PREVIOUS SEMINARS IN CANBERRA
2010
Wednesday 28th of July: Dr. Anne Schwenkenbecher (CAPPE)
Title:Collective Moral Obligations and Climate Change
Abstract
The existing philosophical literature on the ethics of climate change and on climate justice is mainly concerned with how burdens of mitigation, adaptation, and, to some degree, compensation can be justly distributed between states. It is widely accepted that industrialized or wealthy countries in particular have a moral obligation or duties of justice to shoulder these burdens. Without questioning the relevance of these approaches, in my paper I want to suggest that moral obligations of a state are best understood as the collective moral obligations of its individual citizens exercised by the state, or rather, by its institutions. Hence, in a first step, I will sketch an account of institutional duties as a form of collective duties of individuals. In a second step I seek to show what implications this has for the climate change-related duties of (citizens of) industrialized or wealthy countries. This approach seeks to reconcile two intuitions regarding global injustices. On the one hand, with regard to climate change and global poverty individuals seem to have stringent moral duties. On the other hand, confronting problems of global dimensions appears overly demanding for individuals and institutionalization seems necessary in order to avoid problems of coordination and non-compliance. My approach seeks to offer solutions to these problems, while at the same time attempting to make sense of the ascription of moral obligations and duties of global justice to states. Furthermore, this approach implies that if the institutionalization of collective moral duties in a given state is insufficient, individual citizens must contribute more than is legally demanded from them.
Wednesday 21st of July: Geoffrey Brennan (Economics, ANU)
Title:The Tyranny of Public Opinion
Abstract
Mill’s On Liberty makes two central distinctions: one between ‘coercion’ motivated by a desire to avoid a harm to the coerced individual and ‘coercion’ motivated by a desire to avoid a harm to some other(s); and the other between coercion orchestrated by government action and coercion via the “tyranny of popular opinion”. The former is the distinction that does normative work. The latter is in Mills view not a distinction of substance at all: his claim is that the tyranny of popular opinion and the tyranny of governments are of a piece. For him, the issue is really that political and social philosophers have focused excessively on government as a source of coercion and overlooked the implications for liberty of ‘public opinion’. My view is that both of Mill’s distinctions are in different ways problematic; but in particular the (normatively relevant) first distinction cannot carry over to the case of popular opinion. So if the first distinction is valid, the claim that there is no significant difference between government coercion and coercion via popular opinion cannot be upheld.
Wednesday 14th of July: Emma Aisbett (Crawford School of Economics and Government)
Title:Government as a means to achieve collective action: an economic perspective
Abstract
Economics has a long tradition of assessing government policy primarily in terms of maximizing the size of the economic pie. Other issues, such as low inequality, gender equity, etc. have been relegated to “other objectives” which the government may be pursuing and are generally viewed as constraints on the achievement of Pareto optimality. Meanwhile, advances in behavioural and environmental economics over the last couple of decades have seen a growing acceptance of the inclusion of things other than personal consumption in utility functions. I argue that when this broader conception of a utility function is applied, many of the issues previously labelled “other objectives” can be understood in welfare maximizing, optimal policy terms. Furthermore, I question the legitimacy of government actions which cannot be understood in these terms.
Wednesday 30th of June: David Blankfein-Tabachnick and Kevin Kordana (Peking University School of Transnational Law and University of Virginia)
Title:A Property Law Refutation of the "Tax and Transfer Preference"
Abstract
The paper addresses the efficiency question of the “tax and transfer preference.” That is, Kaplow and Shavell’s important and prominent claim that equity-oriented distributive demands are always more efficiently achieved through systems of income taxation and transfer, than through all “other legal rules.” Kaplow and Shavell famously reach their conclusion through a comparison of the efficiency of rules of tort to rules of tax and transfer in meeting equity-oriented aims, concluding that taxation and transfer is always more efficient than other private law legal rules. We maintain that Kaplow and Shavell reach their important conclusion only through inattention to an important body of private law rules that inform the very basis of their discussion: namely property. We argue that Kaplow and Shavell’s comparison of rules of taxation to rules of tort fails to take proper account of the powerful role that changing underlying property conceptions plays in achieving the equity-oriented distributive aims of competing maximands. We conclude, contra Kaplow and Shavell that as a matter of efficiency taxation and transfer is not always preferable to rules of property in achieving equity-oriented distributive aims.
Wednesday 23th of June: Tom Campbell (CAPPE)
Title:Justice, Humanity and Prudence
Wednesday 9th of June: Bruce Chapman (Crawford School of Economics and Government)
Title:Understanding HECS in a Policy and Political Economy Perspective
Abstract
The presenter helped design and develop the Australian Higher Education Contribution Scheme in 1989, and has been involved with reforms of student loans along similar lines in around 20 other countries since then. The talk will examine the political and policy context relevant to this significant change to Australian higher education, and will explore important aspects of the role of the researcher as a policy adviser.
Wednesday 2nd of June: Steve Vanderheiden (CAPPE, UC)
Title:The Ethics of Free Riding
Abstract
Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? Here, I shall consider the ethics of free riding, which as an act involves the implicit rejection of any such obligation, and shall do so through the consideration of the practical case of free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system by enjoying its benefits but refusing to bear one’s share of the costs of its maintenance. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial responsibility for climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes.
Wednesday 19th of May: John Weckert (CAPPE)
Title:Trust as “seeing as” in the virtual world
Abstract
An account of trust in terms of seeing someone as trustworthy will be defended here. To trust is to operate within something like a Kuhnian paradigm. This notion highlights various aspects of trust, for example the relationship between the cognitive and the attitudinal, its robustness and the fact that frequently develops very quickly. This account is then applied to the virtual world where it gives an explanation for the prevalence of virtual trust in an environment where it might be expected not to flourish.
Wednesday 12th of May: Mhairi Cowden (CAPPE)
Title:Why a child doesn’t have a right to be loved
Abstract
It is often stated in international and domestic legal documents that children have a right to be loved. Yet there is very little explanation of why this right exists or what it entails. Matthew Liao seeks to provide such an explanation by arguing that children have a right to be loved as a human right. I will examine Liao’s explanation and in turn argue that children do not have a right to be loved. I will argue that ‘loving’ cannot be a duty and even if we were willing to concede that it is, enforcing such a right may lead to harm.
Wednesday 5th of May: John Kleinig (CAPPE/ City University of New York)
Title:Organisational Loyalty
Abstract
Organisations frequently expect the loyalty of their members or employees, and often seek it from their clients. Are they justified in doing so, and how demanding should such loyalty be? What makes an organisational obligation an obligation of loyalty? These are some of the questions to be addressed, along with discussions of the relation between organizational loyalty and loyalty to management, peers, supervisors, and profession. If there is time, there may be some discussion of whistle blowing.
Wednesday 28th of April: Peter Morriss (NUI Galway, Ireland)
Title:Casuistry and Chess: Why we should pay no attention to Intuitions in Ethics
Abstract
Casuistry is a method in ethics that consists in examining cases (from which the name is derived). The idea is that we should not attempt to discover general ethical principles, from which we can deduce the rightness or wrongness of a course of action; instead, we should examine each case in its full complexity. The required logic is analogical (using analogy) from paradigm cases, rather than deductive from general principles. When analysed carefully, this method turns out to be identical to the method that strong players use when playing chess (well). In this paper, I will try to explore what lessons we can learn from the undeniable success of the casuistic method in chess for the application of this method to other areas. A hint as to what one of these conclusions might be is provided in the subtitle.
Wednesday 21th of April: Keith Dowding (Political Science, ANU)
Title:Rationality, Reasons and Reasonable Agreement: Political Argument in Brian Barry
Abstract
Barry’s justice as impartiality relies upon Scanlon’s contractual device of ‘reasonable rejection’. Many have criticised both Barry and Scanlon for not defining precisely what reasonable is, further suggesting that what is reasonable or rational is culturally specific and cannot underlie a universal account of justice, such as justice as impartiality. In the paper I try to uncover the role of rationality, reasons and reasonable agreement in Barry’s book Justice as Impartiality, in part by looking back at his first book Political Argument and specify in what sense the theory provide a universal account of justice and in what sense it can sustain quite different accounts of justice.
Wednesday 14th of April - Peter Balint (UNSW@ ADFA)
Title:State promotion of breastfeeding (with Tiziana Torresi, Oxford)
Abstract
Breastfeeding is now promoted by many western governments as best for the welfare of infants. But to what extent is this promotion justified? This paper discusses three sources of problems for western liberal governments in justifying such promotion. First, despite the claims that breastfeeding has overwhelming and significant long term health benefits for infants, a careful review of the available scientific literature does not support this position. Second, for those concerned with autonomy promotion and protection, there is a serious concern when women are subjected to aggressive and emotive campaigning in favour of breastfeeding especially at a crucial and vulnerable stage in their lives. This influences a choice which can have a profound effect in the future sharing of parenting duties and therefore on women’s role within the family and involvement in outside paid work. Third, there is a problem of neutral justification. The promotion of breastfeeding rests on thick notions of the proper role of women as mothers and a specific notion of ‘correct parenting’. These are particular conceptions of the good, not uniformly shared in our societies. We conclude therefore that from both a perfectionist and a neutralist take on liberal justification there are serious reasons for questioning the justifiability of the current promotion of breastfeeding by western liberal governments.
Wednesday 7th of April: Jane Stapleton (ANU, Law)
Title:Which relations should the law designate as causal?
Abstract
Philosophers seem to talk past one another when they discuss causation. In assessing a metaphysical account of causation some judge it against how causal language is used and, perhaps, something called intuition, while others reach out to a crude science and want only to designate as ‘causal’ those relations they see as active forces. In the world there are relations of blame, of explanation, or only of a physical role and so on. If our causal terminology is used sometimes to mean one relation and sometimes to mean another, it does not denote a single relation in the world: the search for a coherent freestanding metaphysical account of “causation” is doomed. Lawyers need their terms to have as precise and unambiguous a meaning as possible. The law should precisely designate what that term means for its own purposes and ignore the fact that the term “cause” has a range of vague meanings outside the law. In this talk I will consider the range of relations in which the law is interested and argue that any form of involvement in the existence of the particular phenomenon should be designated as a “causal” relation. It will be helpful to keep in mind the following exemplar relations. [1] A retailer would have made a $Y profit from a farmer fulfilling a contractual promise to deliver peas on Tuesday. . . a delivery which turned out to be impossible, though the farmer used all care to fulfill his promise to deliver. The retailer’s financial situation has remained static yet lawyers say that the farmer’s contractual breach “caused” the retailer to suffer a $Y “loss”. What relation must the law be designating as “causal” in such a case? [2] The 9 members of a club’s governing committee unanimously vote in favour of a motion to expel Member X from the club, where a majority of only 5 was needed under the club’s rules. The vote of Committee Member No.1 is neither necessary nor sufficient for the motion to pass. This is true of the vote of each member, yet the motion passed. Consider the relation of the vote of one Committee member to the passage of the motion: should the law designate that relation as “a cause” of the motion to expel passing? [3] Due to the carelessness of each of two unrelated hunters, a mountain walker is simultaneously shot by both and the medical evidence is clear that either shot would have been sufficient to result in instantaneous death. Is the relation of Hunter No.1 to the walker’s death ‘causal’?
Wednesday 31th of March: Gerhard verland (University of Oslo/ CSU CAPPE)
Title: 602 and One Dead Contribution to global poverty and its implications for liability to defensive resistance
Abstract
Do we the affluent in the developed world have stringent, demanding, and constraining contribution-based duties to address global poverty? Perhaps we do have such duties. In this paper, however, I shall simply argue that we have no such contribution-based duties unless certain violent actions would become permissible as a consequence of our failure to discharge these duties. Hence I argue that either we dont have any stringent, demanding, and constraining duties, or we do indeed have such duties and are thus liable to the use of defensive force. By suggesting that we are legitimate targets of defensive force due to our alleged contribution to global poverty one is likely to be countered by one of two strategies. The first denies that we contribute to global poverty. The second seems to affirm that we contribute, and even that we have stringent, demanding, and constraining contribution-based duties to address this poverty, but denies that such contribution makes forcible resistance permissible. Those in this second group employ several argumentative strategies: they say that each affluent individuals contribution is too small to warrant forcible resistance; they say that the affluent are innocent; they say that the causal path cannot be identified; they say that there is at least uncertainty about whether the affluent contribute; they say that use of force will not bring an end to poverty; they say that the type of contribution at stake is not the standard type of contribution and doesnt imply permission to use force. In this paper I investigate these strategies for denying the force-related implication of contribution to poverty. I do not argue for political violence or for a permissibility of targeting the affluent, I merely investigate a conditional: If contribution to global poverty generates stringent, demanding, and constraining duties to address it, then this contribution implies permission on the part of the victims to defend themselves with force, or for third parties to use force on their behalf. Note that my interest is in the in principle permissibility of using force against the affluent, and not its actual execution. That is, whether affluent people become liable to forceful resistance by their alleged contribution to global poverty. Note also that the affluent may have duties that are somehow contribution-based that do not entail any, or very limited, permissibility to use force on the part of the poor, but then, as I shall argue, these type of contribution-based duties are neither as stringent, demanding, or constraining as they are alleged to be.
Wednesday 24th of March: Ned Dobos (CAPPE)
Title: Positive Duties and the Shareholder Model of Business Ethics
Abstract
Libertarianism and the shareholder model of corporate responsibility have long been thought of as natural bedfellows. In a recent contribution to the Journal of Business Ethics, Brian Schaefer goes so far as to suggest that a proponent of shareholder theory cannot coherently and consistently embrace any moral position other than philosophical libertarianism. The view that managers have a fiduciary obligation to advance the interests of shareholders exclusively is depicted as fundamentally incompatible with the acknowledgement of natural positive duties – duties to aid others that have not been acquired by some prior commitment or transaction. I argue that positive duties are incompatible with the shareholder model only if we must contribute to their fulfilment in the corporate context; that is, only if we have some reason to think that it is not possible or not permissible to discharge these obligations entirely in our private lives or through our various other roles and capacities. Do we have reason to accept this? Individuals are presumptively free to decide how and when to discharge their positive duties. Unless buying shares somehow causes this presumption to lapse, a non-libertarian moral theory can be held without incoherence by a proponent of the shareholder model.
Wednesday 17th of March: Christopher Wellman (CAPPE)
Title: The Rights-Forfeiture Theory of Punishment
Abstract
Punishment is notoriously difficult to justify because, by definition, it involves visiting hard treatment upon those who are punished. The rights-forfeiture theory of punishment contends that punishment is justified when and because the criminal has forfeited her right not to be subjected to this hard treatment. This view has very few advocates. In fact, because of a number of apparently devastating objections, this account is seldom even taken seriously by those who work on the morality of punishment. In this talk I aim to rehabilitate the rights-forfeiture account by offering responses to each of the standard criticisms.
Wednesday 10th of March: Christian Barry (CAPPE)
Title: On the hierarchical approach to moral uncertainty
(paper co-authored with Patrick Tomlin, Oxford)
Abstract
With respect to issues that are the subject of heated moral and political debate, we are often uncertain about what to believe about them. Indeed, even suspending belief about their moral status often seems to be the most reasonable position to take. However, whatever we may decide to believe about matters of practical concern under conditions of principled moral uncertainty, we must ordinarily decide to act in a way that reflects some attitude towards them. What, then, should we do when we dont know what to believe about what we should do? More specifically, what should we regard as morally permitted, when we are unsure about what is morally permitted? In this essay, we critically examine one way of taking the beliefs of an agent into account in deciding the most reasonable conduct option for her under conditions of moral uncertainty. We shall call the Hierarchical Approach, and define it in terms of two propositions that it affirms:
- (1) If an agent is choosing between an act that is (by her own lights) certainly permissible and an act that (by her own lights) may be impermissible, she must always choose the act that she is certain is permissible; AND
- (2) If an agent is choosing between an act that (by her own lights) may be permissible and an act that is (by her own lights) certainly impermissible, then she must choose the act that she is certain is possibly permissible.
Wednesday 3d of March (2010): Scott Wisor (CAPPE)
Title: Developing a New Global Poverty Metric: Toward a Pro-Poor Approach
Abstract
There is widespread disagreement about what poverty is and how it should be measured. In this paper I develop a methodological framework for analyzing poverty. I argue that poverty is an essentially contested concept and there are multiple plausible conceptions of poverty. Similarly, there are multiple plausible poverty metrics that can be and have been developed. I argue that poverty measurement has hitherto been treated as value-neutral, despite the inherently value-laden nature of poverty conceptions and metrics. I argue for an ameliorative approach to poverty analysis that is explicitly normative, explicate the ameliorative approach, and defend it against common objections. I will then sketch how such an approach might contribute to the development of a pro-poor global poverty metric.
Wednesday 24th of February (2010) : Professor Christel Fricke (University of Oslo)
Title: What we cannot do to each other – On Forgiveness and Moral Vulnerability
Abstract
In this paper, I explore the conditions under which moral forgiveness becomes an issue, namely our moral vulnerability to each other. Moral invulnerability does not depend on a meritocratic or perfectionist understanding of morality (as Charles Griswold seems to imply). According to our Western, egalitarian understanding of morality, the morality of a person relies in this person intrinsic value or moral dignity. The attribution of dignity to a human being neither depends on this being’s moral merit, nor does it depend on the social role this being might have within a society. It is out of reach of anything a human being can do either to another human being or to herself or himself. Thus, an offender cannot damage the dignity of his victim; nor can he completely undermine his own dignity. Human beings are morally invulnerable to each other, if ‘moral vulnerability’ is to be understood in terms of the vulnerability of dignity. But dignity is a normative status, not a psychic disposition. In order to be able to perform as a responsible moral agent, a person needs a stable and mature psyche. A healthily born baby may have the disposition to develop such a psyche, but in order to actually become such a person it depends on being brought up by loving, caring, and morally respectful people. A child is morally vulnerable in the sense of being in danger to suffer psychic damage that hinders it from becoming a morally responsible agent. And even a fully responsible moral agent’s psyche is not invulnerable. Human beings are morally vulnerable – not in the normative, but in the psychological sense of the term.
Wednesday 15th of January (2010) at 4pm: Steve Clarke
Title: Consequentialism,Coercion and Salvational
Abstract
There are many salvific exclusivists and consequentialism is very influential in philosophical ethics. The combination of these two intellectual commitments is extremely dangerous. In virtue of her intellectual commitments, a consequentialist who is also a salvific exclusivist will consider that she has a moral obligation to ensure that everyone accepts her religion. If they will not do so voluntarily, then she will have a compelling reason to attempt to coerce others to accept her religion, and a compelling reason to coerce others to prevent proselytizing on behalf of other religions. If the state tries to prevent her from using coercive means to achieve these ends then she will have a compelling reason to attempt to overthrow the state. It may seem that there are few sorts of states that would be able to tolerate the presence of consequentialist salvific exclusivists other than religious states that happen to endorse her religion. However, it is possible for the liberal state to tolerate the presence of consequentialist salvific exclusivists. To do so the liberal state needs to ensure that the consequentialist salvific exclusivist will judge that she is more likely to be able to make converts by non-coercive means than she is by attempting to overthrow the state so as to enable the use of non-coercive means.