Onora O'Neill

Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning

1. Overview: justice against virtue? 2. Practical reason: abstraction and construction 3. Focus: action, intelligibility and principles 4. Scope: agents and subjects: who counts? 5. Structure: obligations and rights 6. Content I: principles for all: towards justice 7. Content II: Principles for all: towards virtue.

Agents of Justice

Accounts of international or global justice often focus primarily on the rights or goods to be enjoyed by all human beings, rather than on the obligations that will realise and secure those rights and goods, or on the agents and agencies for whose action obligations of justice are to be prescriptive. In the background of these approaches to international or global justice there are often implicit assumptions that the primary agents of justice are states, and that all other agents and agencies are secondary agents of justice, whose main contribution to justice will be achieved by conforming to the just requirements of states. This background picture runs into difficulties when states are either unjust or weak. The problems posed by unjust states have been widely noted, but the distinctive problems weak states create are less commonly discussed. In this paper I shall consider some reasons for and against viewing states as primary agents of justice, and will focus in particular on the importance of recognising the contribution to justice that other agents and agencies can make when states are weak.

Children's Rights and Children's Lives

A friend who lived in New York could not see the sky from her windows. To discover the days weather she had to peer at a glass-fronted building opposite, which offered a blurred reflection of part of the sky above her own building. I shall argue that when we take rights as fundamental in looking at ethical issues in childrens lives we also get an indirect, partial and blurred picture. If no more direct, clearer and fuller account can be had, we will have to rely on any oblique and partial light which a theory of childrens fundamental rights provides. If a clearer, more direct and more complete view of ethical aspects of childrens lives is available, we would have good reason to prefer it. We may begin with a reminder of the appeal and importance of thinking in terms of childrens rights. Children easily become victims. If they had rights, redress would be possible. Rather than being powerless in the face of neglect, abuse, molestation and mere ignorance they (like other oppressed groups) would have legitimate and (in principle) enforceable claims against others. Although they (unlike many other oppressed groups) cannot claim their rights for themselves, this is no reason for denying them rights. Rather it is reason for setting up institutions that can monitor those who have children in their charge and intervene to enforce rights. The Aristotelian thought that justice is a relation between equals, so inappropriate in dealings with children, is to be rejected. The lives of children are no private matter, but a public concern which can be met by fostering childrens rights. Many aspects of this view seem to me plausible. I shall not query the thought that childrens lives are a public concern or the aim of securing positive (legal, institutional, customary) rights for children. I shall, however, query whether childrens positive rights are best grounded by appeals to fundamental (moral, natural, human) rights. This conclusion does not threaten childrens positive rights, which may have other grounds; nor does it deny that children have fundamental rights. Rather I shall

Research led by participants: a new social contract for a new kind of research

In recent years, there have been prominent calls for a new social contract that accords a more central role to citizens in health research. Typically, this has been understood as citizens and patients having a greater voice and role within the standard research enterprise. Beyond this, however, it is important that the renegotiated contract specifically addresses the oversight of a new, path-breaking approach to health research: participant-led research. In light of the momentum behind participant-led research and its potential to advance health knowledge by challenging and complementing traditional research, it is vital for all stakeholders to work together in securing the conditions that will enable it to flourish.

Insurance and Genetics: The Current State of Play

Seen in the simplest possible terms, insurance is a way of mitigating the effects of harmful events of uncertain incidence by pooling modest premiums which provide the resources to make larger payments selectively to those who suffer such events. Insurance is worthwhile for each person because the incidence of harm is uncertain: each benefits by contributing a premium in return for assurance that if misfortune strikes a claim can be made and met. If the incidence of harm could be fully known in advance there would be no context for insurance: those who knew for sure that they would not experience adverse events of a given type would not insure against them, and insurers would not offer worthwhile terms to those who were certain to experience such events. These simplicities soon vanish when one considers the variety of possible forms personal insurance can take. The most fundamental division between types of insurance is between those based on solidarity and those based on mutuality. Solidarity-based insurance takes no cognisance of the different levels of risk that different individuals bring to the pool: premiums are set at a uniform level, or based on ability to pay; entitlement to claim if the event insured against occurs is uniform. The NHS and similar health insurance schemes in other countries are

I. Kant after Virtue 1

Maclntyres refurbishing of Aristotelian ethics aims to restore both intelligibility and rationality to moral discourse. In After Virtue he concentrates on showing how intelligible action requires that lives be led within institutional and cultural traditions. But he does not offer a developed account of practical reason which could provide grounds for seeking some rather than other intelligible continuations of lives and traditions. Despite Maclntyres criticisms of Kants ethics, a Kantian account of practical reasoning may complement his account of intelligibility. An appropriate interpretation of Kantian ethics is outlined, which escapes Maclntyres criticisms, allows both for the universal character of basic moral principles and for the historical variability of intelligible action, and which makes moral worth or virtue the centre of the moral life. The refurbishing of Aristotelian ethics may be achieved by a Kantian completion.

Plural and Conflicting Values.

SECTION I: Plurality and choice Monism, pluralism, and conflict Conflict Maximization Ought and can Act and agent evaluations SECTION II: Akrasia: The unity of the good, commensurability, and comparability Courage, the doctrine of the mean, and the possibility of emotional and evaluative coherence Dirty hands and ordinary life Dirty hands and conflicts of value and desires in Aristotles ethics Friendship and morality: some difficult relations Some problems with counter-examples in ethics

Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge

This article reports on a conversation convened by Quentin Skinner at the invitation of the Editors of The Journal of Political Philosophy and held in Cambridge on 13 February 2001.

Consequences for Non-consequentialists

Both consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical reasoning have difficulties in accounting for the value of consequences. Taken neat, consequentialism is too fierce in its emphasis on success and disregard of luck, while non-consequentialism seemingly over-values inner states and undervalues actual results. In Uneasy Virtue Julia Driver proposes a form of objective consequentialism which claims that characters are good if they typically (but not invariably) produce good results. This position addresses the problems moral luck raises for consequentialism, but requires some form of realism about traits of character. However, if our knowledge of mental states is ascriptive, this form of objective consequentialism may make excessive demands. Non-consequentialists may gain in so far as the theories of action to which they are typically committed are less demanding, and are built to take account of the typical or systematic connections between states of character and results of action.

Global Poverty and the Limits of Academic Expertise

Academics are not a natural kind. They have varied expertise and aims, and most have no expertise that is particularly relevant to problems of poverty and development. This presumably is why the essay in this issue by Thomas Pogge and Louis Cabrera—a virtual “manifesto” of the newly formed Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP)—shifts to and fro between addressing “academics” and addressing “poverty-focused academics.” Even those academics whose work touches on poverty and development—a quite small minority—are mostly expert in some but not in other aspects of these topics. Some are expert in international law, but not in economics; others know about international trade, but not about aid; some study corruption, but know nothing about nutrition—and so on. A few know a lot about normative argument, but their credentials are sketchy when it comes to empirical evidence. Many more are interested in empirical evidence, usually of a specific sort, but are uncritical of or confused about normative argument. (I suspect that many suffer from a lingering positivist hangover, which suggests that there is no intellectually respectable way to support normative claims, and indeed that this fear may lie behind the appeals to the importance of academic neutrality that Pogge and Cabrera discuss.)