🎉 Congratulations to SCLP Research Fellows Ambrose Lee and Taylor Koles on their recent publications!
📘 Ambrose Lee, ‘The bindingness of obligations’, Revus: Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law
Abstract: In a contribution to this volume, Himma argues for what I call “the liabilities view” for the bindingness of obligations. Put roughly, according to this view, obligations bind in virtue of their detrimental liabilities because of the reasons that we have to avoid them. In this paper, I first raise some doubts against this view. I then sketch an alternative view in response to these doubts. However, I do not go on to argue that this alternative view is superior to the liability view. Instead, I raise a worry about the alternative view in the latter part of the paper. I then go on to suggest that perhaps there is more than one general concept of obligation and we need both views to properly account for them.
📗 Taylor Koles, ‘The bindinCollective Harm and Instrumental Reasons’, Journal of Moral Philosophy
Abstract: Collective harm cases are cases in which the actions of a number of people result in a morally significant outcome, but no individual’s actions seem to make a difference to the occurrence of that outcome. This paper argues against the “Instrumentality Thesis,” advanced by Nefsky, on which any successful approach to collective harm cases must be instrumental in the sense that the reasons which it gives against participating in collective harm must involve that action’s influence on the outcome. First, I argue that Nefsky’s own account of collective harm, based on the notion of a “non-superfluous cause,” does not succeed as an instrumental approach. Second, I argue that Nefsky’s objections to non-instrumental views fail, and that we have good reason to think that a successful account of collective harm problems will be non-instrumental in character.
Well done to Ambrose and Taylor on these fine contributions to the philosophy of obligation and collective harm! 👏