Authors:Nicolas Delon Abstract: A growing literature argues that animals can act for moral reasons without being responsible. I argue that the literature often fails to maintain a clear distinction between moral behavior and moral agency, and I formulate a dilemma: either animals are less moral or they are more responsible than the literature suggests. If animals can respond to moral reasons, they are responsible according to an influential view of moral responsibility—Quality of Will. But if they are responsible, as some argue, costly implications must be acknowledged. If, however, they should not be considered responsible, then we may have to reassess the meaning of animal morality. I discuss ways to eschew responsibility or to tailor it to animals and argue that each requires a revised conception of animal morality. Keywords:Articles
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The Challenge for Coronavirus Vaccine Testing
Authors:Bastian Steuwer Abstract: Can we permissibly accelerate vaccine testing even if this increases risk to study participants' During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers, policymakers, and bioethicists debated ways in which vaccine development could be expedited. One suggestion were human challenge trials which only started after safe and efficacious vaccine had already been developed. Was this hesitation justified' Can challenge trials play a role in future pandemics' I defend both a version of challenge trials – a low-dosage challenge trial – and a faster option for post-challenge trial safety testing. My argument draws on a new framework for risks in biomedical research. The new framework, embedded in a broader approach to the ethics of risk, can justify seemingly risky research while remaining strongly protective of the rights and interests of research participants. My argument furthermore draws on considerations about the connection between the risks to study participants, the benefits to nonparticipants, and the number of participants involved. Keywords:Articles
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The Person as Environmentally Integrated
Authors:Matilda Carter Abstract: While there are urgent health-related demands surrounding dementia, there are sociopolitical dimensions to this issue that ought not to be neglected, concerning the ways in which institutions and individuals treat people living with dementia. Key among these concerns, for dementia self-advocate Christine Bryden, is the dominant narrative of dementia as a process that irreversibly sets those that live with it on a path to the destruction of their personal identities and personhood. In this paper, I bolster Bryden’s arguments against the loss narrative and develop a novel conception of personhood as a first step towards challenging it. Keywords:Articles PubDate: 2024-07-12 DOI: 10.26556/jesp.v28i1.3185
Authors:Guy Fletcher Abstract: In a recent paper, Michal Masny put forward a novel, interesting, theory of the goodness of a life: the Dual Theory. As Masny’s discussion demonstrates, the Dual Theory, if true, would have very significant implications for various issues related to the goodness of lives and for normative ethics. It is thus worthy of serious attention. In this paper, I first explain the Dual Theory and the motivation Masny provides for it. I then aim to show three general problems for the view. Keywords:Discussion Notes
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Murderers on the Ballot Paper
Authors:Richard Williams Abstract: Epistemic democrats typically argue that widespread public competence can empower democratic states to produce the correct decisions more effectively than antidemocratic alternatives. In reaction, this paper shows that epistemic democrats are too insensitive to a fundamental fact of representative democracies: the democratic choice of policy is mediated through a democratic choice of politician. Epistemic democrats neglect that party politicians potentially spoil the epistemic benefits of widespread public competence. Firstly, politicians must compete with each other for votes during elections. Secondly, politicians should compromise with each other to protect those they represent from the bad apples in the legislature. Politicians, as elected representatives with democratic integrity, have a profession-specific obligation to resist the bad apples, even if they must sacrifice their personal integrity in the process. They must compromise on promoting the correct decisions to gain critical political alliances and electoral support. Once political theorizing recognizes the significance of party politicians and their obligations more fully, public deliberation can be modelled as a compromise-discovery process: public deliberation can enable politicians to know which moral compromises will gain the alliances and votes necessary to resist the bad apples. Keywords:Articles
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Three Kinds of Prioritarianism
Authors:Carlos Soto Abstract: In the philosophical literature, prioritarianism is generally given either a teleological or contractualist rendering. Both forms of prioritarianism, I argue, are unsatisfactory, which creates a need for an alternative conception of prioritarianism. I develop a noncontractualist version of deontic prioritarianism that is superior to both teleological and contractualist prioritarianism with respect to grounding the normativity of absolute levels of well-being and explaining our moral thinking about priority to the worse off. Some objections to this view are addressed, and the possibility of a mixed or hybrid view is briefly considered. Noncontractualist deontic prioritarianism might apply to both whole lives and parts of lives, a position that is consistent with a person-centered approach to distributive ethics, I contend. Finally, noncontractualist deontic prioritarianism seems to apply to one-person cases in which there are not competing claims to our aid, but I argue that this result is not an embarrassment for the view. Keywords:Articles
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