Welcome to the Journal of Practical Ethics, an open access journal in moral and political philosophy (and related areas), published by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, located at the University of Oxford.
Gregg D. Caruso
2023-03-31 Volume 10 • Issue 2 • 2023
Kelly McCormick
2023-03-31 Volume 10 • Issue 2 • 2023
Abstract: There are many sorts of day-to-day choices that are such that, if enough people were to choose one way rather than another, serious harm could be avoided or reduced, and yet it does not seem that any one such choice will itself make a difference. Consider, for example, how our collective consumer choices have various serious environmental and social consequences, and yet for [...]
Read MoreAbstract: Rawlsian justice as fairness is neither fundamentally luck egalitarian nor relational egalitarian. Rather, the most fundamental idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation. Collective pensions provide a case study which illustrates the fruitfulness of conceiving justice in these latter terms. Those who have recently reached the age of majority do not now know how long they [...]
Read MoreA familiar part of ordinary moral thought is this idea: when other people are conducting some worthwhile joint activity, there is a reason for you to join in on the same terms as them. Morality does not tell you that you must always do this; but it exerts some pressure on you to join in. It is thinking of this form that explains the moral pressure we feel to pick up our litter like other [...]
Read MoreThe United States Supreme Court announced its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, 2022. The ruling overturned the court’s decision nearly 50 years prior in Roe v. Wade that women in the U.S. had a constitutional right to abortion, and several states immediately introduced legislation to ban abortions from conception on. Occurring as it did only a few months [...]
Read MoreIn their paper "How Can AI Aid Practical Ethics", Sinnott-Armstrong and Skorburg propose an AI system for kidney allocation based on the preferences of survey participants. Their proposal that AI systems trained on large-scale survey data will result in more “informed, rational, and impartial” outcomes is optimistic. In an earlier paper, Sinnott-Armstrong and others state that “aggregating the [...]
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