Tom Regan on Kind Arguments against Animal Rights and for Human Rights

Tom Regan argues that human beings and some non-human animals have moral rights because they are “subjects of lives,” that is, roughly, conscious, sentient beings with an experiential welfare. A prominent critic, Carl Cohen, objects: he argues that only moral agents have rights and so animals, since they are not moral agents, lack rights. An objection to Cohen’s argument is that his theory of rights seems to imply that human beings who are not moral agents have no moral rights, but since these human beings have rights, his theory of rights is false, and so he fails to show that animals lack rights. Cohen responds that this objection fails because human beings who are not moral agents nevertheless are the “kind” of beings who are moral agents and so have rights, but animals are not that “kind” of being and so lack rights. Regan argues that Cohen’s “kind” arguments fail: they fail to explain why human beings who are not moral agents have rights and they fail to show that animals lack rights. Since Cohen’s “kind” arguments are influential, I review and critique Regan’s objections . I offer suggestions for stronger responses to arguments like Cohen’s

Why the rich may favor poor protection of property rights

In unequal societies, the rich might benefit from shaping economic institutions into their favor. This paper analyzes the dynamics of institutional subversion focusing on one particular institution, public protection of property rights. If this institution is imperfect, agents have incentives to invest in private protection of property rights. With economies of scale in private protection, rich agents have a significant advantage: they could expropriate other agents using their private protection capacities. Ability to maintain private protection system makes the rich natural opponents of full protection of property rights provided by the state. Such an environment does not allow grass-roots demand to drive development of new market-friendly institutions (such as public protection of property rights). The economy as a whole is stuck in a ’bad’ long-run equilibrium with low growth rate, high inequality, and wide-spread rent-seeking. The Russian ‘oligarchs’ of 1990s, a handful of politically powerful agents that controlled large stakes of newly privatized property, we re the major motivation for this paper.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39929/2/wp544.pd

Why the Rich May Favor Poor Protection of Property Rights

In unequal societies, the rich might benefit from shaping economic institutions into their favor. This paper analyzes the dynamics of institutional subversion focusing on one particular institution, public protection of property rights. If this institution is imperfect, agents have incentives to invest in private protection of property rights. With economies of scale in private protection, rich agents have a significant advantage: they could expropriate other agents using their private protection capacities. Ability to maintain private protection system makes the rich natural opponents of full protection of property rights provided by the state. Such an environment does not allow grass-roots demand to drive development of new market-friendly institutions (such as public protection of property rights). The economy as a whole is stuck in a ’bad’ long-run equilibrium with low growth rate, high inequality, and wide-spread rent-seeking. The Russian ‘oligarchs’ of 1990s, a handful of politically powerful agents that controlled large stakes of newly privatized property, we re the major motivation for this paper.economic institutions, property rights, political economy, inequality

Wartime sexual violence: women’s human rights and questions of masculinity

This article examines wartime sexual violence, one of the most recurring wartime human rights abuses. It asserts that our theorisations need further development, particularly in regard to the way that masculinities and the intersections with constructions of ethnicity feature in wartime sexual violence. The article also argues that although women and girls are the predominant victims of sexual violence and men and boys the predominant agents, we must also be able to account for the presence of male victims and female agents. This, however, engenders a problem; much of the women’s human rights discourse and existing international mechanisms for addressing wartime sexual violence tend to reify the male-perpetrator/female-victim paradigm. This is a problem which feminist human rights theorists and activists need to address

Walrasian prices in a market with consumption rights

In this paper we consider an exchange economy where there is an external restriction for the consumption of goods. This restriction is defined by both a cap on consumption of certain commodities and the requirement of an amount of rights for the consumption of these commodities. The caps for consumption are imposed exogenously due to the negative effects that the consumption may produce. The consumption rights are distributed among the agents. This fact leads to the possibility of establishing licence or consumption rights markets. These consumption rights do not participate in agents' preferences, however the individual's budgetary constraint may be modified, leading to a reassignment of resources. The aim of this paper is to show the existence of a Walrasian equilibrium price system linking tradable rights prices with commodity prices.competitive equilibrium, quotas, consumption rights, cap-and-trade program.

Philosophical Signposts for Artificial Moral Agent Frameworks

This article focuses on a particular issue under machine ethics—that is, the nature of Artificial Moral Agents. Machine ethics is a branch of artificial intelligence that looks into the moral status of artificial agents. Artificial moral agents, on the other hand, are artificial autonomous agents that possess moral value, as well as certain rights and responsibilities. This paper demonstrates that attempts to fully develop a theory that could possibly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents may consider certain philosophical ideas, like the standard characterizations of agency, rational agency, moral agency, and artificial agency. At the very least, the said philosophical concepts may be treated as signposts for further research on how to truly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents

Insecure Property Rights and Growth: The Roles of Appropriation Costs, Wealth Effects, and Heterogeneity

We extend the model of insecure property rights by Tornell and Velasco (1992) and Tornell and Lane (1999) by adding three features: (i) extracting the common property asset involves a private appropriation cost, (ii) agents derive utility from wealth as well as from consumption, and (iii) agents can be heterogeneous. We show that both an increase in the appropriation cost and, when appropriation costs vary across agents, an increase in the degree of heterogeneity of these costs reduce the growth rate of the public capital stock. We also show that, in the interior equilibrium, the private asset can have either a lower or a higher money rate of return than the common property asset.corruption, property rights, growth, appropriation cost

"Who's the thief?": Asymmetric Information and the Creation of Property Rights

This paper studies the creation of property rights in a state of anarchy and in the presence of uncertainty about a potential appropriator's ability. In a game of conflict, securing property can be achieved by spending resources for protection. We show that secure property rights will never emerge in equilibrium. The reason for this finding is not that it is not possible to secure property in principle, but that because of uncertainty agents will choose to protect their possessions against an expected appropriator and not against the most able one. Hence, agents voluntarily expose themselves to the risk of losing ownership. This finding has important consequences, since secure property rights are a fundamental prerequisite of economic activity, and insecure property may for example hinder the exploitation of mutually beneficial trade opportunities or distort investment and production incentives.Asymmetric Information, Property Rights, Conflict

Are Some Animals Also Moral Agents?

Animal rights philosophers have traditionally accepted the claim that human beings are unique, but rejected the claim that our uniqueness justifies denying animals moral rights. Humans were thought to be unique specifically because we possess moral agency. In this commentary, I explore the claim that some nonhuman animals are also moral agents, and I take note of its counter-intuitive implications