate and defend a certain variant of the causal account of harming. (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7.  20
    Rights and Demands: A Response to Kamm.Margaret Gilbert - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (1):1-12.
    I respond to some questions raised by Frances Kamm with respect to my book Rights and Demands (2018). The book focuses on demand-rights and asks how we accrue them. In other words, how does one accrue the standing to demand an action of someone or rebuke them for non-performance? My response to Kamm emphasizes how I understand “directed duties” in this context. Contrary to the standard practice of rights theorists, I do not start from the assumption that directed duties are (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  8.  1
    (1 other version)Liberty, Secrecy, and the Right of Assessment.Daniele Santoro & Manohar Kumar - 2025 - Law and Philosophy 44 (1):89-113.
    In this article we argue that governmental practices of secrecy threaten the epistemic dimension of rights. We defend the view that possessing a right entitles its holder to the largest extent of available knowledge of the circumstances that may impede the enjoyment of that right. We call this the ‘epistemic entitlement’ of rights. Such an entitlement holds in ideal conditions once full transparency is assumed. However, under non-ideal conditions secrecy is a fact that should be accounted for. We argue that, (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
 Previous issues
  
Next issues