Seana Valentine Shiffrin

Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism

The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components — including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create commitments. What is really at issue between conventionalists and nonconventionalists is whether the basic moral relation of promissory commitment derives from the moral principles that govern our use of social conventions.Other nonconventionalist accounts make problematic concessions to the conventionalists core instincts, including embracing: the view that binding promises must involve the promisees belief that performance will occur; the view that through the promise, the promisee and promisor create a shared end; and the tendency to take promises between strangers, rather than intimates, as the prototypes to which a satisfactory account must answer. I argue against these positions and then pursue an account that finds its motivation in their rejection. My main claim is: the power to make promises, and other related forms of commitment, is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way. The argument proceeds by examining what would be missing, morally, from intimate relationships if we lacked this power.

Harm and Its Moral Significance

Standard, familiar models portray harms and benefits as symmetrical. Usually, harm is portrayed as involving a worsening of ones situation, and benefits as involving an improvement. Yet morally, the aversion, prevention, and relief of harms seem, at least presumptively, to matter more than the provision, protection, and maintenance of comparable and often greater benefits. Standard models of harms and benefits have difficulty acknowledging this priority, much less explaining it. They also fail to identify harm accurately and reliably. In this paper, I develop these problems, argue that we should reconsider our commitment to the standard models, and then merely gesture at the direction in which we might locate a superior approach, one that better accounts for the moral significance of harm and its relation to autonomy rights.

Moral Overridingness and Moral Subjectivism

Increasingly, claims of moralitys overridingness are met with resistance, especially from theorists who regard moral reasons as, in an important sense, subjective. This paper challenges this resistance by arguing that moral overridingness may be reconciled with this significant form of subjectivism about moral reasons. It does not argue for or even endorse this form of subjectivism. In fact, I suspect the view is false. Nevertheless, because of subjectivisms persistent pull, it is worth exploring the views ramifications and, in particular, the degree to which -- through its challenge to overridingness -- it would be deflationary of moralitys authority. Moreover, such an exploration will show that a critical source of overridingness may be found in features of morality that are intrinsic to its structure.

Reparations for U.S. Slavery and Justice Over Time

This paper extends a non-comparative account of harm to the issue of reparations for identity-affecting historical injustices, focusing on American slavery. Many object to reparations for slavery because the original victims and perpetrators of slavery are dead and because the lives and identities of the descendants of slaves are causally dependent upon the fact of slavery. This objection misses the point of reparations. What is central to reparations claims is not any idea that some particular individuals, considered in isolation from social groups, either owe or are owed. Rather, reparations arguments are centrally concerned with the relations between and histories of important social collectives and how these relations in turn affect individuals. Reparations should serve as, and be seen as, a concrete rather than merely discursive repudiation of slavery and commitment to its non-recurrence.

Enhancing Moral Relationships Through Strict Liability

The article considers the apparent tension between contract’s strict liability doctrine with respect to performance and the general moral precepts that liability should track fault and that one should internalize the costs of one’s own choices, but not the costs of arbitrary misfortune. By making contractors strictly liable for their failure to perform, the law attributes greater responsibility to agents than these moral principles seem to countenance – namely by according them legal responsibility for events or outcomes for which they bear no fault. Those precepts, however, are couched at a highly abstract level that is more appropriate for blame and punishment than for the sort of responsibility that contract law assigns. In the article, I defend the strict liability doctrine as a philosophically interesting default rule that supports trusting relationships between the parties and lays the groundwork for a healthier moral cooperative relationship between contracting parties than a fault-based system would. Strict liability norms relieve the promisee of pressures to supervise and intrude upon the promisor during performance and so eliminate some of the impetus to cultivate and display attitudes and behaviours of distrust. In turn, strict liability encourages the promisors to assume full responsibility for a project and by relieving promisees of pressures to intrude on the promisor gives the promisor a greater arena of autonomy in which to operate. While fault-based liability rules may encourage displays of distrust and sow the seeds of conflict, strict liability rules assign responsibility in ways that encourage trust and other components of healthy moral relationships. However, conceiving strict liability in this way brings out an internal tension between the justification of strict liability in contract and broad construals of the duty to mitigate, a doctrine that places the burden of self-help on disappointed promisees. As I will argue, broad construals of the duty to mitigate work at cross-purposes with the moral functions of a strict liability regime, offering further reasons to interpret the duty to mitigate narrowly.

The Incentives Argument for Intellectual Property Protection

The incentives argument for intellectual property contends that intellectual property protections must be given to creators in order to give them the incentive to create their works. The incentives argument for intellectual property differs from other incentives arguments because the intellectual property incentive works in a distinctive way, by offering a form of monopoly control as the incentive. In theory, that incentive operates to stimulate creation of some work by promising the power to prevent other, similar works from being produced or distributed. I will argue that by enabling creators to prevent the creation or dissemination of other, similar works, the incentives argument for intellectual property is prey to unique philosophical difficulties that do not arise for other incentive arguments, or at least not to the same degree.

Caution About Character Ideals and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Sorell

Tom Sorell argues that the ideal of responsible agency requires an agent who has committed a crime to submit to the publics response. This article contests Sorells claim that this ideal could provide any independent source of support for the death penalty. The article also raises worries about Sorells claim that the ideally responsible agent would confess promptly and submit willingly to prosecution. In some cases, taking true responsibility for a crime may require more time and greater engagement with the publics response than prompt expressions of remorse would allow.