Ethics, organ donation and tax: a proposal

Five arguments are presented in favour of the proposal that people who opt in as organ donors should receive a tax break. These arguments appeal to welfare, autonomy, fairness, distributive justice and self-ownership, respectively. Eight worries about the proposal are considered in this paper. These objections focus upon no-effect and counter-productiveness, the Titmuss concern about social meaning, exploitation of the poor, commodification, inequality and unequal status, the notion that there are better alternatives, unacceptable expense, and concerns about the veto of relatives. The paper argues that none of the objections to the proposal is very telling

Global injustice and redistributive wars

On Pogge’s view, we —people living in rich countries— do not just allow the global poor to die. Rather, we interfere with them in such a way that we make them die on a massive scale. If we did the same through military aggression against them, surely, it would be permissible for these people to wage war on us to prevent this. Suppose Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, and assume the moral permissibility of self-defence by poor people in the hypothetical military action scenario just mentioned. If these assumptions are correct, poor countries could start just and, even possibly, morally permissible redistributive wars against us provided various additional conditions are met. To avoid misunderstanding, I should stress that my main claim is the conditional equivalence claim, namely that if Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, our relation to poor countries is morally equivalent to one in which we each year killed many of the global poor by military means. I do not claim (i) that Pogge’s analysis is correct; (ii) that, as a matter of fact, it is morally permissible for poor countries to wage redistributive wars against rich countries; (iii) that it is not the case that anything that is impermissible for poor countries to do in the latter situation involving military aggression —e. g. deliberately targeting rich civilians— is impermissible in redistributive wars as well

What Is It For Us To Be Moral Equals? And Does It Matter Much If We\u27re Not?

The main concern here will be to clarify what it means for us to be moral equals (and thus what it means for us not to be so). Specifically, I want to address two questions about the nature and significance of basic moral equality. First, what is the difference between what I shall call epiphenomenal moral equality and non-epiphenomenal moral equality? This distinction is often ignored, or overlooked, and this is unfortunate because it hides from view a decision that many will seem a dilemma. If, in affirming the moral equality of all persons, we mean the non-epiphenomenal kind, moral equality is quite controversial. But if we mean the epiphenomenal kind, moral equality is derivative, i.e., it is simply a summation of the moral significance of other morally relevant factors—suggesting that the notion of moral equality does not play the role of moral bedrock generally ascribed to it. Since moral equality in this sense is not moral equality in the sense that is most crucial to philosophical disagreements about basic moral equality, I shall have less to say about this notion than about non-epiphenomenal moral equality. Second, what are the close alternatives to moral equality? In response to this question, I defend the deflationary view that several ways of denying that all persons are moral equals leave most of our other moral beliefs largely unaffected, in terms of their justification. This casts further doubt on the importance assumption in addition to that induced by my first question. Ultimately, these deflationary implications should be welcomed—even by typical egalitarian assumers and defenders of the importance assumption—because it means that their cherished assumed implications of basic moral equality have a greater robustness, i.e., they could be justified even in the absence of basic moral equality. Section 2 addresses the first question. Section 3 presents a general challenge to the idea that non-epiphenomenal moral status has across-the-board moral significance. Section 4 explores two non-egalitarian ideas of moral status. I suggest that these have moral implications for a wide range of first-order normative issues, and that these implications do not differ in any important respects from the implications normally taken to follow from non-epiphenomenal moral equality. Section 5 concludes

Private Discrimination: A Prioritarian, Desert-Accommodating Account

Most of us would consider a state\u27s discrimination against its citizens-say, by refusing to hire them on account of their sex, race, religion, or ethnicity-clearly unjust, something in urgent need of rectification. Yet we often take a less censorious view of discriminatory acts by private individuals who choose not to share their neighborhood with, associate with, trade with, work with, befriend, marry, or be buried in the same graveyards as people of a different sex, race, religion, or ethnicity. On reflection, this asymmetry is puzzling. It cannot be explained by saying that state discrimination has graver consequences involving more people than private discrimination. True, considered on their own, private discriminatory acts often have negligible consequences; but together such acts often form patterns that are no less consequential than, say, the passing of a piece of discriminatory legislation. We need a better understanding of the morality of private discrimination

Indirect Discrimination is Not Necessarily Unjust

This article argues that, as commonly understood, indirect discrimination is not necessarily unjust: 1) indirect discrimination involves the disadvantaging in relation to a particular benefit and such disadvantages are not unjust if the overall distribution of benefits and burdens is just; 2) indirect discrimination focuses on groups and group averages and ignores the distribution of harms and benefits within groups subjected to discrimination, but distributive justice is concerned with individuals; and 3) if indirect discrimination as such is unjust, strict egalitarianism has to be the correct account of distributive justice, but such egalitarianism appears vulnerable to the leveling down objection (whether decisively or not), and many theorists explicitly reject strict egalitarianism anyway. The last point threatens the position of liberals who oppose indirect discrimination but think significant inequalities can be just

The Problem(s) of Constituting the Demos:A (Set of) Solution(s)

When collective decisions should be made democratically, which people form the relevant demos? Many theorists think this question is an embarrassment to democratic theory: (1) because any decision about who forms the demos must be made democratically by the right demos, which itself must be democratically constituted and so on ad infinitum; and (2) because neither the concept of democracy, nor (3) our reasons for caring about democracy, determine who should form the demos. Having distinguished between these three versions of the demos problem, we argue that each of them can be solved

The Problem(s) of Constituting the Demos:A (Set of) Solution(s)

When collective decisions should be made democratically, which people form the relevant demos? Many theorists think this question is an embarrassment to democratic theory: (1) because any decision about who forms the demos must be made democratically by the right demos, which itself must be democratically constituted and so on ad infinitum; and (2) because neither the concept of democracy, nor (3) our reasons for caring about democracy, determine who should form the demos. Having distinguished between these three versions of the demos problem, we argue that each of them can be solved

Refugees and minorities:some conceptual and normative issues

In many contexts, states have a duty to take special measures to protect minorities. Does this duty include prioritizing minority over majority refugees? To answer this question, we first show that a vulnerabilityfocused notion of ‘minorities’ is preferable to a numerical one. Given the vulnerability-focused notion, there is a presumption in favour of prioritizing minority over majority refugees. However, this presumption is sometimes defeated. We identify five conditions under which this is the case. In fact, surprisingly, under special circumstances, states should prioritize certain majority over certain minority refugees