Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Craig Purshouse, ‘A utilitarian theory of private law’
ABSTRACT Private law covers a range of areas such as torts, contract law and property and its focus is on the rights we have against one another. It is often contrasted with public law, which is concerned with our rights against the state. Attempts to theorize private law have elicited widespread criticism for failing to […]
Ethan Leib, ‘Contract as Vow or Oath’
ABSTRACT Many scholars and judges attempt to harmonize legal practices of contracting with the social practice of promising in ordinary life. This article explores an alternative genealogy of contract in traditional social practices that track many of contract’s core norms: taking vows and oaths. Without denying that promissory morality infiltrates modern contract, contract-as-vow-or-oath can expose […]
Adam Slavny, ‘Varieties of Consequentialism and Deontology in Theories of Tort Law’
ABSTRACT An important contribution of Gregory Keating’s Reasonableness and Risk is to mount objections to law and economics whilst articulating an alternative deontological vision of tort law to that offered by corrective justice theorists. In this paper I offer two reservations about Keating’s account. One is that some forms of consequentialism can accommodate at least […]
Mark Gergen, ‘Contract Law’s Morality and Punitive Debt Enforcement’
ABSTRACT This article uses punitive enforcement of personal debt to critically examine contemporary moral theories of contract. Charles Fried and Peter Benson take the position contract law appropriately embodies the morality of commercial exchange. This has unacceptable implications for enforcement of personal debt because it licenses creditors to demand and enforce as harsh terms as […]
Kenneth Simons, ‘Exploring Nonconsequentialist Accounts of Negligence and Risky Tradeoffs’
ABSTRACT Negligence doctrine dominates tort law, yet its scope and underlying justification remain contested. One of the most controversial questions is the propriety of employing the Learned Hand test as a criterion of reasonable care or ordinary prudence. Is it helpful, or even essential, to evaluate whether the actor’s burden of taking a precaution (B) […]
‘Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility’
A self-driving taxi has no passengers, so it parks itself in a lot to reduce congestion and air pollution. After being hailed, the taxi heads out to pick up its passenger – and tragically strikes a pedestrian in a crosswalk on its way. Who or what deserves praise for the car’s actions to reduce congestion […]
Cameron Harwick, ‘Morality is Fractal’
ABSTRACT If the basic purpose of moral norms is to coordinate on the conditions under which one should cooperate in social dilemmas, this paper shows that the boundaries of such conditions must be fractal. In other words, as one focuses on the border of the area in signal space where the best response flips from […]
Guanghua Yu, ‘The Idea of Private Law: A Communitarian version of Kantian Rights’
ABSTRACT This Article begins with the introduction of two competing schools in private law. One school claims that private law is to achieve efficient resource allocation or wealth maximization. The other school follows the bipolar structure of corrective justice with the assistance of the Kantian theory. While each side is very strong and elegant, neither […]
Diogo Tapada dos Santos, ‘A Concept of Personal Autonomy Fit for Contract Law’
ABSTRACT The interplays between autonomy and many areas of law are somehow evident but many times redundant and unclear. In this paper, I offer an account of personal autonomy that can be useful in reading private law phenomena, especially focusing on the doctrine of contract as promise. This doctrine, which assimilates contracts and promises, poses […]
‘The Ethics of Personalised Digital Duplicates: A Minimally Viable Permissibility Principle’
It’s now possible, with the right set of training data, for anyone to create a digital copy of anyone. Some people have already done this as part of research projects, and employers are proposing to do it for employees. What are the ethics of this practice? Should you ever consent to having a digital copy […]