Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties

Studies in Christian Ethics 23 (2), 118-129 , 2010

This is a non-evaluative overview of Justice: Rights and Wrongs covering its three parts: (i) an ‘archaeological’ account of justice and rights in the Christian tradition; (ii) a description of the goods to which we have rights; (iii) an argument grounding natural, inherent, human rights to goods in God’s love. Keywords goods, justice, overview, right-order, rights, summary

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2017

If D commits a wrong against V, D typically incurs a corrective duty to V. But how should we respond if V has false beliefs about whether she is harmed by D’s wrong? There are two types of cases we must consider: (1) those in which V is not harmed but she mistakenly believes that she is (2) those in which V is harmed but she mistakenly believes that she is not. I canvass three views: The Objective View, The Subjective View and The Mixed View. The Objective View holds that V’s claim depends on the correct account of harm, rather than her false beliefs, and so D has a duty to offer damages to V in (2) but not in (1) in order to compensate her. The Subjective View holds that, for broadly anti-perfectionist reasons, V’s claim depends on her sincere beliefs, even if they are mistaken, and so D has a duty to compensate V in (1) but not in (2). The Mixed View holds that we should defer to her beliefs in (1) but not in (2), so D has a duty to compensate her in both cases. In this article, I...

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 2020

In this paper we elucidate the notion of “social wrongs”. It differs from moral wrongness, and is broader than narrowly political wrongs. We distinguish conceptually monadic wrongness (1.1), dyadic wronging (1.2), and the idea of there being something “wrong with” an entity (1.3). We argue that social and political wrongs share a feature with natural badness or wrongness (illnesses of organisms) as well as malfunctioning artifacts or dysfunctional organizations: they violate so called ought-to-be norms; they are not as they ought to be; there is something wrong with them. In contrast, moral wrongs are violations of ought-to-do norms. Social wrongs typically, but not invariably, include dyadic wronging. We examine who or what can wrong whom or what, and by what means: we can be wronged by individuals and groups, as well as by practices, institutions or structures (2.1-2.3). The notion of structural injustice is compared to the notion of social wrongs in 2.4. Social wrongs are defined as there being something wrong with the social reality (3.3), in comparison to there being something wrong with an organism or a system (3.1), including the narrowly political wrongs of systems of governance (3.2).

This is a short essay on human trafficking discourse -- included in a series of five commentaries.

The goal of this article is to rethink the relationship between the concepts of justification and wrongdoing, which play vital roles in the theory of criminal law. Reading George P. Fletcher's new book, The Grammar of Criminal Law, in the context of his earlier scholarship has led me to one major disagreement with Fletcher as well as with the traditional criminal law doctrine: for Fletcher and many others, wrongdoing and justification mutually exclude each other; for me, they do not. Consider a hypothetical: a group of people are captured by criminals. The criminals are about to kill everyone but then they have a change of heart and offer their victims a deal: if Jack rapes Jill, the criminals will let everyone go. If not, no one's life will be spared. Realizing that this is the only way to save several lives, including Jill's own, Jack reluctantly agrees. Jill, on the other hand, vehemently protests that she would rather die than be violated. When Jack attempts to overp...

2013

The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word’s etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice. Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.

Claiming rights against one another is a perfectly familiar phenomenon. We express the elementary thought you cannot do that to me in a variety of ways. And yet, in spite of the perfect familiarity of this phenomenon, the two standard philosophical theories of rights (the interest and the choice theories) face notorious difficulties in accounting for it. My aim in this paper is to introduce a distinctive, second-personal account of rights. I will call this the independence theory of rights, the view that rights are specifications of a basic right to independence against another. And I will argue that by taking as basic the second-personal thought you cannot do that to me the independence theory best illumi- nates the basic phenomenon of having rights against one another.

2014