Intentional collective action -- Collective moral responsibility -- Collective guilt -- Individual responsibility for (and in) collective wrongs -- Collective obligation, individual obligation, and individual moral responsibility -- Individual moral responsibility in wrongful social practice.

In A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation, Colleen Murphy devotes a full chapter to arguing that international criminal trials make significant contributions to political reconciliation within post-conflict and transitional societies. While she is right to claim that these trials serve an important function, I take issue with her with respect to what that important function is. Whereas Murphy focuses on the contributions international criminal prosecutions might make to political reconciliation within the borders of transitional societies, I claim instead that their (...) primary function is to restore order at the international level and to dispense justice. The aims of justice are not always consistent with the aims of reconciliation. Moreover, several features of international criminal trials should give us pause with respect even to how well, in fact, they manage to serve the ends of international justice. (shrink)

A recent account of this type of theory, from Thomas Hurka, makes an endrun around this worry by filling in “the most plausible perfectionism” as a maximizing consequentialism that is time- and agent-neutral. It provides a central action-guiding principle: the right act is the act that maximizes perfectionist value. Perfectionist value, as value typically is in consequentialist normative systems, is non-moral in character. It is non-moral because it is prior to the moral, and that in terms of which the moral (...) is defined. According to perfectionism, the good is to be understood as the development of human nature, particularly as excellence in human achievement. Combining this theory of value with the maximizing principle that says we ought to maximize this type of value, we arrive at one way of filling in the moral picture of perfectionism that is not susceptible to the charge of vagueness with respect to its action-guiding component. Filling in the directive in somewhat more detail, Hurka explains that the most plausible version of the theory requires that perfectionist value be maximized in a time-neutral fashion, that is, that it be maximized in a way that recognizes whole lives, taking each time of a life as equally a part of the life, and so to be valued equally. In addition, it should be agent-neutral, requiring agents to focus not just on their own perfection, but to care equally about the perfection of all. (shrink)

(2001). Domestic violence and hate crimes: Acknowledging two levels of responsibility. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 31-43. doi: 10.1080/0731129X.2001.9992106.

This special issue of IJFAB starts from the premise that fitness is a feminist issue, and, more specifically, it is an issue that ought to be of concern to feminists interested in bioethics. While a neglected concept in feminist bio-ethics, fitness is of key importance to women’s health and well-being. Not only that, it is also an area of women’s lives that invites unwelcome policing and advice from friends, family members, medical practitioners, and even strangers. People have a difficult time (...) prying apart the idea of fitness from that of weight loss. Most women who embark on a fitness routine have weight loss among their primary goals.Since late 2011, we and a host of guest authors have been exploring the... (shrink)

This volume contains ten chapters, each of which takes up a different question in contemporary moral or political philosophy. The volume has three parts: meta-ethics, issues in freedom and autonomy, and contemporary political philosophy. In the meta-ethical section, the chapters address issues concerning acts and their value, the plausibility of aggregation and counting with respect to the value of human lives, and the role of moral character in causing and explaining moral behavior. In the second section, the chapters take up (...) questions about the connection between moral imagination and a plausible account of integrity, the connection between autonomy and rights to property, and the difficulties facing internalist accounts of autonomy. In the final section, the chapters address issues concerning feminist critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, the limits of liberalism and communitarianism, the importance of understanding Rawls's social contract as a contract for institutions, and the morality of nationalist movements. These chapters reflect a cross-section of the issues concerning value that are of contemporary scholarly interest in Canada and the United States. (shrink)

This volume explores new and urgent applications of collective action theory, such as global poverty, the race and class politics of urban geography, and culpable conduct in organizational criminal law. It draws attention to new questions about the status of corporate agents and new approaches to collective obligation and responsibility.

The philosophy of action is about agents and actions. As such, it has both a metaphysical and an ethical dimension. My dissertation is divided into three papers. ;The first is wholly metaphysical, concentrating on the ontology of actions. I explore the relationship between actions reported by a certain class of "by" -sentences and argue that the relationship is identity. ;The second paper concerns the bearing that ontological conclusions about actions have on ethics. I argue that, except for the claim that (...) there are no such entities as actions, ontological conclusions about actions do not make a substantive difference to ethical theory. ;In the third paper, I concentrate on the ethical issue of an agent's responsibility for her actions. I argue that an agent is responsible only if she could have done otherwise, as long as "could have done otherwise" is interpreted as meaning "would have done otherwise if she had so chosen.". (shrink)