I defend one way of solving the Impermissibility Problem—that is, the problem that on moralized approaches to coercion, coerciveness and permissibility are mutually exclusive. This brings up intuitive difficulties for cases such as taxation, which seem to be both coercive and permissible. I gloss three popular theories of coercion—the moralized baseline, nonmoralized baseline, and enforcement approaches—and conclude that only the nonmoralized baseline approach clearly solves the problem. However, Robert Nozick’s famous “slave case” raises another serious issue for the nonmoralized baseline (...) approach. So, in order to solve both the slave case and the Impermissibility Problem, I draw on Grant Lamond’s discussion of the coerciveness of law to propose the pro tanto wrong approach. On this approach, coercion is not impermissible simpliciter, but requires some sort of special justification. The pro tanto wrong approach is moralized, but on it, moralization comes in coercion’s need for justification, not in whether it is, in fact, justified. Thus impermissibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for coerciveness, and the Impermissibility Problem is avoided. I conclude that solving the problem in this way is desirable because it preserves a core belief of liberalism: certain acts, including taxation, may be both coercive and permissible. (shrink)

Some recent scholarship in the philosophy of criminal law has claimed that sexual penetration ‘per se’—meaning, consensual or otherwise—is pro tanto morally wrong, or that there exist ‘general reasons’ against it. On such a view, penetrative sex is only ever at best justified wrongdoing. When paired with an influential view about the theoretical basis of the offence-defence distinction in criminal law, the apparent implication is that sexual penetration alone ought to constitute the actus reus of rape, with the question (...) of consent relegated to a defence matter. This article firstly sets out some of the difficult upshots of considering all sexual penetration to be pro tanto wrong, particularly when one attends to the full moral entailments of justified wrongdoing. Assuming, arguendo, that sexual penetration is pro tanto wrong, it is also far from clear, I suggest, that consent, of all things, amounts to a justification for penetrative sex. This creates further difficulties for the pro tanto wrong view. Finally, I argue that even if penetrative sex is a pro tanto moral wrong of some kind, it does not follow, as some scholars have suggested, that there is a case for making penetrative sex as such the offence element of rape. (shrink)

The discussion develops the view that public justification in Rawls’s political liberalism, in one of its roles, is actualist in fully enfranchising actual reasonable citizens and fundamental in political liberalism’s order of justification. I anchor this reading in the political role Rawls accords to general reflective equilibrium, and examine in its light the relationship between public justification, pro tanto justification, political values, full justification, the wide view of public political culture and salient public reason (...) intuitions. This leaves us with the question of how a more plausible, post-Rawlsian political liberalism should understand the commitment to discursive respect and robust discursive equality that is reflected in its view of actualist and fundamental public justification. (shrink)

(Please note: the main ideas of this paper are restated in revised/developed form in: "On actualist and fundamental public justification in political liberalism" and "Patterns of justification: on political liberalism and the primacy of public justification". Both papers are available from philpapers.) The paper suggests the deep view of Rawls-type public justification as promising, non-ideal theory variant of an internal conception of political liberalism. To this end, I demonstrate how the deep view integrates a range of (...) ideas, views and commitments at the core of political liberalism’s justification structure, including pro tanto justification, full justification, political values and their priority, justificatory neutrality, the role of reasonable comprehensive views, the nature public reasons, the wide view of public political culture, the role of overlapping consensus and political legitimacy, and not least, the status of reflective equilibrium and the Original Position. I then contrast the deep view with Quong’s ideal theory variant if the internal conception, and argue that we should prefer the deep view. Thus, the prospects of political liberalism depend not so much on whether we find ways to make ideal theory relevant for non-ideal purposes. Rather, it depends on whether political liberalism can devise a credible response to the problem of public dogma. (shrink)

People often think that their special relationships with family, friends, comrades and compatriots, can ground moral reasons. Among these reasons, they understand some to be duties – pro tanto requirements that have genuine weight when they conflict with other considerations. In this paper I ask: what is the underlying moral structure of associative duties? I first consider and reject the orthodox Teleological Welfarist account, which first observes that special relationships are fundamental for human well-being, then claims that we cannot (...) have these relationships, if we do not recognise associative duties, before concluding that we should therefore recognise associative duties. I then introduce a nonteleological alternative, grounded in the Appropriate Response approach to ethical theory. (shrink)

In articles published ten years apart in 2011 and 2021, Gur-Arye argues that when considering an agent’s explanation for doing something that looks, prima facie, like a criminal offence, we should distinguish between a plea of justification, and an assertion that one acted within one’s power. The former explains an agent’s reasons for having committed a pro tanto offence (i.e., actus reus + mens rea). The latter is a denial that the agent committed any pro tanto offence (...) at all. In this piece, I build on Gur-Arye’s argument, suggesting that her claim about powers can be extended to all instances in which rights are displaced. I argue that in its expanded form, the practical significance of Gur-Arye’s claim goes well beyond what she identifies. It points to important and underappreciated points about the structure and classification of defensive claims in the criminal law, and helps identify errors in some arguments commonly made to support claims about disputed features of justifications. (shrink)

Political liberals hold that the exercise of state power is legitimate only if it can be publicly justified—justified on the basis of public reasons. Many find this requirement too demanding and propose instead that there are just pro tanto reasons for laws and policies to be publicly justified. Here I argue that this alternative proposal fails to recognize that there are also distinct pro tanto reasons to have institutional requirements that laws and policies are publicly justified. This suggests (...) an intermediate position between political liberals and their critics, which holds that states have reasons to adopt the kinds of institutions that political liberals favor—institutions that require public justification—but whether they should do so will depend on the costs and benefits of those institutions. This allows for a more practical approach to public justification by focusing on its application in particular political contexts. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to present and defend a new argument for rights contributionism – the view that the notion of a moral claim-right is a contributory (or pro tanto) rather than overall normative notion. The argument is an inference to the best explanation: it is argued that (i) there are contributory moral factors that contrast with standard moral reasons by way of having a number of formal properties that are characteristic of rights, even though (...) they can be overridden, and (ii) that this is best explained by a view that takes these factors to correlate with rights. The second aim is to show that the truth of rights contributionism matters for normative ethics. More specifically, it is argued that rights contributionism clears the way for deontologists to justify the pre-theoretically plausible verdict that we have a duty to save the greater number in so-called Taurek scenarios – scenarios in which we have to choose between saving either a greater or a smaller number of different people. The chapter offers a novel and distinctively deontological explanation of this verdict that is based on the assumption that everyone has a pro tanto right to be saved in a Taurek scenario. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson and others contend that rights are pro-tanto rather than absolute, that is, that rights may permissibly be infringed in some circumstances. Alan Gewirth maintains that there are some rights that are absolute because infringing them would amount to unspeakable evil. However, there seem to be possible circumstances in which it would be permissible to infringe even those rights. Specificationists, such as Gerald Gaus, Russ Shafer-Landau, Hillel Steiner and Kit Wellman, argue that all rights are absolute because (...) they have implicit exceptions, the exceptions being either right-voiding or right-compatible. Specificationists have charged pro-tantoism with preventing rights from being action-guiding, and pro-tantoists have levelled the same charge against specificationism. I show that both charges are mistaken. Pro-tantoists claim that specificationists cannot account for the moral remainder that we recognise in some circumstances and which can be explained by reference to a permissible right-infringement. Specificationists retort that the moral remainder can be explained by invoking compensation-rights. I show that the pro-tantoist claim is true and that the specificationist retort is false on two counts: explanation in terms of compensation-rights is not applicable to all cases; and it fails to account for the moral dynamic in the cases to which it is applicable. The contention that rights are pro-tanto does not conflict with the substance of the contention that rights are trumps, despite claims of specificationists to the contrary. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Whistleblowing (2019), Boot engages with the current literature on unauthorized disclosure of information, critically examines some positions, and defends others. One early step of the book’s main argument is to claim that whistleblowing is pro tanto wrong. This claim which many parties of the debate accept affects the narrative of the discussion and also plays a role against attempts to justify whistleblowing based on moral rights. In opposition to such a claim, I argue that one (...) can similarly ascribe pro tanto rightness to whistleblowing. However, this would also be a mistake. In principle, such claims are inaccurate concerning how pro tanto reasons work. Considering the motivations for taking up Ross’s idea of prima facie duties, and having in mind the theoretical role they are supposed to play, I suggest that only simple type-acts (as contrasted with complex act-types) may be called pro tanto right or wrong. Therefore, although widely appealed to, such claims about whistleblowing are neither helpful nor successful in the debate. (shrink)

I summarize a conception of morality as containing a set of rules which hold ceteris paribus and which impose pro-tanto obligations. I explain two ways in which moral rules are ceteris-paribus, according to whether an exception is duty-voiding or duty-overriding. I defend the claim that moral rules are ceteris-paribus against two qualms suggested by Luke Robinson’s discussion of moral rules and against the worry that such rules are uninformative. I show that Robinson’s argument that moral rules cannot ground pro- (...) class='Hi'>tanto obligations is unsound, because it confuses an absolute reason for an obligation with a reason for an absolute obligation, and because it overlooks the possibility that priority rules may be rules for ordering pro-tanto obligations rather than rules for eliminating contenders for the status of absolute obligation. (shrink)

In _The Ethics of Whistleblowing_ (2019), Boot engages with the current literature on unauthorized disclosure of information, critically examines some positions, and defends others. One early step of the book’s main argument is to claim that whistleblowing is _pro tanto_ wrong. This claim which many parties of the debate accept affects the narrative of the discussion and also plays a role against attempts to justify whistleblowing based on moral rights. In opposition to such a claim, I argue that one can (...) similarly ascribe _pro tanto_ rightness to whistleblowing. However, this would also be a mistake. In principle, such claims are inaccurate concerning how _pro tanto_ reasons work. Considering the motivations for taking up Ross’s idea of _prima facie_ duties, and having in mind the theoretical role they are supposed to play, I suggest that only simple type-acts (as contrasted with complex act-types) may be called _pro tanto_ right or wrong. Therefore, although widely appealed to, such claims about whistleblowing are neither helpful nor successful in the debate. (shrink)

There are many uses in English of the word “ought” (see Ought). This essay concerns the normative uses and the concepts or properties denoted thereby. In particular, it concerns two nonfinal oughts commonly used in the philosophical literature: prima facie oughts and pro tanto oughts.

In Climate Matters (2012), John Broome argues that individuals have private duties to offset all emissions for which they are causally responsible, grounded in the general moral injunction against doing harm. Emissions do harm, therefore they must be neutralized. I argue that individuals' private duties to offset emissions cannot be grounded in a duty to do no harm, because there can be no such general duty. It is virtually impossible in our current social context―for those in developed countries at least―to (...) do no harm, and we cannot have duties to do what we cannot do. I argue that this shifts the general injunction from 'do no harm' to 'do the least harm', and thereby reopens the question of tradeoffs which Broome had set aside as a matter of 'goodness' rather than 'justice'. He admits that when it comes to goodness, reducing emissions is not the best way to promote the good. The focus of this paper is on whether when it comes to minimizing injustice, reducing emissions is the best way. Climate change is undoubtedly one of the most important issues we face; it's clear that it matters prima facie. The question is whether―and to what extent―it matters all-things-considered. (shrink)

The ‘impairment argument’ against abortion developed by Perry Hendricks aims to derive the wrongness of abortion from the wrongness of causing foetal alcohol syndrome. Hendricks endorses an ‘impairment principle’, which states that, if it is wrong to inflict an impairment of a certain degree on an organism, then, ceteris paribus, it is also wrong to inflict a more severe impairment on that organism. Causing FAS is wrong in virtue of the impairment it inflicts. But abortion inflicts an even more severe (...) impairment, and so, ceteris paribus, is also wrong. Notably, Hendricks thinks that this argument does not require the claim that the foetus is a person. Here, I respond to Hendricks by arguing that the ceteris paribus clause of the impairment principle is not met in ordinary cases of pregnancy. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term is much more burdensome than is refraining from excessive drinking for nine months. This provides a pro tanto justification for obtaining an abortion that does not apply to causing FAS. If the foetus is not a person, it seems fairly clear to me that this justification is strong enough to render abortion permissible. Hendricks is therefore incorrect in claiming that the impairment argument can go without claims concerning foetal personhood. If the foetus is a person, then whether burdensomeness justifies abortion depends on certain questions relating to Thomson’s famous violinist argument. I will not attempt to answer those. But anyone who is otherwise sympathetic to Thomson’s argument should not be moved by the impairment argument. (shrink)

Critics often argue that Ross’s metaphysical and epistemological accounts of all-things-considered duties suffer from the problem of explanation. For Ross did not give us any clear explanation of the combination of pro tanto duties, i.e. how principles of pro tanto duties can combine. Following from this, he did not explain how we could arrive at overall justified moral judgements. In this paper, I will argue that the problem of explanation is not compelling. First of all, it is based (...) on the classical account of pro tanto duties. Principles of pro tanto duties can be understood in another way, i.e. in terms of reason-giving account that might be of help to provide a response to the critics. Furthermore, critics fail to see some evidence in Ross about how we can arrive at moral judgements. (shrink)

I argue that riskier killings of innocent people are, other things equal, objectively worse than less risky killings. I ground these views in considerations of disrespect and security. Killing someone more riskily shows greater disrespect for him by more grievously undervaluing his standing and interests, and more seriously undermines his security by exposing a disposition to harm him across all counterfactual scenarios in which the probability of killing an innocent person is that high or less. I argue that the salient (...) probabilities are the agent’s sincere, sane, subjective probabilities, and that this thesis is relevant whether your risk-taking pertains to the probability of killing a person or to the probability that the person you kill is not liable to be killed. I then defend the view’s relevance to intentional killing; show how it differs from an account of blameworthiness; and explain its significance for all-things-considered justification and justification under uncertainty. (shrink)

Pacifism is the view that necessarily, the nonconsensual harming of pro tanto rights-bearers is all-things-considered morally impermissible. Critics of pacifism frequently point to common moral intuitions about self-defenders and other-defenders as evidence that pacifism is false and that self- and other-defense are often morally justified. I call this the Justification View and defend its rival, the Excuse View. According to the latter, a robust view of moral excuse adequately explains the common moral intuitions invoked against pacifism and is (...) compatible with pacifism. The paper proceeds in five steps. First, I identify ten intuitive data points that require explanation. Second, I introduce the justification/excuse distinction. Third, I demonstrate the Excuse View’s equal explanatory power with respect to the intuitive data. Fourth, I defend the Fair Use Principle: When evaluating the plausibility of rival theories J and E, the use of datum d’s full intuitive force against E and for J is epistemically permissible only if (i) d is better explained by J than E and (ii) no intuitive components of d are equally well-explained by E. Finally, I conclude that the conjunction of pacifism and the Excuse View renders the intuitive defense of the Justification View largely moot, and that this is a substantial victory for pacifism. (shrink)

This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (...) (such as BETRAYAL). The chapter aims to make vivid and plausible a range of possible answers to these questions, and important forms of argument that can be used to favor certain answers over others. (shrink)

According to the standard liberal egalitarian approach, religious exemptions from generally applicable laws can be justified on the grounds of equal respect for each citizen’s conscience. I contend that claims of conscience cannot justify demands for exemptions, since they do not meet even the most inclusive standards of public justification. Arguments of the form ‘My conscience says so’ do not explicate the rationale behind the practices that the claimants seek to protect. Therefore, such arguments do not constitute even pro (...) tanto reasons for exemptions. Rather, they are what Francis Bacon called idola fori – ‘idols of the marketplace’– conventional justifications that are deemed rational and even self- evident, while in fact they are not. (shrink)

(OPEN ACCESS) This paper offers a novel substantive justification for mandatory electoral quotas—e.g., gender or racial quotas—and a new methodological approach to their justification. Substantively, I argue for a political egalitarian account of electoral quotas. Methodologically, based on this account and a political egalitarian grounding of political participatory rights, I offer an alternative to the External Restriction Approach to the justification of electoral quotas. The External Restriction Approach sees electoral quotas as at best justified restrictions on political (...) participatory rights. I argue for the Internal Restriction Approach instead, which can justify electoral quotas by specifying the pro tanto scope of political participatory rights rather than by justifying restrictions on the pro tanto scope of these rights. On this approach, adequately set electoral quotas do not even conflict with and are not balanced against political participatory rights, while electoral quotas—when justified—are pro tanto required rather than merely permitted. (shrink)

(OPEN ACCESS) In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting – respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does (...) not justify such support – although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care – but not necessarily surrogate voting. (shrink)

The paper discusses the structure, applications, and plausibility of the much-used parallel-case argument for workplace democracy. The argument rests on an analogy between firms and states according to which the justification of democracy in the state implies its justification in the workplace. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the argument is illustrated by applying it to two usual objections to workplace democracy, namely, that employees lack the expertise required to run a firm and that only capital (...) suppliers should have a say over the governance of the firm. Second, the structure of the argument is unfolded. Third, two salient similarities between firms and states regarding their internal and external effects and the standing of their members are addressed in order to asses the potential and limits of the argument, as well as three relevant differences regarding the voluntariness of their membership, the narrowness of their goals, and the stiffness of the competition they face. After considering these similarities and differences, the paper contends that the the parallel-case argument provides a sound reason in favor of democracy in the workplace—a reason, however, that needs to be importantly qualified and that is only pro tanto. (shrink)

Why conduct research concerning human genome or proving the existence of Higgs particle? What makes these problems significant or worthy of investigation? In recent epistemological discussions one can find at least two conceptions of the problem of epistemic significance: research question or cognitive problem can be practically significant or intrinsically epistemically significant, in a way that depends on the consideration whether reasons that support the significance of the problem are practical or epistemic. In this paper I am dealing with the (...) question of the possibility of determining the significance of the problem from the purely epistemic perspective. In that regard I argue that (under suitable interpretation of the problem of epistemic significance) there are no pure epistemic reasons that could determine the importance of the cognitive problem. The argument is based on three objections: (1) epistemic duty is unjustifiably identified with epistemic justification, (2) the dependence of epistemic reasons on conceputal schemes is not taken into consideration, and (3) the infinite justificatory potential of evidence is being disregarded. (shrink)

This paper critiques the version of the argument that the regulation of hateful speech by the state undermines its democratic legitimacy made by Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein. It argues that in some cases the harmful effects of hateful speech on the democratic process outweigh those of restriction. It does not challenge the central premise of the Legitimacy Argument, that a wide-ranging right to freedom of expression is an essential political right in a liberal democracy. Instead, it uses ideal and (...) nonideal theory as a framework for judgements about the regulation of hate speech. The mistake underpinning the Legitimacy Argument is that it assumes that other conditions pervade that make an ideal democratic procedure possible when they do not. In reality the state can be put in a position where, whatever course of action it takes with regard to the regulation or non-regulation of hate speech, some citizens will not be able to participate fully in political deliberation. Under such conditions there remain strong pro tanto reasons not to regulate hate speech on democratic grounds, but they are not all-things-considered reasons, and there are also pro tanto reasons to regulate hate speech that might outweigh them in some cases. This leads to the cautious conclusion that while there might be a normative justification for the regulation of hate speech in individual instances, the debate is best understood as one between competing pro tanto reasons, and must be approached on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

How should we act when uncertain about the moral truth, or when trying to remain neutral between competing moral theories? This dissertation argues that some types of actions and policies are relatively likely to be approved by a very wide range of moral theories—even theories which have never yet been formulated, or which appear to cancel out one another's advice. For example, I argue that actions and policies which increase a moral agent's access to primary goods also tend to increase (...) that agent's likelihood of bringing about good consequences, even under varying and mutually incompatible hypotheses about what consequences count as "good". We therefore have a subjective, pro tanto moral reason to perform such actions and enact such policies—one whose justification does not require treating any particular theory as especially probable, but instead merely requires treating at least one at-least-partly consequentialist moral theory as an open hypothesis, and is therefore applicable even under conditions of moral uncertainty or moral neutrality. My discussion begins abstractly, but as it progresses it gradually applies its framework to increasingly concrete issues. I find that the justification of some liberal policies—in the classical sense of "liberal"—can be accomplished with significantly fewer moral assumptions than have traditionally been relied upon. (shrink)

Without needing to commit to any specific claims about what states of affairs have most agent-neutral value, we can nevertheless predict that states of affairs which are relatively valuable are also relatively likely to occur—on the grounds that, all else equal, at least some other agents are likely to recognize the value of those states of affairs, pursue them because they are valuable, and successfully bring them about as a consequence of that pursuit. This gives us a way to promote (...) value as such, rather than promoting it under some more tendentious description. We can predict that actions which help other people—or our own future selves—to recognize valuable states of affairs, actions which motivate them to pursue whatever states of affairs they believe to be valuable, or actions which help them succeed at their pursuits will, all else equal, have positive consequences. So we have a pro tanto reason to take such actions, and the subjective justification of that reason is independent of other moral claims. (shrink)

Following P. F. Strawson, a number of philosophers have argued that if hard incompatibilism is true, then its truth would undermine the justification or value of our relationships with other persons. In this paper, I offer a novel defense of this claim. In particular, I argue that if hard incompatibilism is true, we cannot make sense of: the possibility of promissory obligation, the significance of consent, or the pro tanto wrongness of paternalistic intervention. Because these practices and normative (...) commitments are central to our relationships as we currently conceive of them, it follows that hard incompatibilism has radically revisionary conclusions. (shrink)

Ecotage, or the destruction of property for the sake of promoting environmental ends, is beginning to (re)establish itself both as a topic of public discussion and as a radical activist tactic. In response to these developments, a small but growing academic literature questions whether, and if so under what conditions, ecotage can be morally justified. This paper contributes to the literature by arguing that instances of ecotage are pro tanto justified insofar as they are instances of effective and proportionate (...) self- and/or other-defense. Having elucidated and defended its central claim, this paper concludes by briefly considering some other morally relevant features of ecotage that might tell for or against its overall justification in particular cases. (shrink)

Humans ought to do much more in order to remedy the severe harm caused by climate change. While there seems to be an overall consensus that governments and other national and international political agents need to resolve the problem, there is no agreement yet on the role and responsibility of individuals in this process. In this paper, I suggest an argument of integrity that offers strong pro tanto moral reasons for individuals to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. Hourdequin (...) (2010) has presented an argument of integrity to justify a corresponding obligation. In this paper, I argue that even though Hourdequin’s argument is appealing, it has important limitations. I advance the argument in light of the current literature so that it is not subject to these limitations and establishes an overall more comprehensive justification for why individuals ought to reduce their personal emissions. (shrink)

Plausible retributivist justifications for punishment assert that the commission of a moral wrong creates a pro tanto reason to punish the person who committed it. Yet there are good case-based and theoretical reasons to believe that not all moral wrongs are the proper subjects of criminal law or that they are within the proper domain of the state. This article provides these reasons, which suggest that a plausible retributivist justification for punishment must make distinctions between state-relevant and non-state-relevant (...) moral wrongs and state-relevant and non-state-relevant desert. The article makes the case for Rawlsian public reason as a plausible method for making these distinctions. (shrink)

This paper defends a new argument for enabling citizen participation in government: individuals must have genuine opportunities to try to change the law in order to be able to satisfy duties of conscience. Without such opportunities, citizens who regard systems of related laws as partially unjust face a moral dilemma. If they comply with these laws willingly without also trying to change them, they commit a pro tanto wrong by willingly participating in injustice . If they disobey, or if (...) they obey only to avoid sanction, they respond inadequately to the morally important purposes that the laws advance despite their injustice. Government should help citizens avoid this dilemma. This argument bolsters the non-instrumentalist view that responsiveness in the political process is desirable even if it does not promote just legislative outcomes. It also helps to explain what governments owe to citizens with minority political views. (shrink)

Is the law good? How can it be improved? These questions are frequently addressed, both in traditional doctrinal research and in interdisciplinary legal research. In this article, I elaborate a general argumentative framework for justifying evaluations and recommendations for legislative reform, and I identify the chains of argument for making evaluations and recommendations. This may help researchers to make their arguments explicit and transparent, and then to justify the choices made for each of the steps in the argument. This enables (...) readers - as well as authors - to assess whether the argument’s conclusions are sound and convincing. A key problem in making these arguments concerns the choice of standards for evaluation. I suggest that they can be best understood in terms of the underlying values. In order to make all-things-considered evaluations and normative recommendations, interdisciplinary cooperation between doctrinal, socio-legal, and legal-philosophical researchers is necessary. Therefore, individual researchers will usually have to settle for pro tanto evaluations and recommendations. (shrink)

This chapter investigates different ways that pro tanto reasons bearing on our options can compete with one another in order to determine the overall normative status of those options. It argues for two key claims: (i) any theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) any theory must allow for comparative verdicts about how strongly supported the options are by the reasons, rather than simply which options are permissible (...) or required. A simple balancing account and an account based on a distinction between requiring and justifying reasons are rejected, and a new account giving a distinct role for reasons against is introduced. (shrink)

Epistemologists routinely distinguish between two kinds of justification or rationality – the propositional and the doxastic kind – in order to characterize importantly different ways in which an attitude can be justified or rational for a person. I argue that these notions, as they are commonly understood, are well suited to capture rationality judgments about the attitudes that agents reach as conclusions of their reasoning. Yet, these notions are ill-suited to capture rationality judgments about attitudes that agents form while (...) their reasoning is still in progress. In fact, we currently lack any suitable theory of rationality that lets us capture the ways in which we evaluate the rationality of such transitional attitudes, even though they are ubiquitous. I propose to capture these rationality judgments by introducing a new notion of rationality that is orthogonal to the propositional/doxastic distinction, which I call pro tem rationality. This new notion can be integrated with both traditional and formal ways of characterizing rationality or justification. It can be used to enlighten debates about logical and empirical learning, higher-order evidence, and the epistemology of philosophy, among others. (shrink)

The problem of skepticism is often understood as a paradox: a valid argument with plausible premises whose conclusion is that we lack justification for perceptual beliefs. Typically, this conclusion is deemed unacceptable, so a theory is offered that posits conditions for justification on which some premise is false. The theory defended here is more general, and explains why the paradox arises in the first place. Like Strawson’s (Introduction to logical theory, Wiley, New York, 1952) “ordinary language” approach to (...) induction, the theory posits something built into the very notion of justification: it is loaded with a bias towards the proposition that we are not massively deceived. Beyond the paradox, remaining skeptical problems consist of metaphysical and practical questions: whether we are massively deceived, or why we should use our loaded notion rather than some other. Such challenges have pro- found epistemological significance, but they are not problems that an a priori theory of justification can solve. (shrink)

Resumen: En La actualidad de lo bello, Gadamer hace una referencia reveladora a la improvisación musical y a la importancia de la escucha musical, además de poner en primer plano la necesidad de justificación del arte. Situando este debate a través de Goethe y Platón, junto con las Lecciones de Estética de Adorno de finales de la década de 1950 y una discusión sobre Nietzsche y la Antigüedad, es posible establecer que lo que está en juego es la afinación, así (...) como una tensión que invita a un debate ulterior tanto sobre la detención del amante en Carson como el demorarse en Heidegger. Al revisar la hermenéutica gadameriana de la programación y la interpretación musical, incluida la improvisación y el desafío de la nueva música, las reflexiones de Gadamer sobre la cultura musical en el contexto de la cultura social y su reflexión no solo pueden ser leídas a través de Platón y Goethe, sino también a partir de las concepciones de "lo bello" en Hölderlin y Rilke. Se trata de una "conversación" cultural en la que la contribución del público puede estar en tensión con la programación musical progresiva, además de la dinámica de respuesta que surge en la energeia de la improvisación tanto para el intérprete como para el oyente.// Abstract: Gadamer’s On the Relevance of the Beautiful makes telling reference to musi-cal improvisation and the importance of musical listening in addition to fore-grounding the need for justification. Situating this discussion via Goethe and Plato along with Adorno’s late 1950s lectures on Aesthetics together with a discussion of Nietzsche and antiquity, what is at stake is attunement and a tension which invites a discussion of Carson on the lover’s arrest and Heidegger on tarrying. By reviewing Gadamer’s hermeneutic of musical pro-gramming and performance, including improvisation and the challenge of new music, Gadamer may be read on music culture in the context of social culture and his reflection not only via Plato and Goethe but Hölderlin and Rilke on ‘the beautiful.’ At work is a cultural ‘conversation’ where audience input can be in tension with progressive musical programing along with the dynamic of response emergent in the energeia of improvisation for performer and listener. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Arguments Con Arguments Pro Ambivalence Concerning Relativism? The Case of Richard Rorty A Newer Argument Pro: Hales's Defense of Relativism References.

In a recent paper in the Yale Law Journal, Malcolm Thorburn argued that to enjoy a justificatory defence in the criminal law is to have a normative power that is exercised in the circumstances which give rise to the justification. He also argued that where such powers are conferred on private citizens, those citizens should be understood as acting as public officials pro tempore when they exercise them. In this extended reply, I resist both propositions and reply to some (...) of the criticisms that Thorburn makes of my own rival views. I also take the opportunity to explore, philosophically, some of the criminal law relating to consent, self-defence and arrest, and to discuss the connections between the debate over the nature of criminal-law justifications and the debate over the nature of law. (shrink)

I reinforce my defense of permissivism about the rationality of doxastic attitudes on the face of a certain body of evidence against criticism published in this journal by Anantharaman. After making some conceptual clarifications, I manage to show that at least one of my original arguments pro-permissivism is left unscathed by Anantharaman's points.

«Au moment de monter sur ce théâtre du monde [...], j'avance masqué». Cette déclaration de Descartes dans le Préambule des Cogitationes Privatae n'est pas que l'aveu d'un jeune philosophe à l'aube du XVIIe siècle, mais marque une stratégie maintenant séculaire selon laquelle philosophie et théologie devraient être séparées tant dans leurs disciplines que dans leur corpus. Jean-Luc Marion, témoin exemplaire de cette dichotomie, use ainsi de la démarche dionysienne de l'homme caché devant Dieu comme justification théologique de l'avance masquée (...) du philosophe . Le gain unilatéral pour la philosophie est cependant une perte pour la théologie. À partir de la double hypothèse bonaventurienne du «Dieu proche» et de la «monadologie trinitaire», cet article trace une autre voie pour notre aujourd'hui - non pas contraire à la précédente, mais la poussant en quelque sorte «à son terme», ne craignant pas cette fois de revendiquer la fécondité explicite de la phénoménologie pour la théologie elle-même: non larvatus sed détecta fonte prodeo - j'avance non pas voilé mais à visage découvert. (shrink)

Abuse of a dominant position is one of the key aspects in EC competition law. The Court of Justice and General Court acknowledge that sometimes the actions of dominant undertaking that might be recognized as abusive should not be prohibited on the basis of Article 102 TFEU, if undertaking provides objective justification or proves that its actions generate positive effect which outweighs negative outcome on competition. Therefore, actions that usually are regarded as predatory pricing, which is one of the (...) forms of the abuse of a dominant position, in case of special circumstances might be recognized as legitimate. In the present case, attention should be devoted to objective justifications, since this provides the basis for evaluation of legitimate, pro-competitive reasons that explain why undertakings may establish prices lower than costs. This article is devoted to the analysis of objective justification, which might prove that allegedly abusive behaviour is actually legitimate. Plenty of factors might be recognized as objective justifications, therefore it is quite difficult to provide a finite list of justifications. (shrink)

Background Despite its negative impact on patients and nurses, the use of restraint in somatic health care continues in many settings. Understanding the reasons and justifications for the use of restraint among nurses is crucial in order to manage this challenge. Aim To understand nurses’ justifications for restraint use in neurosurgical care. Research design A qualitative, descriptive design was used. Data were analysed with inductive qualitative content analysis. Participants and research context Semi-structured interviews with 15 nurses working in three neurosurgical (...) departments in Sweden. Ethical considerations Approved by The Regional Ethics Committee, Stockholm, Sweden. Findings The analysis resulted in three categories. The category Patient factors influencing restraint use describes patient factors that trigger restraint, such as a diminished decision-making competence, restlessness, and need for invasive devices. The category Specific reasons for justifying restraint describes reasons for restraining patients, such as restraint being used for the sake of the patient or for the sake of others. The category General reasoning in justifying restraint describes how nurses reason when using restraint, and the decision to use restraint was often based on a consequentialist approach where the nurses’ weighed the pros and cons of different alternatives. Discussion Nurses with experience of restraint use were engaged in a constant process of justifying and balancing different options and actions. Restraint was considered legitimate if the benefit exceeded the suffering, but decisions on which restraint measures to use and when to use them depended on the values of the individual nurse. Conclusion How nurses reason when justifying restraint, why they use restraint, and who they use restraint on must be considered when creating programs and guidelines to reduce the use of restraint and to ensure that when it is used it is used carefully, appropriately, and with respect. (shrink)

Quienes nos adscribimos al realismo metafísico y tenemos a Robert Spaemann como uno de nuestros filósofos de referencia, celebramos que Comares haya editado una “introducción a la ética de Robert Spaemann”, elaborada por la profesora de la Universidad Católica de Ávila y de la Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca Mª Luisa Pro Velasco (Pro Velasco, 2021). En su introducción, la autora señala que su estudio viene a cubrir el vacío provocado por la escasez de trabajos sobre el filósofo alemán. Y ciertamente (...) lo hace. Por eso, no se trata tanto de un ensayo dirigido a quienes ya conocemos a Spaemann, cuanto de una síntesis orientada a seducir a un público culto de amplio espectro, interesado por la filosofía y cansado de las propuestas éticas idealistas (e ideológicas), para que descubra la obra de este gran filósofo y se adhiera a su idea de que la verdad, por más que sea perspectivista y se deje decir desde múltiples ubicaciones, es siempre verdad y se asienta sobre la realidad. En lo que sigue, ofrecemos una breve recensión del contenido del libro, al objeto de ayudar a los lectores a decidirse en favor de su lectura. (shrink)

When in doubt, for the embryo. New arguments on the moral status of human embryos. - In the first part of our essay we distinguish the philosophical from the legal and political level of the embryo debate and describe our indirect justification strategy. It consists in renouncing a determination of the dignity-giving φ-properties and instead starting from premises that are undoubted by all discussion partners. In the second part we reconstruct and criticize the species, continuum, identity and potentiality arguments. (...) The species argument only has a certain plausibility, if at all, as a critical argument. From the continuum argument and identity argument we take over the idea of numerical identity (NI) and link it with the core idea of the potentiality argument (P). So we come to the NIP argument: -/- (NIP) -/- (1) Every living human body that is the bearer of (or has) potential φ-properties has dignity. (2) Every viable human embryo is a living human body that is the bearer of (or has) potential φ properties. Therefore, (3) Every viable human embryo has dignity. -/- Reversibly comatose people and newborns are protected because they have the potential to have actual personal characteristics in the future; our thesis is that embryos that are capable of development also have the same potential in moral terms. The basic idea of numerical identity, with which we support the second premise, is that every human being, from embryonic existence to adulthood, forms a physical unity. In a detailed part, we deal with the crown princess, gametes, parthenogenesis, somatic cell, pronuclear stage, biological heteronome early embryo, multiple, fusion, Siamese twin, hydatidiform mole and finally trophoblast problems. In a third part, the indirect argument is supplemented by a metatheoretical cautionary argument. It states that in situations where there is doubt as to whether a being falls within the scope of a moral norm, but there are sufficiently strong reasons for this subsumption, it must be assumed that this is the case if the contrary assumption and the positive effects it may have are in no acceptable proportion to the moral harm that would result if that subsumption were not made. The main result of our considerations is therefore: When in doubt, for the embryo. (shrink)

A substantial proportion of human embryos spontaneously abort soon after conception, and ethicists have argued this is problematic for the pro-life view that a human embryo has the same moral status as an adult from conception. Firstly, if human embryos are our moral equals, this entails spontaneous abortion is one of humanity’s most important problems, and it is claimed this is absurd, and a reductio of the moral status claim. Secondly, it is claimed that pro-life advocates do not act as (...) if spontaneous abortion is important, implying they are failing to fulfill their moral obligations. We report that the primary cause of spontaneous abortion is chromosomal defects, which are currently unpreventable, and show that as the other major cause of prenatal death is induced abortion, pro-life advocates can legitimately continue efforts to oppose it. We also defend the relevance of the killing and letting die distinction, which provides further justification for pro-life priorities. (shrink)

Epistemic expressivists maintain, to a first approximation, that epistemic assertions express non-cognitive mental states, like endorsements, valuations, or pro-attitudes, rather than cognitive mental states such as beliefs. Proponents of epistemic expressivism include Chrisman, Gibbard, Field, Kappel, and Ridge, among others. In this paper, I argue for an alternative view to epistemic expressivism. The view I seek to advocate is inspired by hybrid expressivist theories about moral judgments, Copp Oxford studies in metaethics, 2009), Finlay, Strandberg ). According to these hybrid views, (...) moral judgments express semantically cognitive or representational states and pragmatically convey the speaker’s non-cognitive mental states via implicatures. I will argue that a particular version of this view can reasonably be extended to epistemic judgments and that it has several advantages over its expressivist and cognitivist competitors. In particular, I will try to show that there exist certain phenomena in the epistemic domain that seem to be best accounted for by expressivist theories of epistemic judgments. However, a version of hybrid expressivism that maintains that epistemic judgments convey the attributor’s non-cognitive mental states via generalized conversational implicatures is able to account for these phenomena just as well without running afoul of the main problems that have been identified for different versions of epistemic expressivism. (shrink)