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    Global injustice and redistributive wars
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper
    On Pogge’s view, we —people living in rich countries— do not just allow the global poor to die. Rather, we interfere with them in such a way that we make them die on a massive scale. If we did the same through military aggression against them, surely, it would be permissible for these people to wage war on us to prevent this. Suppose Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, and assume the moral permissibility of self-defence by poor people in the hypothetical military action scenario just mentioned. If these assumptions are correct, poor countries could start just and, even possibly, morally permissible redistributive wars against us provided various additional conditions are met. To avoid misunderstanding, I should stress that my main claim is the conditional equivalence claim, namely that if Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, our relation to poor countries is morally equivalent to one in which we each year killed many of the global poor by military means. I do not claim (i) that Pogge’s analysis is correct; (ii) that, as a matter of fact, it is morally permissible for poor countries to wage redistributive wars against rich countries; (iii) that it is not the case that anything that is impermissible for poor countries to do in the latter situation involving military aggression —e. g. deliberately targeting rich civilians— is impermissible in redistributive wars as well.
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    A Constitutivist theory o reasons: its promise and parts
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Smith, Michael
    The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it explains what a constitutivist theory of reasons is and why the theory promises to deliver the holy grail of moral philosophy, which is an argument to the conclusion that each of us would choose to act morally if we had and exercised the capacity to respond rationally to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Second, it describes the various parts of a constitutivist theory of reasons, and it explains how these parts give support to the premises required for the promised argument.
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    A Defense of animal citizens and sovereigns
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Donaldson, Sue; Kymlicka, Will
    In their commentaries on Zoopolis, Alasdair Cochrane and Oscar Horta raise several challenges to our argument for a “political theory of animal rights”, and to the specific models of animal citizenship and animal sovereignty we offer. In this reply, we focus on three key issues: 1) the need for a groupdifferentiated theory of animal rights that takes seriously ideas of membership in bounded communities, as against more “cosmopolitan” or “cosmo- cosmopolitan” or “cosmo- cosmopolitan” or “cosmo- ” or “cosmo- or “cosmozoopolis” alternatives that minimize the moral significance of boundaries and membership; 2) the challenge of defining the nature and scope of wild animal sovereignty; and 3) the problem of policing nature and humanitarian intervention to reduce suffering in the wild.
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    Cosmozoopolis: the case against Group-Differentiated Animal Rights
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Alasdair, Cochrane
    This paper claims that relational position and group-based distinctions are less important in determining the rights of animals than Zoopolis concludes. In particular, it argues that the theory of animal rights developed in Zoopolis is vulnerable to some of the critiques that are made against theories which differentiate the rights of humans on the basis of group-based distinctions. For example, in the human context, group-differentiated theories of rights have been criticised on a number of important grounds: for failing to extend to non-associates rights that ought to be so extended; for granting too much weight to the rights of associates over non-associates; for wrongly treating groups as homogenous entities; and for also assuming that these groups necessarily have value as they exist presently. This paper outlines how modified versions of these critiques can be levelled at the theory of animal rights defended in Zoopolis.
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    Jury nullifications and the bad faith juror
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Hreno, Travis
    Jury nullification, that phenomenon whereby a jury returns a not-guilty verdict for a defendant it believes to be technically guilty of the alleged crime, is, obviously, a controversial issue. What is not a matter of controversy, however, is the fact that the law protects the jury’s ability to behave this way. Much of the controversy therefore centers on whether juries ought to be informed of this ability to nullify free from legal redress. In this paper I examine a number of arguments both for and against the view that juries ought to be, in the words of the literature, fully informed. In the end I conclude that there is significant empirical evidence to suggest that, rather than simply promoting justice and mercy, as proponents of the instruction argue, fully informing a jury has the unforeseen consequence of encouraging juries to behave in a manner I label bad-faith, and that such bad-faith juries in fact corrupt the principles of justice and fairness that are the cornerstones of the trial system.
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    Poverty and violence
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Pogge, Thomas
    Citizens of affluent countries bear a far greater responsibility for world poverty than they typically realise. This is so because poverty is more severe, more widespread and more avoidable than officially acknowledged and also because it is substantially aggravated by supranational institutional arrangements that are designed and imposed by the governments and elites of the more powerful states. It may seem that this analysis of world poverty implies that citizens of affluent countries have forfeited their right not to be killed in the course of a redistributive war and that such a war would be both just and permissible. In fact, however, it has none of these three implications. This finding should be welcomed insofar as violence and macho talk of violence are in our world highly counterproductive responses to the injustice of poverty.
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    What's So Shameful about Shameful revelations?
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Firth, Joanna
    Jonathan Wolff, amongst others, has criticised luck egalitarian theories of distributive justice because these theories require untalented citizens to reveal their lack of talent to the state. He believes that, even in an ideal egalitarian society, this would cause citizens to feel ashamed. Having to reveal facts that one considers shameful undermines one’s self-respect. The state should treat its citizens with respect and, thus, it ought not to treat them in ways that undermine their self-respect. In this paper, I argue that this shameful revelations allegation is false. In an ideal egalitarian society, people would believe that a person’s natural marketable talents are an inappropriate basis on which to measure her value. Emotions typically have a cognitive structure: one of the constitutive components of each particular emotion is a particular type of belief. Shame is felt when one believes that one does not possess some quality that one believes one needs to have in order to have value. So, since citizens of an ideal egalitarian society will not believe that a person’s value depends on her natural marketable talents, they will not feel ashamed of being untalented. This is good news. Luck egalitarian theories require citizens to reveal their untalentedness because it is necessary in order to achieve fairness in the distribution of resources and/or welfare. Wolff’s allegation therefore implies that fairness and respect will conflict in an ideal egalitarian society. But, if I am correct, we may be able to achieve both these values
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    Zoopolis, interventions and the State of Nature
    (Law, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013) Horta, Oscar
    In Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that intervention in nature to aid animals is sometimes permissible, and in some cases obligatory, to save them from the harms they commonly face. But they claim these interventions must have some limits, since they could otherwise disrupt the structure of the communities wild animals form, which should be respected as sovereign ones. These claims are based on the widespread assumption that ecosystemic processes ensure that animals have good lives in nature. However, this assumption is, unfortunately, totally unrealistic. Most animals are r-strategists who die in pain shortly after coming into existence, and those who make it to maturity commonly suffer terrible harms too. In addition, most animals do not form the political communities Zoopolis describes. The situation of animals in the wild can therefore be considered analogous to one of humanitarian catastrophe, or to that of irretrievably failed states. It matches closely what a Hobbesian state of nature would be like. This means that intervention in nature to aid nonhuman animals should not be limited as Donaldson and Kymlicka argue.