Kimberley Brownlee

A Human Right Against Social Deprivation

Human rights debates neglect social rights. This paper defends one fundamentally important, but largely unacknowledged social human right. The right is both a condition for and a constitutive part of a minimally decent human life. Indeed, protection of this right is necessary to secure many less controversial human rights. The right in question is the human right against social deprivation. In this context, ‘social deprivation’ refers not to poverty, but to genuine, interpersonal, social deprivation as a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent human contact and social inclusion. Such deprivation is endured not only in arenas of institutional segregation by prisoners and patients held in long-term solitary confinement and quarantine, but also by persons who suffer less organized forms of persistent social deprivation. The human right against social deprivation can be fleshed out both as a civil and political right and as a socio-economic right. The defense for it faces objections familiar to human rights theory such as undue burdensomeness, unclaimability, and infeasibility, as well as some less familiar objections such as illiberality, intolerability, and ideals of the family. All of these objections can be answered.

The civil disobedience of Edward Snowden A reply to William Scheuerman

This article responds to William Scheuerman’s analysis of Edward Snowden as someone whose acts fit within John Rawls’ account of civil disobedience understood as a public, non-violent, conscientious breach of law performed with overall fidelity to law and a willingness to accept punishment. It rejects the narrow Rawlsian notion in favour of a broader notion of civil disobedience understood as a constrained, conscientious and communicative breach of law that demonstrates opposition to law or policy and a desire for lasting change. The article shows that, according to Rawls’ unduly narrow conception, Edward Snowden is not a civil disobedient. But, according to the more plausible, broader conception, he is. It then identifies some advantages of the broader conception in contemporary analyses of new forms of disobedience, including globalized disobedience and digital disobedience.

Moral Aspirations and Ideals

My aim is to vindicate two distinct and important moral categories – ideals and aspirations – which have received modest, and sometimes negative, attention in recent normative debates. An ideal is a conception of perfection or model of excellence around which we can shape our thoughts and actions. An aspiration, by contrast, is an attitudinal position of steadfast commitment to, striving for, or deep desire or longing for, an ideal. I locate these two concepts in relation to more familiar moral concepts such as duty, virtue, and the good to demonstrate, amongst other things, first, that what is morally significant about ideals and aspirations cannot be fully accommodated within a virtue ethical framework that gives a central role to the Virtuous Person as a purported model of excellence. On a certain interpretation, the Virtuous Person is not a meaningful ideal for moral agents. Second, I articulate one sense in which aspirations are morally required imaginative acts given their potential to expand the realm of practical moral possibility.

Ethical Dilemmas of Sociability

There is a tension between our need for associative control and our need for social connections. This tension creates ethical dilemmas that we can call each-we dilemmas of sociability. To resolve these dilemmas, we must prioritise either negative moral rights to dissociate or positive moral rights to social inclusion. This paper shows that we must prioritise positive social rights. This has implications both for personal morality and for political theory. As persons, we must attend to each other’s basic social needs. As a society, we must adopt a sufficientarian approach to the regulation of social resources.

Review of John Gardner, Offences and Defences

icology. As Cranor explains in great detail, one cannot predict a priori whether these changes, which establish a stronger gate-keeping role for trial judges, have the effect of making it easier or more difficult for plaintiffs who have been harmed to receive just compensation. Cranor’s discussion of post-Daubert cases, however, makes clear that plaintiffs have been disadvantaged by the new rules and still encounter formidable hurdles in winning their cases. He believes the process can be fixed, and he has many detailed suggestions of ways to fix it. Judges, like juries, are seldom scientific experts or philosophers of science with the kind of expertise that would give them informed views about scientific methods or the nature of scientific objectivity. One of Cranor’s main goals in this book is to describe the elaborate, complicated task judges now face in determining what kind of expert testimony is scientifically respectable. His aim is largely constructive: he explains many considerations about scientific reasoning that judges ought to take into account, and he offers suggestions that would bring their decisions more in line with current thinking in science and philosophy. But a reader may nevertheless come away from this book with a sense of despair. There is no doubt a large gulf between the stories scientists tell each other to justify their inferences about toxicity and the ability of laypeople to make reasonable judgments about which of those stories to believe. Juries certainly need help in this area, but after reading Cranor’s detailed account of the kinds of help they need, I have little confidence that many judges have the kind of expertise that well equips them to carry out their roles as gatekeepers to determine which experts and what kinds of testimony will effectively help juries to make the crucial inferences that determine guilt or innocence in toxic tort cases.

Can the Law Help Us to Be Moral

ABSTRACT The moral value of law can take many forms. It is instrumentally valuable when it coordinates interaction, provides moral advice and leadership, models the virtues, and motivates us to be moral. It is intrinsically valuable when it constitutes the collective moral conscience of citizens, embodies an ideal form of communal life, and expresses the moral integrity of the community. We analyse all of these potential values of law and assess their moral significance. In doing so, we are careful to distinguish between (a) the general concept of law and (b) the actual law of any particular legal system. We argue that, although in principle law does have the potential to help us to be moral in each of the ways noted, many actual legal systems are conducive to great immorality and injustice. Being moral and living well under such regimes is likely to be much harder than it would be otherwise, even in the absence of any legal system.

WHAT’S VIRTUOUS ABOUT THE LAW?

Debates about our moral relation to the law typically focus on the moral force of law. Often, the question asked is: Do we have a moral duty to follow the law? Recently, that question has been given a virtue-ethical formulation: Is there a virtue in abiding by the law? This paper considers our moral relation to the law in terms of virtue, but focuses on a different question from the traditional ones. The question here is: Can the law model virtue in beneficial ways that enable us to cultivate virtue? This paper shows that the law can do this by setting a moral example that we have good reason to emulate. This is significant given the distinctive influence the law has over our lives. The paper begins by examining the nature of a model, comparing different models of virtue, and then questioning the possibility of a complete model of virtue such as the so called Virtuous Person. The paper then articulates several ways in which the law can model virtue for us, and responds to three objections: 1) the embodiment problem, 2) the poisoning problem, and 3) the emulation problem.

On Gardner on Law in General

There is an informal club of students, young academics and more established academics who regularly check John Gardner’s website to see if he has posted new papers in progress or forthcoming articles. I have been a card-carrying member of this club for close to 10 years, and many of Gardner’s papers are old friends, such as ‘The Mark of Responsibility’, ‘Reasons for Teamwork’, ‘The Wrongdoing that Gets Results’ and ‘In Defence of Defences’. The papers collected in Gardner’s newest book––Law as a Leap of Faith––include pieces that are good friends, such as ‘Legal Positivism: 51⁄2 Myths’, which has helped me not to perpetuate as many myths about legal positivism in my teaching as I otherwise would have done. There are also some newer acquaintances, such as ‘Can there be a Written Constitution?’ and ‘How Law Claims, What Law Claims’ and, most excitingly, there are some previously unpublished papers: ‘The Supposed Formality of the Rule of Law’ and ‘Law in General’. It is a treat to have Gardner’s work on law in general compiled in a single volume. This not only makes accessible some of his contributions to edited

Symposium : Joseph Raz on value, reasons, and respect : introduction

Joseph Raz’s seminal work in legal and political philosophy and practical reason theory has been complemented in recent years by his writings on the nature of value. His account of value combines a commitment to the universality of values with an appreciation that evaluative properties depend on historically contingent social practices. This fact of dependence makes values contingent, diverse, and legitimately differentially attractive—three features that Raz shows to be compatible with universality. Importantly for the arguments contained in this symposium, Raz’s account of the nature of value has implications, which he himself develops, for what it means to show respect for persons. The essays in the symposium each engage in different ways with this topic and with the more general issue of how values provide reasons. They focus on such questions as whether the duty to respect persons is a distinct type of duty or, as Raz has argued, an instance of the more general duty to respect value; how respect for persons, respect for value, and value pluralism bear on state neutrality; and how respect for persons as addressees of claims and demands bears on the limits of practical authority.Joseph Raz’s seminal work in legal and political philosophy and practical reason theory has been complemented in recent years by his writings on the nature of value. His account of value combines a commitment to the universality of values with an appreciation that evaluative properties depend on historically contingent social practices. This fact of dependence makes values contingent, diverse, and legitimately differentially attractive—three features that Raz shows to be compatible with universality. Importantly for the arguments contained in this symposium, Raz’s account of the nature of value has implications, which he himself develops, for what it means to show respect for persons. The essays in the symposium each engage in different ways with this topic and with the more general issue of how values provide reasons. They focus on such questions as whether the duty to respect persons is a distinct type of duty or, as Raz has argued, an instance of the more general duty to respect value; how respect for persons, respect for value, and value pluralism bear on state neutrality; and how respect for persons as addressees of claims and demands bears on the limits of practical authority. In May 2008, the University of Manchester Centre for Political Theory hosted a conference on themes from Joseph Raz’s recent work. The three articles published in this symposium were presented in draft form at that conference. The conference concluded with a response from Joseph Raz, which developed into the reply for this symposium. We are grateful to David Miller for helping shepherd these articles through the review process. We are also grateful to the Society for Applied Philosophy and the University of Manchester School of Social Sciences for their sponsorship of the conference. In the first of the articles, Leslie Green examines two worries about the Razian account of respect for persons. Green’s first worry is conceptual: Can we explain meaningfully what it is to show respect for persons—all persons—given that such respect must in some sense “terminate on the person” (214)? Does respect for persons require anything beyond treating people as we ought to treat them? Green argues that