Moral status, rights, and parfit's no-difference view -- Rights that ethical responsibility cannot justify and agreements may not undermine -- What "must" be done to answer practical questions? -- Rights and their related duties -- Intuitions, the veil of ignorance, and strains of commitment -- Neuroscience, psychology, and moral reasoning -- The irrelevance of deontological distinctions and "moral inertia"? -- Duties that become supererogatory or forbidden? -- Rights and their limits: nonconsequentialism in light of the trolley problem -- The use and abuse of the trolley problem: self-driving cars, medical treatments, and the distribution of harm -- The trolley problem and economic policy -- Thought experiments: art and ethics -- The torture puzzle -- Rights and aggregation in a pandemic -- Harms, wrongs, and meaning in a pandemic.
Summary:
"In this volume, F.M. Kamm explores how theories as well as hypothetical and practical cases help us understand rights and their limits. The book begins by considering moral status and its relation to having rights (including whether non-human animals have rights and what rights future persons have). The author then considers whether rights are grounded in duties to oneself, which duties are correlative to rights, and whether neuroscientific and psychological studies can help determine what rights we have. Kamm next investigates the contours of the right not to be harmed by considering critiques of deontological distinctions, the costs that must be undertaken to avoid harming, and a proposal for permissibly harming someone (that allows for resisting the harm) in the Trolley Problem. Additional chapters cover possible implications of the Trolley Problem for such practical issues as correctly programming self-driving cars, providing medical treatments, and enacting redistributive economic policy. Kamm concludes the book by comparing the use of case-based judgments about extreme cases in moral versus aesthetic theory, and by exploring the significance of the right not to be harmed for morally correct policies in the extreme cases of torture and a pandemic. Where pertinent, Kamm considers the views of Derek Parfit, Tom Regan, Christine Korsgaard, Shelly Kagan, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Allan Gibbard, Joshua Greene, Arthur Danto, and Judith Thomson, among others."--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.