George Sher

Liberal Neutrality and the Value of Autonomy

Many liberals believe that government should not base its decisions on any particular conception of the good life. Many believe, further, that this principle of neutrality is best defended through appeal to some normative principle about autonomy. In this essay, I shall discuss the prospects of mounting one such defense. I say only “one such defense” because neutralists can invoke the demands of autonomy in two quite different ways. They can argue, first, that because autonomy itself has such great value, the state can produce the best results by simply allowing each citizen to shape his own life; or they can argue, second, that even if non-neutral policies would produce the most value, the state remains obligated to eschew them out of respect for its citizens autonomy. Here I shall discuss only the first and more consequentialist of these arguments.

What makes a Lottery Fair

It is generally agreed that when two or more people have equal claims to a good that cannot be divided among them, the morally preferable way of allocating that good is through a tie-breaking device, or lottery, which is fair. Intuitively, we have little difficulty recognizing which lotteries are fair. Tossing ordinary coins, drawing straws, and picking numbers from one to ten are all clearly fair, whereas awarding goods on the basis of personal preference, of flips of loaded coins, or of racial or religious characteristics, are generally not. However, the principle behind these intuitions is not nearly as clear as the intuitions themselves. When one is asked about this principle, one is apt to reply that a lottery is fair provided that it affords each claimant an equal chance of obtaining the contested good; but this is helpful only to the extent that the relevant notion of equal chances can then be specified in its turn. Failing such specification, it will not be clear why lotteries based on personal preference or racial characteristics do not afford their entrants equal chances; and neither, conversely, will it be clear how coin tosses or straw drawings can offer genuine chances to any but their eventual winners. In this paper, I shall try to develop an adequate account of the principle that underlies our intuitions about fair lotteries. This will involve asking (a) exactly what conditions are necessary and sufficient for a lottery to be fair, and (b) why it should be morally preferable to allocate indivisible contested goods through lotteries which satisfy these conditions.

But I Could Be Wrong

INTRODUCTION My aim in this essay is to explore the implications of the fact that even our most deeply held moral beliefs have been profoundly affected by our upbringing and experience—that if any of us had had a sufficiently different upbringing and set of experiences, he almost certainly would now have a very different set of moral beliefs and very different habits of moral judgment. This fact, together with the associated proliferation of incompatible moral doctrines, is sometimes invoked in support of liberal policies of toleration and restraint, but the relevance of these considerations to individual moral deliberation has received less attention. In Sections II through V, I shall argue that this combination of contingency and controversy poses a serious challenge to the authority of our moral judgments. In Section VI, I shall explore a promising way of responding to this challenge. THE CHALLENGE TO MY MORAL JUDGMENTS In Chapter II of On Liberty , John Stuart Mill observes that the person who uncritically accepts the opinion of “the world” devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same causes which made him a churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Peking.

Blame for Traits

Soulevant la question de la relation entre caractere et culpabilite dans le cadre de la philosophie morale, lA. defend la these selon laquelle une personne peut etre condamnee pour ses traits de caractere. Distinguant les notions de responsabilite et punition, lA. montre que sa theorie eclaire lorigine emotionnelle de la peur detre juge en tant quindividu mauvais, dune part, et releve de lethique du devoir et de la vertu, dautre part.

On the Decriminalization of Drugs

In his lively and provocative paper, Four Points About Drug Decriminalization, (1) Douglas Husak advances two main claims: first, that none of the standard arguments for criminalizing drugs are any good, and, second, that there is little evidence that drug laws deter drug use. In these comments, I will not take up the second claim (though I must admit to some skepticism), but I do want to take issue with the first. My strategy will be, first, to sketch three pro-criminalization arguments that I take to have real weight; second, to respond to an objection of Husaks that, if sound, would tell against all three of my arguments; and, third, to confront the related objection that we cannot consistently support the criminalization of narcotics without also supporting the criminalization of alcohol. I Three Arguments for Criminalization I begin with two ritual disclaimers. When I say that there is a good case for continuing to attach criminal penalties to the use of narcotics, I do not mean that that case extends to any particular schedule of penalties or to any special list of drugs. I am sure that many drug sentences, both past and present, are far too harsh. I am also willing to concede that the harms and bads associated with some drugs--marijuana is the obvious example--may not be significant enough to justify attaching even minor penalties to their use. I do think, however, that the harms and bads associated with many other drugs are sufficiently weighty to justify their continued criminalization. The drugs of which I take this to be true include heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, and ecstasy, among others. What, then, are the main arguments for criminalizing these drugs? They are, I think, just the familiar ones: drug users harm themselves, they harm others, and they do not live good lives. At the risk of sounding like an eighth-grade teacher, or a drug czar, I will briefly sketch each argument. (1) The paternalistic argument The nature of the harms that drug users risk is of course a function of the drugs they use. Thus, to borrow a point from Peter de Marneffe, heroin harms the user by sapping his motivation and initiative. (2) Also, because heroin is addictive, using it now forecloses the option of comfortably not using it later. By contrast, cocaine and methamphetamine do not have only these effects (though crack is by all accounts highly addictive), but their regular use also significantly increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Furthermore, by drastically enhancing self-confidence, aggression, and libido, these drugs elicit behavior that predictably culminates in high-speed collisions, shootouts in parking lots, and destroyed immune systems. Other drugs have still other destructive effects: LSD can trigger lasting psychosis; ecstasy harms the brain, impairs the memory, and, taken with alcohol, damages the liver; and so on. Thus, one obvious reason to continue to criminalize these drugs is simply that many persons deterred by the law from using them will thereby be spared serious injury. (2) The protective argument Just as drug use can harm the user, so, too, can it harm others. Drug use harms strangers by involving them in the collisions, shootouts, and other catastrophes to which the impaired and overly aggressive are prone. It harms family members by depriving them of the steady companionship and income of their addicted partners. It harms fetuses by exposing them to a toxic and permanently damaging prenatal environment. It harms children by subjecting them to the neglect and abuse of their drug-addled parents. Thus, a second obvious reason to continue criminalizng drugs is that many persons deterred by the law from using drugs will thereby be prevented from harming others. (3) The perfectionist argument Just as there is broad agreement about what constitutes harm, so, too, is there broad agreement about many factors determining both good and bad lives. …

REAL-WORLD LUCK EGALITARIANISM

Luck egalitarians maintain that inequalities are always unjust when they are due to luck, but are not always unjust when they are due to choices for which the parties are responsible. In this paper, I argue that the two halves of this formula do not fit neatly together, and that we arrive at one version of luck egalitarianism if we begin with the notion of luck and interpret responsible choice in terms of its absence, but a very different version if we begin with the notion of responsible choice and interpret luck in terms of its absence. I argue, further, that the difference between the two versions is significant because many real-world inequalities fall precisely in the gap between them, and that attempts to adjudicate between them lead quickly to hard questions about the relation between equality and responsibility.

Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point.

In this work, the author has fashioned out of the logical and linguistic theses of his earlier books a full-scale but readily intelligible account of moral argument.

A Wild West of the Mind

abstract This paper addresses the relation between morality and private thought. It is widely agreed that government and society have no business trying to control our thoughts—that, as long as we don’t put them into action, our beliefs, fantasies, and attitudes are our own business. However, it is also widely agreed that even private thoughts are subject to moral constraint—that it’s morally wrong to fantasize about rape or child abuse, feel inappropriate emotions such as envy or schadenfreude, or entertain biased beliefs that are unsupported by evidence. I argue that this last view is badly mistaken, and that the realm of the purely mental is best regarded as morality-free. My argument rests partly on a general view of the role of morality in our lives and partly on an examination of the best arguments for extending its purview to the realm of thought. The upshot is that we have little reason to accept, and much reason to reject, the extension of morality’s requirements to anyone’s inner world.