The Cartoon Controversy: Offence, Identity, Oppression?

If the publication of twelve drawings of the Prophet Mohammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten , which sparked the 'cartoon controversy', was wrong, why might this be the case? The article considers four arguments advanced in relation to the quite similar Rushdie affair for judging such publications to be wrong, and asks whether they provide plausible moral reasons against such publications, and whether they justify legal restrictions on freedom of speech. The arguments concern: (a) the consistent extension of group defamation legislation to cover Muslims; (b) offence to religious sensibilities; (c) issues of identity; and (d) oppression. The article also considers whether such arguments can be acknowledged within a liberal model of toleration. It is argued that versions of several of the arguments may in fact be thus accommodated, but that they nevertheless do not provide strong reasons for judging the kind of publications under consideration to be morally wrong or suitable objects for legal restrictions. The argument from oppression is different, however, in pointing to different kinds of factors, but its applicability is limited both by a number of conditions for when oppression provides the right kind of reasons, and by empirical constraints. The suggested conclusion is that the publication of the Mohammad cartoons was not wrong, at least not all things considered, for any of the noted reasons, but that there might be other kinds of factors that are not captured by traditional liberal models of toleration, which might provide reasons for moral criticism of this and similar publications.     

On the possibility of principled moral compromise

Simon May has argued that the notion of a principled compromise is incoherent. Reasons to compromise are always in his view strategic: though we think that the position we defend is still the right one, we compromise on this view in order to avoid the undesirable consequences that might flow from not compromising. I argue against May that there are indeed often principled reasons to compromise, and that these reasons are in fact multiple. First, compromises evince respect for persons that we have reason to think of as our epistemic peers, and acknowledgement of our own finitudes as moral reasoners. Second, compromises are often made morally necessary by the shortfalls that unavoidably separate democratic institutions from democratic ideals. Third, compromises express a desirable form of democratic community. And fourth, compromises are often justified from a consequentialist point of view, in that they allow for the realization of values that would not be realized as well by the failure to compromise.     

'A Land without a People': an Evaluation of Nations' Efficiency-based Territorial Claims

This paper considers the role of efficiency arguments in grounding territorial rights from a liberal perspective. The view advanced here is pitted against some recent arguments voiced by Margaret Moore opposing the inclusion of any efficiency criterion in our moral reasoning about territorial entitlement. Though I argue against this view, my own conclusion – favouring the adoption of only a moderated version of such principles – is a relatively mild one. It maintains, on the one hand, that the beneficial use of land is morally relevant to determining its rightful owner, but, on the other hand, it also recognizes the limitations of any such principle of utilization. Ultimately, there are good moral reasons for viewing the way in which a given land has been put to use as a relevant component (though admittedly only one) of our account of territorial entitlement.     

Animals, Ethics and Public Policy

In orthodox moral thinking in the West, animals count for something but human interests take precedence. It is argued that this moral orthodoxy or animal welfare position is flawed. It fails to take into account that some animals, like humans, are persons and that some, so-called 'marginal' humans lack personhood. More importantly, although it is likely that animals do not have an interest in liberty for its own sake and have less of an interest in continued life than humans, there is little justification for the animal welfare claim that an animal's suffering should be regarded as less important morally than that of a human. It is concluded that the adoption of a 'sentiency position', whereby animals have a right not to suffer, has radical implications for the way animals are treated, ruling out intensive forms of animal agriculture and those scientific procedures that inflict suffering as morally illegitimate.     

Explaining Networks through Mechanisms: Vaccination, Priming and the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis

There is an ongoing debate about whether and how the existence of policy networks can be used to explain policy outcomes. Making use of the concept of priming, it is argued here that network structures create differential opportunities for interest groups to persuade decision makers to act in particular ways. In conditions of uncertainty where there is a pressure to take immediate decisions, priming can help us to understand why some groups are more persuasive than others. This argument is developed against the backdrop of a particular puzzle: the British government's refusal to use emergency vaccination during the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001. This decision is routinely accounted for in terms of the bargaining strength of the National Farmers Union. Against this it is argued that farmers' influence over government policy ought to be explained primarily in terms of the way they were able to prime particular arguments and so help persuade the government to act in particular ways.     

Dilemmas of ethnic affirmative action. Benign state‐neutrality or relational ethnic neutrality?

Affirmative action policies are in the spotlights again, in America as well as in Europe. Taking stock of recent normative and political debates I clarify the concept and modalities of affirmative action. From my moral pluralist perspective of liberal, democratic socialism conflicting principles of moral and legal equality have to be balanced in a prudent and context‐sensitive way. Wherever severe structural inequalities among ethnic and national groups are reproduced and strengthened, affirmative action is morally required. Some rules of thumb with regard to appropriate modalities, aims, forgetting and public legitimation of affirmative action are discussed. A short comparison of the institutional contexts of the US and The Netherlands demonstrates that ethnic affirmative action is both more morally required and more difficult to realize and to legitimize in the US. Canadians and Europeans beware of an export of US‐American ideological gifts.     

Fair-Play Obligations

The fair-play theory of political obligation holds that citizens incur obligations to obey the law as a result of gaining important benefits from their political communities. In this essay, I argue that the fair-play theory fails in large part because it relies on a flawed understanding of the way in which free-riding is morally wrong. Starting with the assumption that those who benefit from the efforts of others have a moral reason to reciprocate, at least under some circumstances, I show that the fair-play theorists' claim that this reason is grounded in a right to reciprocation, which the providers gain, does not succeed. Therefore this theory cannot provide an adequate explanation of how citizens incur political obligations.     

Offending the One Percent: Seven Arguments Against Distributive Desert

The belief that people morally deserve the income they acquire in the market is both powerful and deep-rooted. Nevertheless, most political philosophers are skeptical of the idea that market income is morally deserved. There is thus a large and uncomfortable chasm between the philosophical mainstream and the actual public. The purpose of this article was to inject new intellectual effort in closing this gap. The goal is the ambitious one of a comprehensive demolition of the notion of distributive desert. To this end, I put forward seven critical arguments. Four of them are common in the literature. Since these have been adequately discussed elsewhere, I mention them here briefly and only for completeness. The core of the article focuses on three original arguments. Overall, my aim is to show that, taking these arguments together, the case against distributive desert is conclusive.     

Mill and the Value of Moral Distress

People are sometimes distressed by the bare knowledge that lifestyles are being practised or opinions held which they take to be immoral. Is this distress to be regarded as harm for the purposes of Mill's Harm Principle? I argue, first, that this is an issue that is to be resolved not by analysis of the concept of harm but by reference to the arguments in On Liberty with which the Harm Principle is supported. Secondly, I argue that reference to those arguments makes it clear beyond doubt that, since Mill valued moral confrontation and the shattering of moral complacency as means to social progress, he must have regarded moral distress as a positive good rather than as a harm that society ought to intervene to prevent. Thirdly, I relate this interpretation to Mill's points about temperance, decency and good manners. I argue, finally, that my interpretation is inconsistent with Mill's underlying utilitarianism only if the latter is understood in a crudely hedonistic way.     

Dworkin on external skepticism and moral permissions

This article discusses Ronald Dworkin’s first objection against what he calls external moral skepticism, the view that denies truth-value to moral judgments. According to that objection, an external skeptic denies that substantive moral judgments can be true. But, at the same time, the objection goes, what follows from the skeptical view is that all actions are morally permissible, which is in itself a substantive moral judgment. We call this ‘the self-defeating argument.’ We argue that the objection’s success depends on how we interpret the idea of moral permission, an issue Dworkin does not clearly resolve. Against his objection, we advance two different arguments. First, once we learn what role the idea of moral permission plays in morality, we can see that any plausible view of some agent’s moral permission must acknowledge its complex character, and that the existence of a moral permission must have some impact on the balance of moral reasons for other agents. On this understanding, it is false that it follows solely from external skepticism that everything is permissible. Second, we argue that even if permissions have a simple character, not a complex one, they are plausible only when framed within a moral constellation of rights and obligations. So understood, it is, again, false that it follows from external skepticism that everything is permissible.     

Values,Frames, and Persuasion in Presidential Nomination Campaigns

This paper examines the persuasability of rhetorical value framing within a presidential nominating campaign, in an effort to understand how values and value-laden language may provide useful signals in electoral contexts where partisan cues are absent. Relying on a survey-experiment conducted during the 2000 Republican nomination campaign, I evaluate the relative persuasiveness of arguments framed in either individualistic or egalitarian terms. Drawing upon an “active-receiver” model of framing effects, I posit that Republican primary voters respond more readily to candidates when they use individualistic frames than when they use egalitarian frames, because individualism is a more “chronically accessible” value construct for Republicans. Furthermore, I hypothesize that this dynamic is particularly pronounced among more educated respondents, who have been trained to recognize abstract value cues and automatically apply them to applied political contexts. The experimental findings support these hypotheses.     

Loyalty Oaths in Finland

Loyalty oaths are a certain type of promise. What is their moral force? Do I by taking an oath thereby bind myself with some (new) moral ties to, say, the State of Finland? When can we speak of an oath as morally binding? These questions constitute the core of the paper. First, I shall give an analysis of promises and promising in general. Secondly, I shall try to analyse the question ‘Do we have to keep our promises?’ After this I shall consider some differences between standard case promises and loyalty oaths. After this the connection of loyalty oaths to civil liberty will be brought out. Thereafter I shall give a brief presentation of the politically most relevant loyalty oaths in Finland and ask if they can be considered as having any moral force. The paper ends with a few hints on the practical consequences of this analysis.     

Fair-Play Obligations: A Critical Note on Free Riding

McDermott rejects the argument that an individual, in receiving benefits from a political community, thus incurs a 'fair-play obligation' to contribute to the provision of these benefits. While acknowledging that an individual receiving benefits without contributing is 'free riding' and that free riding may be morally wrong, McDermott denies that such moral lapses entail communities having any right to demand support. Not contributing may be morally objectionable, but individuals may still have a right not to contribute. However, both proponents and opponents of the fair-play obligation claim do not sufficiently differentiate between different forms of free riding. Arguments tend to be based on rights that may or may not be invoked when individuals free ride through consuming externalities. However, this form of free riding does not entail any reciprocal obligations. Yet it can plausibly be argued that when free riding occurs in the case of the production of public goods, then communities can demand support from individuals, and can have a right to do so.     

The rights of (future) humans qua humans

Human rights are rights held “simply in virtue of humanity.” In unpacking this claim, we find that theories of human rights disclose (1) something about what we understand a minimally decent human life to be and (2) who we consider to belong within a community of rights-bearers. In this article, I address two interrelated questions: When and why do future persons have standing as rights-bearing members of a shared moral community? Are the rights held by future generations best expressed in the “greening” of existing rights or in a new distinctly environmental right? I argue that human rights theorists miss an important element of the human qua human if they take ecological embeddedness to be contingently rather than necessarily relevant to human rights. I therefore argue that there are reasons to favor a new distinctly environmental human right.     

THE EYE OF DOUBT: NEUTRALITY,RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORALITY*

Abstract: The conditions of employment of a professional public service together with the wide-ranging consequences of the actions of public servants combine to require considerable moral responsibility. Whatever political neutrality means for public servants, it does not mean moral neutrality. If public servants were never to exercise moral judgement in moments of truth there would be little justification for endowing the profession with the status and security it now enjoys. After some discussion of the origins of the professional public service, several recent cases of morally responsible public servants are reviewed and the arguments frequently given to avoid or trivialise morality are evaluated. My claim is that courage is the key to morality. The ordinary moral obligations that lie upon us all apply with added force to public servants. The truth that the eye of doubt beholds is that political neutrality brings moral responsibility. … the more civil servants, the more thieves… The Great Elector … not from the Castle … not from the village… Kafka … polite, upright, and mild… Hegel     

Weibo, Framing, and Media Practices in China

This study uses frames analysis to investigate online discourses and processes of political deliberation on China’s weibo (microblog) service. It offers a comparative analysis of competing discourses surrounding the case of Wang Yue, a toddler who was ran over by two motor vehicles in Foshan, following which 18 people passed by and ignored her plight. The study aims to understand how weibo facilitate its users to express their differences and deliberate disagreements with each other. The study found that Internet users are rational in the sense that they do not simply lean towards a dichotomised choice of ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-’ official discourse, but they are able to negotiate their moral choices by considering a wide range of social and political factors in such an emotional and morally controversial incident.     

Liberals, Democrats and the Agenda of Politics

Democrats sometimes wonder why liberalism, as a theory which values choice, should seek to restrict democratic choices by limiting the political agenda. This article tries to answer this question by emphasizing a value which is common to liberal and democratic arguments: that as far as possible states should rest on persuasion rather than compulsion. On this basis, it is argued that personal and political choice situations are not analogous, that not all the arguments for personal freedom are exhausted by the arguments for fair democratic procedure, that it is not irrational to fear that one might be in an unpersuaded minority, and that even democratic political outcomes cannot be substituted for personal conclusions. Some democratic theories do not accept the value assumed here: but they pay too high a price.     

Is there an obligation to reduce one's individual carbon footprint?

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one's individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter.     

Free Speech and Learning from Difference

In debates about campus speech, there are arguments from the left and from the right that the community function of a college and the intellectual functions of a college can’t both be maximized. Improving the community role necessarily entails placing limits on the intellectual roles, and improving the intellectual role necessarily entails placing limits on the community roles. Where these arguments disagree is in the valuation of the tradeoffs between these roles. I argue that the apparent tension between the community role and intellectual role of colleges can be resolved, or at least mitigated, if we make a clearer distinction between speech and community endorsement of speech. What’s more, if we understand speech to be exploratory in nature rather than declaratory, we may remove some of the status competition between different groups that characterizes the dispute. This can allow for potential complementarities to emerge from the community support role of a college and the intellectual role. The core idea that I wish to explore is the notion of discovery that is embedded in Mill’s defense of free speech and in his conception of experiments in living. This approach depends on the idea that we can abandon the goal of defeating our opponents, and instead embrace the goal of accommodating one another.     

Why should we care about competition?

Abstract

Most people believe that competitive institutions are morally acceptable, but that there are limits: a friendly competition is one thing; a life or death struggle is another. How should we think about the moral limits on competition? I argue that the limits stem from the value of human sociability, and in particular from the noninstrumental value of a form of social connectedness that I call ‘mutual affirmation.’ I contrast this idea with Rawls’s account of social union and stability. Finally, I show how these ideas provide the basis for a powerful argument in favour of social provisions for public goods: for example, a strong public health care system moderates the stakes in labour market competition, preventing the competition from descending into a life or death struggle.