Letters & Forthcoming Articles

Participation, Collective Impact, and Your Instrumental Significance. Forthcoming article by Julia Nefsky

Posted by JPE Editors on 2023-04-14

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 [...]

Fair Terms of Social Cooperation among Equals. Forthcoming article by Michael Otsuka

Posted by JPE Editors on 2023-04-01

Abstract: 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 [...]

Participatory Moral Reasons: Their Scope and Strength. Forthcoming article by Garrett Cullity

Posted by JPE Editors on 2023-04-01

A 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 [...]

Abortion Bans and Cruelty. Forthcoming article by F.M. Kamm

Posted by JPE Editors on 2023-02-16

The 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 [...]

The challenges of using machine learning for organ allocation. Reply to Sinnott-Armstrong and Skorburg By Esther Braun, Noah Broestl, Dorothy Chou, and Robert Vandersluis. Published October 15, 2021, in response to: How AI can aid bioethics

Posted by JPE Editors on 2021-10-16

In 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 [...]