Morality, Voluntary Laws, and State Neutrality

Kantian political philosophies stress that a state ought to be “neutral” (Rawls), “minimal” (Nozick), or “public” (Ripstein’s Kant), as part of its duty to respect its citizens’ freedom to pursue whatever ends these citizens find valuable. States are under duty merely to secure citizens’ independence from each other and from the state. In contrast, Kantian morality contends that individuals are subject to a duty to pursue certain “obligatory” ends, viz., ends that emerge from the intrinsic value of personhood and autonomy. In some cases, hindering one’s freedom is necessary for promoting these ends. This essay describes circumstances in which a legal right to interfere with one’s property and body in promoting obligatory ends is justified, even though such a right compromises states’ neutrality. This description sheds a new light on the relation between the optimal legal system (“Right”) and morality (“Virtue”) and between justice and truth

The Doctrine of Sufficiency: A Defence

This article proposes an analysis of the doctrine of sufficiency. According to my reading, the doctrine s basic positive claim is prioritarian : benefiting x is of special moral importance where (and only where) x is badly off. Its negative claim is anti-egalitarian: most comparative facts expressed by statements of the type x is worse off than y have no moral significance at all. This contradicts the classical priority view according to which, although equality per se does not matter, whenever x is worse off than y, at least some priority should be assigned to helping x. Section I elaborates and defends this reconstruction of the doctrine of sufficiency, and section II shows that the privileged utility level presumed within the sufficiency framework exists.

Civilian immunity without the doctrine of double effect

Civilian Immunity (“Immunity”) is the legal and moral protection that civilians enjoy against the effects of hostilities under the laws of armed conflict and according to the ethics of killing in war. Immunity specifies different permissibility conditions for directly targeting civilians on the one hand, and for harming civilians incidentally on the other hand. Immunity is standardly defended by appeal to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). We show that Immunity’s prohibitive stance towards targeting civilians directly, and its more permissive stance towards harming them incidentally, can be defended without appealing to the DDE if agents suffer from overconfidence. Overconfidence is a cognitive bias that affects agents who are required to make decisions in the presence of significant uncertainty