infonet-economy

This paper shows that the problem of treating people as equals in a world marked by deep-seated and, often, recalcitrant inequalities has implications for the way we approach the provision of security and justice. On the one hand, it means that racial profiling will generally be unjustified even when it might promote collective interests in security, on the other, it means that we should strive to create racially mixed juries, even in cases where defendant and alleged-victim are of the same race. The paper examines a recent report on race and jury trials in the United Kingdom and concludes that, despite the author s claims that all-white juries are fair, the data shows the complex ways in which racial differences are translated into unjustified and arbitrary inequalities. Hence, it concludes, racially mixed juries are desirable, and sometimes necessary for justice, though probably not sufficient.

This book explores the Janus-faced features of privacy, and looks at their implications for the control of personal information, for sexual and reproductive freedom, and for democratic politics. It asks what, if anything, is wrong with asking women to get licenses in order to get pregnant and have children, given that pregnancy and childbirth can seriously damage your health. It considers whether employers should be able to monitor the friendships and financial affairs of employees, and whether we are entitled to know whenever someone rich, famous or powerful has cancer, or has had an adulterous affair. It considers whether we are entitled to privacy in public and, if so, what this might mean for the use of CCTV cameras, the treatment of the homeless, and the provision of public facilities such as parks, libraries and lavatories. Above all, the books seeks to understand whether and, if so, why privacy is valuable in a democratic society, and what implications privacy has for the ways we see and treat each other. The ideas about privacy we have inherited from the past are marked by beliefs about what is desirable, realistic and possible which predate democratic government and, in some cases, predate constitutional government as well. Hence, this book argues, although privacy is an important democratic value, we can only realise that value if we use democratic ideas about the freedom, equality, security and rights of individuals to guide our understanding of privacy.

Three Problems make ethical life difficult for us, and explain the importance of an ‘ethics review’ of scientific research. The first is that we lack a table of weights and measures which would enable us to evaluate the relative importance of our different values and rights - such as rights to life and liberty. The second is that we lack a dictionary which can tell us what ‘life’ and ‘liberty’ mean, given than these words can have rather different senses, and which one we chose may well affect our conclusions about the value of research or of different public policies. Finally, we have no handbook, which tells us what to do when our values and rights conflict. Worse still, it is not as though we can wave some magic wand and make these problems vanish, nor can we make them go away by ‘trying harder’, ‘being less selfish’, or ‘more sensitive’ or ‘reading more’. Hence, the aim of this talk is to clarify the nature of these three problems, their significance for ethical review, and the ways in which a democratic approach to ethics might help us to address them.

The association of privacy with the shameful explains much of the ambivalence surrounding privacy. In particular, the idea that privacy is only valuable if you have shameful secrets to hide makes it seem that privacy is without value if you care about people's freedom and equality. At best, it seems, privacy protects hypocrisy and arbitrary social conventions which wrongly make us ashamed of our feelings, desires, beliefs, ideas and experiences. At worst, privacy enables people to hide behaviour that is deceptive, manipulative, exploitative and coercive – in short, behaviour that is immoral and, quite possibly, also illegal. In either case, it is hard to see what value privacy could have if one values democratic government, which is associated with freedom of expression and with ideals of transparency and publicity in the justification and use of power. The aim of this paper is to question this familiar, and intuitive, perception of privacy. I will do this by arguing that the fact that privacy protects people from shame is an important reason to value it if we care about democratic government. As we will see, privacy does not only protect the shameful – there are many forms of expression which are perfectly desirable, valuable and democratic which, nonetheless, require privacy for their development and full realisation. Still, it is important not to confuse the shameful with the immoral, the unjust or the illegal, or to suppose that privacy protection for acts which are shameful must threaten, rather than protect, our ability to see and treat each other as equals.

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.