Organisation
Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics
Owning Institution:
Report
Legal validity and judicial ethics
It is commonplace to say there is a judicial duty of make decisions according to law. But this construction of judicial ethics is threatened by radical disagreement as to what it means to make decisions in accordance with law. In this paper Professor Tom Campbell argues that the legal system must be able to distinguish...
Report
Global justice and ideals
Discussing world-wide justice is messy not merely because of its scope, the amount of disagreement about the issues, cultural differences, uncertainty about political possibilities or the outcome of present developments. There are more elementary and fundamental difficulties, argues Janna Thompson. For example, how should we reason about global justice? Can we reason in the same...
Working paper
Better off deaf?
Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough's decision in the US to seek out and employ a sperm donor with a family history of deafness in order to maximise their chances of having a deaf child raises a number of ethical questions. Do parents have an obligation to give their children the best lives possible? Do parents...
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Do We Need a Normative Account of the Decision to Parent?
Leslie Cannold provides an analysis of several philosophically interesting results of a recent study of the fertility decision-making of thirty-five childless/childfree Australian and American women. While most women endorsed and expanded on longstanding normative prescriptions for how a "good" mother ought to feel and behave, they were at a loss (at times quite literally) to...
Report
State Terrorism and Counterterrorism
Igor Primoratz writes that when it first entered political discourse, the word "terrorism" was used with reference to the reign of terror imposed by the Jacobin regime--that is, to describe a case of state terrorism. There are also quite a few historical studies of some other instances of state terrorism, most notably of the period...