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Publisher's Note
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Notes on Contributors
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Global Taxes on Natural Resources
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Thomas Pogge's Global Resources Dividend relies on a flat tax on the use of natural resources to fund the eradication of world poverty. Hillel Steiner's Global Fund taxes the full rental value of owned natural resources and distributes the proceeds equally. The paper compares the Dividend and the Fund and defends the Global Share, a novel proposal that taxes either use or ownership, does so (when possible) progressively, and distributes the revenue according to a prioritarian rather than a sufficientarian or egalitarian principle.
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The Global Fund: A Reply to Casal
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The Global Fund is a mechanism for the global application of the Left Libertarian conception of distributive justice. As a form of luck egalitarianism, this conception confers upon each person an entitlement to an equal share of all natural resource values, since natural resources – broadly, geographical sites – are objects for the production of which no person is responsible. Owners of these sites, i.e. states, are liable to a 100% Global Fund tax on their unimproved value: that is, their gross market value minus the value of the improvements added to them by human effort. It is argued that the revenue yielded by this tax would be correspondingly reduced by a further tax on the use of natural resources.
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Allowing the Poor to Share the Earth
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Two of the greatest challenges facing humanity are environmental degradation and the persistence of poverty. Both can be met by instituting a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) that would slow pollution and natural-resource depletion while collecting funds to avert poverty worldwide. Unlike Hillel Steiner's Global Fund, which is presented as a fully just regime governing the use of planetary resources, the GRD is meant as merely a modest but widely acceptable and therefore realistic step toward justice. Paula Casal has set forth various ways in which this step might be improved upon. Solid counter-arguments can be given to her criticisms and suggestions. But to specify the best (effective and realizable) design of an appropriate global institutional mechanism with some confidence, economists, political scientists, jurists, environmental scientists, and activists would need to be drawn in to help think through the immense empirical and political complexities posed by this urgent task.
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Rejoinder to Pogge and Steiner
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Against Public Reason Liberalism's Accessibility Requirement
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Public reason liberals typically defend an accessibility requirement for reasons offered in public political dialog. The accessibility requirement holds that public reasons must be amenable to criticism, evaluable by reasonable persons, and the like. Public reason liberals are therefore hostile to the public use of reasons that appear inaccessible, especially religious reasons. This hostility has provoked strong reactions from public reason liberalism's religion-friendly critics.
But public reason liberals and their religion-friendly critics need not be at odds because the accessibility requirement is implausible. In fact, the accessibility requirement is ambiguous between two interpretations, one of which is too stringent and the other too loose. Depending upon the interpretation, accessibility either restricts the use of too many secular reasons or permits appeal to a wide range of religious reasons. The accessibility requirement should therefore be rejected.
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Should We Replace Disabled Newborn Infants?
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If a disabled newborn infant dies, her parents may be able to conceive another child without impairment. This is sometimes referred to as 'replacement'. Some philosophers have argued that replacement provides a strong reason for disabled newborns to be killed or allowed to die. In this paper I focus on the case for replacement as it relates to decisions about life support in newborn intensive care. I argue (following Jeff McMahan) that the impersonal reason to replace is weak and easily outweighed. I assess and reject several possible ways in which the impersonal reason to replace could be defended. I then address an alternative justification for replacement – as an individual-affecting benefit. The strongest justification for replacement may be the interests of parents. In the latter part of the paper I look at a related question. What role should replacement play in decisions about the funding of newborn intensive care?
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Autonomy, History, and the Origins of Our Desires
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A popular view among autonomy theorists is that facts about the history of a person's desires, and specifically facts about how they were formed or acquired, matter crucially to her autonomy. I argue that while there is an important relationship between a person's autonomy and the history of her desires, a person's autonomy does not depend on how her desires were formed or acquired. I argue that a desire's autonomy lies not in its origins but in whether its bearer has a history of having engaged with it in the right sort of way. I argue that this view has important advantages, and no obvious disadvantages, over its historical and its non-historical rivals.
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Can Wars Be Fought Justly? The Necessity Condition Put to the Test
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According to a widespread view, the same constraints that limit the use of otherwise immoral measures in individual self-defense apply to collective self-defense too. I try to show that this view has radical implications at the level of jus in bello, implications which have not been fully appreciated. In particular, if the necessity condition must be satisfied in all cases of killing in war, then most fighting would turn out to be unjust. One way to avoid this result is to adopt a contractualist view of killing in war, a view which interprets the necessity condition in a way that is more permissive with regard to killing combatants in war. At least in this respect, a contractualist view of killing in war has an advantage over other candidates in explaining how wars might be fought justly.
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The Virtues (and a Few Vices) of Daniel Russell's Practical Intelligence and the Virtues
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Daniel Russell's Practical Intelligence and the Virtues is principally a defense of the Aristotelian claim that phronesis is part of every unqualified virtue—a defense of what Russell calls "hard virtue theory" and "hard virtue ethics." The main support for this is the further claim that we would be unable to act well reliably, or form our character reliably, without phronesis performing its "twin roles": correctly identifying the mean of each virtue, and integrating the mean of each virtue with those of others so as to enable us to act in an overall virtuous manner. In following Russell's argument for these claims, we find much else of interest, including a persuasive account of right action and a resurrection of the old doctrine of cardinal virtues. Here I seek first to give readers a sense of the range and depth of this important book by summarizing the main lines of its argument. But I also raise some critical points, the most substantive of which concern his treatments of the unity of the virtues and of responsibility for character.
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Health, Luck, and Justice
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Democratic Legitimacy
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Morality Without God?
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Mill
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Books Received
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