Michael Otsuka

Double Effect, Triple Effect and the Trolley Problem: Squaring the Circle in Looping Cases

In the Trolley Case (Figure 1), as devised by Philippa Foot and modified by Judith Jarvis Thomson, a runaway trolley (i.e. tram) is headed down a main track and will hit and kill five unless you divert it onto a side track, where it will hit and kill one.

Luck, insurance, and equality

Some people are the victims of luck—that is, of the effect of events and things beyond their control—that is both bad and worse than the luck of others. This is a problem for egalitarians, since luck is at the source of many of the differences in the circumstances of individuals. But egalitarians are not bothered by every variety of luck. Ronald Dworkin, for example, has drawn a distinction between two types of luck—“option luck” and “brute luck”—and has argued that the former does not necessarily give rise to inequalities that are unjust. Option luck, as he defines it, is “a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out—whether someone gains or loses through accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and might have declined.” Brute luck, by contrast, is “a matter of how risks fall out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles.”

Prioritarianism and the Separateness of Persons

For a prioritarian by contrast to a utilitarian, whether a certain quantity of utility falls within the boundary of one persons life or anothers makes the following moral difference: the worse the life of a person who could receive a given benefit, the stronger moral reason we have to confer this benefit on this person. It would seem, therefore, that prioritarianism succeeds, where utilitarianism fails, to ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’. Yet I show that, contrary to these appearances, prioritarianism fails, in ways strikingly parallel to those in which utilitarianism fails, to take this distinction seriously. In so doing, I draw on and develop an earlier critique of prioritarianism by disentangling and pressing two distinct separateness-of-persons objections offered there. One objection is that prioritarianism is insensitive to ‘prudential justifications’. The other is that it is insensitive to the competing claims of different individuals.

Kamm on the morality of killing

The second volume of Frances Kamms Morality, Mortality provides the sustained and compelling answers of a deontologist to three questions involving the morality of killing that have been central to substantive ethics in the last twenty-five years. The first is whether there is a genuine moral distinction between killing and letting die. The second is whether there is any principled way to account for strongly held but seemingly conflicting intuitions about the permissibility of killing some and saving others in much discussed cases involving runaway trolleys, killing to obtain vital organs, and the like. The third is whether one can supply a justification of a deontological constraint against killing even though the violation of this constraint would prevent more of the same type of constraint from being violated. Kamms affirmative answers to these questions will be familiar to those who have read her earlier articles on these topics. Nevertheless, the book greatly expands and revises her previous work and contains much new material.

Prerogatives to Depart from Equality

Should egalitarian justice be qualified by an agent-relative prerogative to act on a preference for—and thereby in a manner that gives rise to or preserves a greater than equal share of the goods of life for—oneself, ones family, loved ones, or friends as compared with strangers? Although many would reply that the answer to this question must be ‘yes’, I shall argue here that the case for such a prerogative to depart from equality is much less far-reaching than one might think. I have in mind a prerogative to depart from a specific form of equality: namely, equality of opportunity for such advantages as resources or welfare. I mean to refer to the strong form of equal opportunity elaborated and defended by Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen whereby, roughly speaking, two people have equal opportunity for advantage if they face the same choices and will end up at the same level of advantage if they make the same choices.

Reply to Crisp

We are grateful for, but unconvinced by, Roger Crisps defence of the Priority View against our critique. In this reply, we show that Crisp fails to grapple with, much less defeat, the central claim of our critique. We also show that an example that Crisp offers in support of the Priority View in fact lends support to our critique of that view.

Can an incompatibilist outfox a compatibilist hedgehog

This article raises some incompatibilist challenges for, and queries some of the implications of, Ronald Dworkin’s arguments in his Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), that responsibility is compatible with both determinism and epiphenomenalism.

Making the Unjust Provide for the Least Well Off

I propose that liberal egalitarians and libertarians can find common ground in support of an unfamiliar means of forcing well off individuals to come to the assistance of the least well off. Such means would not, as is typically the case, involve the taxation of the income of all well off individuals. Rather, assistance would be provided by the taxation of only those well off individuals who have been properly convicted of performing justifiably criminalized acts that they had no right to commit. In Section I, I argue that many liberal egalitarians will discover that a strong case can be made for the taxation of only the unjust, since such a scheme would mitigate the objectionable nature of the coercion that must be applied in order to provide for the least well off. In Section II, I argue that libertarians who reject standard schemes of redistributive taxation will not also be able to resist the case for taxation of the unjust. In Section III, I defend taxation of the unjust against the objection that it would call for punishment in excess of what justice permits.

How it makes a moral difference that one is worse off than one could have been

In this article, I argue that it makes a moral difference whether an individual is worse off than she could have been. Here, I part company with consequentialists such as Parfit and side with contractualists such as Scanlon. But, unlike some contractualists, I reject the view that all that matters is whether a principle can be justified to each particular individual, where such a justification is attentive to her interests, complaints and other claims. The anonymous goodness of a distribution also matters. My attempt to reconcile contractualist and consequentialist approaches proceeds via a serious of reflections on cases.

Quinn on punishment and using persons as means

In “The Right to Threaten and the Right to Punish,” Warren Quinn justifies punishment on the ground that it can be derived from the rights of persons to protect themselves against crime. Quinn, however, denies that a right of self-protection justifies the punishment of an aggressor solely on the ground that such punishment deters others from harming the victim of that aggression or others. He believes that punishment so justified would constitute a morally objectionable instance of using the punished individual as a means. Contrary to Quinn, I argue that (1) an individual can, on the very ground of a right to self-protection that Quinn ultimately relies upon to justify punishment, justify the punishment of an individual as a means of deterring others from committing crimes; and that (2) an individual or individuals (including state officials) can, on the ground of vindicating the right of protection that others possess, justify the punishment of an individual as a means of deterring others from committing crimes.