infonet-economy

In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to form families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy.

Are intellectual property rights a threat to autonomy, global justice, indigenous rights, access to life-saving knowledge and medicines? The chapters in this volume examine the justification of patents, copyrights and trade marks in light of the political and moral controversy over TRIPS (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). Written by a distinguished international group of experts, the volume draws on the latest philosophical work on autonomy, equality, property ownership and human rights in order to explore the moral, political and economic implications of property rights in ideas. Written with an interdisciplinary audience in mind, these essays introduce readers to the latest debates in the philosophy of intellectual property,whether their interests are in the restrictions that copyright places on the reproduction of music and printed words or in the morality and legality of patenting human genes, essential medicines or traditional knowledge.

Neuroscience, like genomic science creates new ways of harming, as well as helping, people. However, this paper argues, these are unlikely fundamentally to challenge the reasons to value privacy, or our ability to protect it for the foreseeable future. Rather, the main threat to privacy comes from the difficulty of determining its nature and value. Hence, this paper looks at the philosophical difficulties in understanding the value of privacy, and shows how we can use the justification of the secret ballot in democratic societies to illuminate the importance of privacy to people’s freedom and equality. It shows that the value of privacy has implications for the procedural, as well as substantive, aspects of neuroethics, and concludes that the threats neuroscience poses to privacy highlight the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the ethical use and development of neuroscience.

“Statistical models are like bikinis: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” Aaron Levenstein What is the role of lay deliberation – if any – in health-care rationing, and administration more generally? Two potential answers are suggested by recent debates on the subject. One, which I will call the technocratic answer, suggests that there is no distinctive role for lay participation once ordinary democratic politics has set the goals and priorities which reform should implement. This view suggests that determining how best to achieve those ends, and then actually achieving them, is a matter for experts armed with the best evidence available to them, both of the subject area involved, and of management and administrative excellence. 1 By contrast, the second – deliberative – view holds that lay deliberation has an important role in the administration and execution of government policy. This is because these latter inevitably have a political element which needs to reflect democratic norms and values, and because lay people are, themselves,a source of information, even of wisdom, that experts will want to use in fulfilling their professional responsibilities. Recent debates on the value of lay participationin healthcare provision can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, as can the experience of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). So, I will start by examining two articles by Albert Weale, which attempt to clarify the role that lay deliberation should have in healthcare, before turning to the dilemmas for both the technocratic and deliberative views which emerge from the experience of NICE.

Human gene patents are patents on human genes that have been removed from human bodies and scientifically isolated and manipulated in a laboratory. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the USPTO) has issued thousands of patents on such genes, and patents have also been granted by the European Patent Office, (the EPO). Legal and moral justification, however, are not identical, and it is possible for a legal decision to be immoral although consistent with legal precedent and procedure. So, it is surprising to learn that some people believe that the legal justification of human gene patents can remove the most serious moral objections to them. Yet, those who are well-versed in patent law often believe that confusion over some quite basic legal and scientific facts accounts for moral objections to such patents and, in particular, for the belief that they justify the ownership of one person by another. Once these confusions are removed, they contend, we will see that there is nothing especially alarming about patents on human genes, and no reason to believe them immoral. Such claims seem especially surprising because the morality of an invention is generally supposed to have little role in decisions about whether or not an invention deserves a patent under U.S. law. Although the European Patent Convention’s article 53 (a) prohibits patenting inventions, the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to public order or morality, it turns out that this clause rarely justifies withholding a patent from an invention that otherwise meets legal criteria. Thus, although more than 320,000 patents have been granted by the EPO since its creation, this clause has never been used successfully to strike down a claim for a patent. Indeed, Ulrich Schatz explains, “Poisons, explosives, extremely dangerous chemical substances, devices used in nuclear power stations, agro-chemicals, pesticides and many other things which can threaten human life or damage the environment have been patented, despite the existence of the public order and morality bar” in almost all European countries. Indeed, this paper shows, while ethical objections to human gene patents are often controversial, they need not be unreasonable, nor need they depend on mistaken assumptions about patent law. Rather, they may reflect familiar ethical concerns about the dominance of commercial imperatives in modern societies; concerns about the disparities in power and wealth amongst individuals and countries; and concerns about the lack of public discussion, transparency and accountability surrounding significant changes in people’s rights, status and opportunities. Hence, I conclude, ethical concerns cannot be easily dismissed and, indeed, point to the need to think harder about the nature and justification of patent law, itself.

Compulsory voting is sometimes thought to be justified in democracies because it promotes high levels of voting and mitigates inequalities of turnout amongst social groups. Proponents of compulsory voting also argue that it helps to prevent the free-riding of non-voters on voters. This article casts a sceptical eye on both arguments. Democratic citizens do not have a duty to promote their self-interest,and their duties to others do not generally require them to vote, or to attend the polls. So, while people are sometimes morally obliged to vote, and to vote one way rather than another, legal compulsion to vote or to turn out is generally unjustified and inconsistent with democratic government.

Lisa Hill’s response to my critique of compulsory voting, like similar responses elsewhere,1 remind me how much a child of the 1970s I am, and how far my beliefs and intuitions about politics have been shaped by the electoral conflicts, social movements and violence of that period. But my perceptions of politics have also been profoundly shaped by my teachers, and fellow graduate students, at MIT. Theda Skocpol famously urged political scientists to ‘bring the state back in’ to their analyses,2 and to recognize that political identities, interests and coalitions cannot be read off straightforwardly from people’s socio-economic positions. In their different ways, this was the lesson that Suzanne Berger, Charles Sabel and Joshua Cohen tried to teach us, emphasizing that political participation and conflict, themselves, can change people’s identities, their sense of what is desirable and possible, and their ability to make common cause with others.3 I do not take it as self-evident, therefore, that the poor and seemingly powerless should be politically apathetic, unwilling to vote, or incapable of imagining a political solution to at least some of the problems confronting them. Nor do I suppose that non-voters are all of a piece, and that their shared interests are, inevitably, more significant than those that divide them. Such assumptions seem mistaken in the case of voters, and I see no reason why they should be true of non-voters. The people we find in these categories are not predestined to be in one rather than the other; they do not always stay where they start off; and at an individual level, the reasons why people fall into one group, rather than another, are likely to be complex and sometimes unpredictable.

This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics likeWaldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation.Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic simply because it enables unelected judges to over-rule elected legislators when people disagree about rights. Against recent defenders of judicial review, such as Eisgruber and Brettschneider, it shows that democratic arguments for judicial review do not require judges to be better at protecting rights than legislators.Hence a democratic justification for judicial reviewdoes not depend on complex and inevitably controversial interpretations and evaluations of judicial as opposed to legislative judgments. Democratic government does not demand special virtue, competence or wisdom in its citizens or their leaders. From a democratic perspective, therefore, the case for judicial review is that it enables individuals to vindicate their rights against government in ways that parallel those they commonly use against each other. This makes judicial review normatively attractive whether or not it leads to better decisions thanwould be made by other means.

How should trial experts approach cases of racial profiling? As a British philosopher, albeit one who has lived and worked in the States, all I can offer are some suggestions and some questions to help readers make the most of their expertise. These are motivated by two concerns. First, from a British perspective, American jury selection is alien to our understanding of the ideal that people are tried by ‘a jury of their peers’. In particular, the American practice of selective strikes raises the worry that you cannot consistently ask jurors to evaluate the use of race-based expectations by police when the jury selection process, itself, is shaped by the idea that race is a good predictor of people’s beliefs and behaviour. The second concern is an extension and generalisation of the first, and exemplifies the problems posed by racial profiling: what does it mean to treat people as equals in a world where people are disadvantaged because of their race? I will take these concerns in reverse order, briefly say something about them, and then suggest some approaches to racial profiling that, I hope, will be of practical, as well as theoretical, use.