Moral Limits Research Articles

The Body as Gift, Commodity, or Something in Between: Ethical Implications of Advanced Kidney Donation.

An innovative program recently initiated at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center allows people to donate a kidney in exchange for a voucher that a loved one can redeem for a kidney if and when needed. As a relatively new practice, the ethical implications of advanced kidney donation have not yet been widely discussed. This paper reflects on some of the bioethical issues at stake in this new donation program, as well as some broader philosophical issues related to the meaning and moral salience of commodification. I first consider whether the literature on commercial markets in organs--a longstanding topic of bioethical debate--can meaningfully inform ethical analysis of kidney voucher programs. Specifically, I consider whether and to what extent common objections to the exchange of kidneys for cash also apply to the exchange of kidneys for "kidney vouchers." Second, I argue that the contrast between the ethical issues raised by these two practices highlights the need to understand commodification as existing on a continuum, with different degrees of commodification giving rise to different ethical issues. Doing so can help sharpen our understanding of commodification as a moral concept, as well as its relevance to broader debates about the moral limits of markets.

Counterterrorism policy in liberal-democratic societies: locating the ethical limits of national security

ABSTRACTThis article considers the moral limits to national security policies. While it may seem self-evident that there are, and ought to be, limits to counterterrorism policies, there is an increasingly widespread public opinion that political leaders can, and must, do everything they can to protect against terrorist acts. Liberal-democratic societies are facing the threat of domestic terrorism, and for a political leader to say that ‘we cannot stop all terrorist acts and, indeed, neither should we’ would sound the death knell for their career. This article seeks to specify the limiting conditions around counterterrorism policy by reference to policymakers’ public justifications offered for counterterrorism policy. This article presents three normative elements that underpin counterterrorism policy to show that there are important reasons to limit counterterrorism policy, and to suggest that these limits ought to be recognised by political leaders and citizens alike in liberal-democratic societies. Having set out three limiting factors on counterterrorism policy, the article then shows that these factors do indeed play a role in UK counterterrorism policy development—that is, in recognising the justificatory apparatus for national security policies, limiting conditions ought to be found that are sensible to, and accepted by, the proponents of such policies.

Decency and the Liberal International (Dis)Order: Moral Limits and the Possibilities of a Global Pluralist Politics

This article analyzes the tension between the liberal ideals of freedom and equality and cultural difference. It argues that decency has become intertwined with the fragility of the liberal international order by providing a problematic threshold of international justice. The idea is that as global pressures mount for protecting the human dignity of persons/peoples, they also congeal or harden decency’s political and social constraints (impartiality, neutrality, and basic rights enforcement) on engaging others. Decency as a moral threshold of international justice, the article claims, has become static or a self-reinforcing limitation. This contradictory decency/dignity dynamic of the liberal international order not only explains how states have aggressively asserted their interests by absorbing these constraints, but also how politics can limit the pragmatic potential to bridge the various social gaps in values and belief systems. This article seeks to conceptualize a pluralist ethos that shows how such constraints can be reimagined as, or turned into, the conditions of possibility/freedom that transition us to a global pluralist politics. It concludes with a discussion of the refugee crisis and Islamism, showing how both cases resonate the felt stigmatization and alienation within the liberal international order.

Zakład Pascala a spór o naturę łaski

Pascal’s Wager is one of the most interesting and original arguments for the existence of God. It does not invoke advanced metaphysical concepts; instead, it employs the methods and concepts of probability calculus. Its argumentative power mainly rests on the appropriate interpretation of the determinants of human existence, which are taken to include our cognitive, moral and physical limitations. The article discusses different aspects of Pascal’s reasoning. In particular, it examines the wager in the context of Grace as something that Pascal himself believed in.

Republicanismo e Esfera Pública em Kant: uma reconstrução social da Justiça

Este artigo pretende fazer uma reconstrução social da justiça kantiana para além dos seus limites metafísicos e morais a partir da relação entre republicanismo e esfera pública. Para Kant o republicanismo é a única forma de governo capaz de equilibrar o vínculo entre liberdade, lei e poder. Na constituição republicana há o fortalecimento da cidadania e da esfera pública deliberativa. No que diz respeito à dimensão social da justiça, Kant defende que o Estado de direito tem a legitimidade constitucional para tributar os mais ricos com a finalidade de criar uma assistência social para os mais pobres.

Crowdsourcing the Moral Limits of Human Gene Editing?

In 2015, a flourish of "alarums and excursions" by the scientific community propelled CRISPR/Cas9 and other new gene-editing techniques into public attention. At issue were two kinds of potential gene-editing experiments in humans: those making inheritable germ-line modifications and those designed to enhance human traits beyond what is necessary for health and healing. The scientific consensus seemed to be that while research to develop safe and effective human gene editing should continue, society's moral uncertainties about these two kinds of experiments needed to be better resolved before clinical trials of either type should be attempted. In the United States, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) convened the Committee on Human Gene Editing: Scientific, Medical and Ethical Considerations to pursue that resolution. The committee's 2017 consensus report has been widely interpreted as "opening the door" to inheritable human genetic modification and holding a line against enhancement interventions. But on a close reading it does neither. There are two reasons for this eccentric conclusion, both of which depend upon the strength of the committee's commitment to engaging diverse public voices in the gene-editing policy-making process.

International law and its discontents: Exploring the dark sides of international law in International Relations

AbstractInternational law is generally considered to be a good thing. With important exceptions, such as Critical Legal Studies, scholarship in both International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL) reinforces this ‘nice law’ assumption and therefore overlooks or underestimates the law’s negative aspects. In contrast, this article assumes the power of international law to examine how international law can have effects that are unintended, unhelpful, or even perverse. In particular, I argue that international law distorts policy- and decision-making processes in liberal democracies by eroding personal responsibility and decreasing accountability; legal expertise and legal virtues crowd out important virtues of statecraft and prudence while shrinking our capacity for sophisticated moral and political thought; and an excessive focus on law can lead to suboptimal foreign policy outcomes. Rather than law being a bad thing per se, I examine the significant strategic and moral limits of international law. This raises the need to lower our expectations of international law, carefully examine the relationship between power and international law, and political responsibility and legal ethics, and more fully embrace our own personal responsibility. The article closes by suggesting a research programme on the dark sides of international law from various theoretical perspectives.

Learning and teaching about the Shoah: retrospect and prospect

ABSTRACTThe “IHRA Education Research Project” and its concluding conference in Lucerne in February 2016 make it necessary to give a summative reflection about normative purposes, empirical results, and pragmatic ways of education about the Shoah. There is some ambivalence in all three fields. “Europeanization” has succeeded, but “universalization” not really. Two necessary (but partly conflicting) main goals are “commemoration of victims” and “prevention of genocides,” implicating conclusions for actual crises like the Syrian civil war and fugitives. In the realm of empirical findings, there are some moral limits of research methods, many illusions about great results can be destroyed, and different “contexts” prove to be absolutely decisive. Therefore, comparisons are very important as well as very difficult, and “normal everyday teaching/learning” has to be distinguished carefully from intervention by “elaborated best-practice teaching.” Unavoidably, some of the remarks are given mainly from the special situation and experience of living as a second-generation person in a former perpetrators’ society.

Taxploitation and Complicity

This article investigates the moral issues surrounding ‘taxploitation’, a term which I coin for behaviour short of tax evasion insofar as it is within the letter of the law, but nonetheless clearly morally objectionable insofar as it contradicts the law’s spirit and is incompatible with a fair distribution of social burdens. Drawing on work in law and economics concerned with the problem of opportunism, I identify a distinctive challenge that liberal commitments to the rule of law and personal privacy pose for effectively enforcing obligations to make fair tax contributions. For good economic reasons tax burdens are responsive to the purposes for which actors make their financial decisions. But a liberal state is properly reluctant to second-guess an actor’s claim about the purposes for which they are acting, and to delve too deeply into the personal financial choices of private individuals or bodies at least until there is evidence of wrongdoing. These constraints on state action in turn open the door to opportunistic decision-making by taxpayers. But, I show, while the moral limits on state action do indeed bar states from directly addressing the problem, they do not stand in the way of an indirect, but potentially equally powerful, solution: to focus, not directly on the actions of taxpayers, but instead on the behavior of the global tax planning industry that is complicit in taxploitation and whose regulation does not give rise to similar moral objections.

Lot's Offer of His Daughters to His People in the Torah and the Qur'an: A Comparative Study in Two Parts (Part Two)

The story of Lot is one of many shared by the Qur'an and the Torah, and Lot's offering of his two daughters to his people is presented in a similar way in the two Books. This article compares the status of Lot in the Qur'an and Torah, and explores the moral dimensions of his character, and what scholars of the two religions make of this story. The significance of the episode in which Lot offers his daughters to his people lies in the similarities and differences of the accounts given in the two Books and the fact that, in both the past and the present, this story has presented moral problems and criticism has been leveled at Lot. Context is crucial in understanding this story, and exploration of the ways that Lot and his people are presented is also useful in terms of comparative studies of the two scriptures. This article is divided into three sections: the first explores the depiction of Lot in the two texts, the second explores his moral limitations, and the third discusses the interpretations of various exegetes and scholars of the two Books. Although there are similarities between the Qur'anic and Torah accounts of this episode, it is read differently by scholars from the two religions because of the different contexts of the respective accounts.

Friendly Rejoinders

In this article Gilbert Meilaender responds to nine scholars whose papers (collected in this issue) analyze and interact with a variety of theological and ethical themes that emerge in his writing. Among those themes are the moral limits grounded in our embodied nature, the freedom to transcend those limits, the perfection of that nature by divine grace, the relation between political progress toward a common good and the kingdom of God, the place of religious beliefs in public discourse within a liberal democratic society, the meaning and scope of our responsibility to care for human persons at the beginning and end of life, and the meaning of our creaturely longing to rest in God.

Equal respect, capabilities and the moral limits of market exchange: denigration in the EU internal market

ABSTRACTThe EU's central task is to improve the lives of European citizens. The EU acts out that task by enhancing its internal market, on the assumption that market exchanges are a primary way individuals pursue their own conceptions of the good life. While the EU aims to enable market exchange through its legal structures, it does not demarcate the moral limits of its internal market. As such, the EU approach to the internal market has decoupled market logic from morality. However, justice requires that European citizens are treated with equal respect and that the exchanges they wish to pursue are subject to a generalisable normative standard. This paper explores the question of how and where the moral limits of the internal market are drawn as a question of justice, and argues that the current European approach to this question fails to safeguard European citizens from denigration.

Editorial Note.

Editorial Note Rebecca Kukla The lead article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Joseph Stramondo's "Disabled by Design: Justifying and Limiting Parental Authority to Choose Future Children with Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis," takes up an issue that is at the center of the growing field of disability studies: what are the moral limits and possibilities when parents wish to use reproductive technologies in order to create a disabled child? This question has been of abstract interest for some time. But as technologies such as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis become increasingly accessible and reliable, and as disability theorists and activists bring growing cultural attention to the ways in which lives with disabilities can be distinctively valuable, the question has become increasingly practically pressing. While discussions of eugenics used to focus on whether it is unethical to control a child's genetic future by preventing disability, Stramondo takes up the increasingly visible question of when and whether eugenic steps to create a disabled child—for instance, to select an embryo with Achondroplasia or genetic deafness—can be morally permissible. Stramondo rejects three types of extreme views: the pro-eugenics view that there is a parental duty to design the 'best child possible' with available technologies; the anti-eugenics view that any form of genetic manipulation of a child—perhaps especially any form designed to produce disability—is impermissible; and the libertarian view that parents should have autonomous decision-making power over how and whether to use eugenic technologies. Instead, beginning from a 'broadly pluralist conception of the good life,' Stramondo defends the moderate view that it is permissible for caring parents with a rich understanding of the context in which they would be raising a disabled child, and who will bring that child into a situation in which accommodations will be available to enable the child to have a flourishing life, to create a disabled child by design. While supporting the idea that parents ought to try to give their children a good range of life opportunities, he rejects Norman Daniels's influential [End Page vii] argument that we should understand 'normal opportunity range' in terms of species typical functioning. Instead, in Stramondo's nuanced account, opportunities are always indexed to material and social context. Blanket statements about the relationship between disabilities and opportunities will thus always be distorted and oversimplified. This paper refuses clean solutions, and challenges our intuitions about what it means to care properly for the well-being of our future children. Tom Walker's "The Obligation to Provide Information where Valid Consent is Not Needed" explores a philosophically and ethically important distinction that almost universally gets elided in bioethics: between the value of giving patients information per se, and the instrumental value of giving them information so that they can autonomously consent to treatment or research participation. Almost all of the bioethical discussions of informing are framed within analyses of informed consent. Walker isolates the ethical contours of informing by considering cases where the patient is not consenting to anything—for instance, when a doctor writes a prescription for a drug for the patient to take at home on their own. This decouples questions about doctors' informational duties from questions about how to enable informed consent, with which they overlap but from which they are distinct. Walker considers questions such as how information contributes to patient benefit (as opposed to autonomy) and whether and when doctors have a duty to warn patients of possible risks. Walker's paper bridges ethical and epistemological concerns and carves out an issue that ought to be the topic of multiple bioethical explorations. Michael Nair-Collins argues that there is no clear moral line between brain-dead patients and patients with severe dementia; both can be harmed and wronged, even though neither has current investment interests. If this is right, he claims, then harvesting organs from the brain dead is permissible under roughly the same conditions in which harvesting organs from patients with dementia is permissible, if it is at all. He points out that brain dead patients can do all sorts of complex things, such as gestate a child or heal a wound. The fact that they have...

A Mistake in the Commodification Debate

ABSTRACT:A significant debate has developed around the question: What are the moral limits of the market? This paper argues that this debate proceeds on a mistake. Both those who oppose specific markets and those who defend them, adopt the same deficient approach. Participants illicitly proceed from an assessment of the transactions making up a market to a judgment of that market's permissibility. This inference is unlicensed. We may know everything there is to know about the transactions in a specific market—they might all be absolutely bad—but we will not yet know whether that market should be prohibited. To discern this, to establish that intervention into some specific market is justifiable, one must supply a rather different assessment. One must compare the outcome in which that market is permitted with the best outcome available in its absence. None in this debate has offered such a judgment.

The Limits of Surrogates' Moral Authority and Physician Professionalism: Can the Paradigm of Palliative Sedation Be Instructive?

With narrow exception, physicians' treatment of incapacitated patients requires the consent of health surrogates. Although the decision-making authority of surrogates is appropriately broad, their moral authority is not without limits. Discerning these bounds is particularly germane to ethically complex treatments and has important implications for the welfare of patients, for the professional integrity of clinicians, and, in fact, for the welfare of surrogates. Palliative sedation is one such complex treatment; as such, it provides a valuable model for analyzing the scope of surrogates' moral authority. Guidelines for palliative sedation that present it as a "last-resort" treatment for severe and intractable suffering yet require surrogate consent in order to offer it are ethically untenable, precisely because the moral limits of surrogate authority have not been considered.

Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski's Markets without limits: moral virtues and commercial interests. New York: Routledge, 2016, 239 pp.

Review of Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski's Markets without limits: moral virtues and commercial interests. New York: Routledge, 2016, 239 pp.Recently, ethical analysis of markets has taken a new direction. The current focus can be called the 'commodification debate'. This commodification debate concerns what should or should not be bought and sold. These arguments have direct implications for the scope of markets: something cannot morally be for sale, then a market for that item is impermissible. 'Anti-commodification theorists' such as Elizabeth Anderson and Michael Sandel argue that there are particular things that ought not be commodified. For example, Elizabeth Anderson argues that commercial surrogacy is an illegitimate form of exchange (Anderson 1990, 71). Michael Sandel's (2013) book, What money can't buy: the moral limits of markets, provides further examples.Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski's recent book, Markets without limits: moral virtues and commercial interests insightfully and systematically critiques anti-commodification theories. The authors argue that whatever may be done for free can be permissibly commodified. One of the book's many virtues involves subjecting this intuition to rigorous analytical critique. Its contribution to the current literatures is so significant that one should not enter into the debate without addressing it.The authors' central claim is if you can do it for free, you can do it for If you can ethically donate an organ for free, you can ethically sell it for money, you may provide sex for free, you may provide sex for money, and so on; conversely, anything that is immoral for free, such as murder, would also be immoral for money. The objections that most people have to markets are rarely regarding the actual exchange of money, but the circumstances in which the transaction is made; objections to selling dogs for dog fighting are not actually about exchanging dogs for money, which would be perfectly moral at a pet store, but to dog fighting itself. Thus Brennan and Jaworski fully acknowledge that commodification can incidentally cause exploitation, rights violations, corruption, and so forth, but it does not essentially cause them. Importantly, the categories above exhaust the moral framework the authors use to evaluate a market exchange. in other words, a market transaction does not exploit, harm, corrupt, or result in rights violations, then it is permissible. Limiting their arguments to these categories of wrongs is an important philosophical strategy that the authors employ. The authors frame their arguments relying only on widespread moral intuitions and avoiding controversial political theory. Brennan and Jaworski's overall strategy is to first articulate the anti-commodification theorists' objections to the best of their abilities, then refute them. one of the book's strengths is the justice it does to its opponents' arguments. At all times, it portrays its adversaries fairly and insightfully. By responding to each argument and describing how each controversial market could be tweaked (thus showcasing that said market is only incidentally and not essentially harmful), their thesis is defended.Also important is Brennan and Jaworski's claim that the concept of a market ought not be restricted to common examples. They note that there are markets that use barter instead of currency, some markets involve government regulation, others may mediate exchange through a broker, etc. This qualification is important to the argument: Brennan and Jaworski's claim is not that anything can be for sale on any market; rather, anything that it is permissible to do for free may be legitimately exchanged on at least one type of market. The concept of market are introduced as a metaphor to explain these variations. These seven dials include participants, means of exchange, price, proportion/distribution, mode of exchange, mode of payment, and motive of exchange, and can conceivably be tweaked in any market to satisfy the objections of anti-commodification theorists. …

Paid in Full: A Critical Look at the Law and Economics of the Football Creditors Rule

The Football League has recently modified its Football Creditors Rule. Once the sport’s financial regulatory bête noire, the changes met with little fanfare. However, these amendments do not fundamentally change the essential structure of a regime that has seen criticism from the media, the judiciary, academics, and indeed has been subject to litigation by the British tax authorities. This paper examines the law and economics of insolvency in English football, framing the case of HM Revenue and Customs v. The Football League Limited & The Football Association Premier League Limited in its prevailing economic context and considering the particular legal challenge brought by HM Revenue and Customs, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Moving beyond the decision in the above cited case, a critique of the underlying cogency and validity of the Football Creditors Rule is provided, which is centred on the views espoused by Michael J. Sandel in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limit of Markets. Particularly, it is posited that the nature of the rule has served to debase the norms that should govern football clubs’ financial management and has instead abetted a climate of free spending by systemically diminishing the downside risk of insolvency between football clubs.

Are There Moral Limits to Military Deception?

It is widely agreed that deception of the enemy can be morally permissible in war. However, the question of the morally acceptable limits to deception in war has barely been explored in contemporary ethics. This paper defends the thesis that there are no moral limits on military deception per se, that is, no limits based on the ethics of truthfulness. Rather, all moral restriction against deception in war is based on another moral principle: military deception is morally unacceptable only when it violates the principle of not harming those who do not intend to harm us.

Private Authority and the Role of Rights: A Reply

I am grateful to each of the commentators for their detailed and careful engagement with my work. In responding to their comments, I am not able to address all of the particulars that they mention, and so focus instead what a take to be the main areas of disagreement. Most of these focus on the distinction between misfeasance and nonfeasance. Both Steele and Cornell propose to soften the distinction by focusing on the effects of an action, rather than exclusively on norms of conduct. Dagan and Dorfman deny the distinction, treating it as an artifact of moral and information-processing limitations of legal institutions. Gardner focuses more on a methodological issue, which concerns the nature and justification of private legal authority, which I regard as inseparable from the distinction between misfeasance and nonfeasance. I will begin with Gardner’s generous comment, because I think clarifying the issue that he raises will bring my treatment of the distinction between misfeasance and nonfeasance into sharper focus. Gardner focuses on one footnote in my book. I should concede from the outset that my choice of wording was unfortunate in several ways. I should not have used the word “indicate” there to characterize the relation between an authority and the reasons that apply to those subject to it. As Gardner correctly points out, an indicator, however reliable, is not authoritative; something only counts as an authority if its say-so determines what you must do. Gardner captures the service conception’s account of successful exercises of authority: authorities “serve us wisely, more particularly, by helping us to do what it is anyway, apart from the authority’s intervention, wise for us to do.” My claim in that footnote is that the private authority you have over your body or property is different; there is no authority-independent fact of the matter about what those subject to your authority have reason to do with your body and property “apart from the authority’s intervention.” They must refrain from interfering with it without your authorization, which is just to say that apart from your intervention, they must acknowledge your authority, that is, that it is up to you, not to them.

European Copyright Inside or Outside the European Union: Pluralism of Copyright Laws and the “Herderian Paradox”

The agenda of the EU includes the harmonisation or unification of laws of its Member States for promoting the common market, improving free movement of goods, free movement of capital, free movement of services, and free movement of people. This also applies to copyright law. However, harmonisation or unification of laws through legislation or CJEU decisions does not necessarily further European integration. In the light of recent political and social events, a movement towards further harmonisation, also in copyright law, could even be detrimental to the European cause. This article argues that the more one pursues integration, harmonisation and unification of national laws across Europe, the more one may endanger the fabric and framework of a union of European states. Further legal unification prompts a tendency of the EU Member States to move away from one another. Increased unity causes further diversity, and a certain level of diversity effects unity. This dialectical process can be called the “Herderian paradox”, inspired by the philosophical history of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) which is outlined in this article. Some of the problematic areas of copyright harmonisation that illustrate the dangers of the “Herderian paradox” are discussed: the concept of copyright work, the interpretation of originality, the role of moral rights, exceptions and limitations, and, as a possible but dangerous remedy to overcome difficulties of harmonisation, EU law pre-emption and intergovernmental treaties outside EU law.