Sean Aas

Building on arguments from G.A. Cohen and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, I argue here that our rights in our bodies are not well explained by self-ownership – and thus that we cannot infer self-ownership from intuitions about body rights, via inference to the best explanation. I begin by arguing that self-ownership does not explain our rights in our bodies unless it is a reflexive relation, wherein for each rational adult X, X quite literally owns X – whatever X is. In the bulk of the paper, I canvas the most prominent metaphysical theories of what we are, arguing that each of these theories makes it hard to see how our self-ownership implies (much less explains) any plausible profile of claims regarding rights in bodies. I go on to sketch an alternative ownership-like theory of our rights in our bodies, on which our interests in fluent bodily functioning explain why others should respect our authority over our embodiments. Such an explanation, I argue, requires reference to social practices: our body rights are grounded, partly, in facts about actual practices, and partly, in facts about what any practices worth hoping for would require. I defend this appeal to social practices against objections, appealing to Kantian ideas about hope and faith to show why we might have reason to respect some body rights in advance of the arrival of practices that protect them.

The literature on the determination of death has, by and large, assumed that human death should be defined as the end of the human organism. I argue that this broadly biological understanding of human death cannot constitute a basis for agreement in a pluralistic society characterized by a variety of reasonable views on the nature of our existence as embodied beings. Rather, following Robert Veatch, I suggest that we must define death in moralized terms, as the loss of an especially significant sort of moral standing. Departing from Veatch, however, I argue that we should not understand death in terms of the loss of all moral status whatsoever. Rather, I argue, what we should argue about, when we argue about death, is when and why people lose their rights-claims to the protection and promotion of their basic bodily functioning.

The social model of disability claims that disadvantage from disability is primarily a result of the social response to bodily difference. Social modellers typically draw two normative conclusions: first, that society has a responsibility to address disability disadvantage as a matter of justice, not charity; second, that the appropriate way of addressing this disadvantage is to change social institutions themselves, to better fit for bodily difference, rather than to normalize bodies to fit existing institutions. This paper offers a qualified defense of both inferences. Social institutions have reasons of justice to fix disability disadvantage, because the choice of institutions that contingently favor normality incurs responsibilities to compensate those who disfavored, in that choice. Among other things, this responsibility implies that societies should not simultaneously materially disadvantage disabled people, and also withhold symbolic resources, by demanding a presumption in favor of personal transformation –thereby, undermining the social conditions for disability pride.

This paper develops an objection to unilateral acquisition of private property, and thus to the sorts of natural property rights that are often offered up as constraints on ‘redistribution’ taxation. I begin by clarifying the prima facie problem with unilateral acquisition, arguing that it is first and foremost a moral problem about the arrogation of authority, rather than a metaphysical problem about the ‘transformation’ of moral reality. But, I argue, no account of authority in the political case allows it to be arrogated without authorizing practices. Among other reasons: absent social practices, there is no way for putative subjects of complex authority relations to know that these relations are in place. Without this knowledge, subjects of putative authority relations are not obligated to obey, after all. This epistemic point, I argue, presses against ‘natural’ authority in property as well, whether we try to justify it in terms of general utility, individual interests, or fundamental rights.

What makes something a part of my body, for moral purposes? Is the body defined naturalistically: by biological relations, or psychological relations, or some combination of the two? This paper approaches this question by considering a borderline case: the status of prostheses. I argue that extant accounts of the body fail to capture prostheses as genuine body parts. Nor, however, do they provide plausible grounds for excluding prostheses, without excluding some paradigm organic parts in the process. I conclude by suggesting that embodiment is moralized all the way down: to be a body part is to be the sort of thing that ought to be protected, in a certain way, by social practices.

This paper argues for Serious Distributive Egalitarianism – the view that some material inequalities are seriously objectionable as such; not merely, say, because such inequalities tend to generate inequalities in status. Social justice requires equality, I argue, because basic social institutions produce important goods and are produced in turn by the relevantly equal contributions of all those that comply with them. E.g., basic social institutions make it much easier to produce cooperatively than it would be in their absence; therefore, these institutions produce, among other things, opportunities to participate in particular productive enterprises. But basic social institutions are themselves produced, in large part, by the compliance of those subject to them; these subjects, therefore, contribute to the production of the goods that basic institutions produce. This gives (at least) every compliant subject of basic social institutions a claim on these goods. And, I argue that, though some do contribute more to the maintenance of basic institutions than others, those who contribute more are too responsible for the fact that others contribute less to point to the consequences of this difference as a reason they should get greater returns. I conclude that all subjects of basic social institutions have equally forceful and forcefully equal claims on the goods these institutions produce; claims that render inequalities in the Distribution of these goods Seriously objectionable as such.

In The Minority Body, Elizabeth Barnes rejects prevailing social constructionist accounts of disability for two reasons. First, because they understand disability in terms of oppressive social responses to bodily impairment, they cannot make sense of disability pride. Second, they maintain a problematic distinction between impairment and disability. In response to these challenges, this paper defends a version of the social model of disability, which we call the Social Exclusion Model. On our account, to be disabled is to be in a bodily or psychological state that is represented as an impairment in the prevailing ideology of one’s society, and to be excluded from valuable activities on the basis of this representation. While this model refers to a distinction between disability and impairment, it makes no presuppositions about which bodies function ‘normally’ and which do not. It is the ideology of impairment rather than impairment itself that does any work to determine whether a person is disabled. We argue that this model answers some of the important objections that Barnes raises against prevailing social constructionist accounts of disability, and that it’s focus on the oppressive social positioning of disabled people gives it explanatory power that Barnes’s own account lacks.

In the past 40 years, disability scholars have emphasized the extent to which disadvantages suffered by people with disabilities are the result of social conditions inhospitable to their atypical bodies – developing what has come to be called a ‘social model’ of disability.  In this paper, we will argue that the contribution of social factors to disability can play a significant role in theorizing about justice: not in making all disability-related disadvantages ipso-facto unjust, but rather in giving the elimination or mitigation of many of those disadvantages higher priority in a just society. We will develop this claim in terms of a distinction thought by some political philosophers to determine the priority of eliminating or reducing a given inequality. Many theorists, following Rawls, hold that the reason why, e.g., class inequality is particularly objectionable is that inequalities due to class background are in some important sense social rather than natural. This, they think, explains the particular priority class inequalities have as a matter of equal opportunity. We argue that there is as yet no adequate account of this distinction; proceed to provide one, and argue that many disability-related inequalities are, relevantly, ‘social’, rather than ‘natural’, and therefore that addressing them should be prioritized under equal opportunity.

Many disabled seem to be thriving, physically and mentally - running marathons; starring in critically-acclaimed films and televisions shows; making groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Yet some are still tempted to insist that, to the extent that someone is disabled, they are unhealthy. Drawing on tools from feminist metaphysics and philosophy of language, this paper argues (a) that insofar as disability is attributable to society, rather than biology, it has no direct bearing on health; and that (b) even when someone's disability makes them less healthy than they would be without it, we are (epistemically) justified in saying, and (morally) unjustified in denying, that they are healthy despite their disability.

In this paper I develop an account of member obligation: the obligations that fall on the members of an obligated collective in virtue of that collective obligation. I use this account to argue that unorganized collections of individuals can constitute obligated agents. I argue first that, to know when a collective obligation entails obligations on that collective’s members, we have to know not just what it would take for each member to do their part in satisfying the collective obligation, but also what they should do if they cannot do their part because others will not do theirs. I go on to argue (contra recent proposals) that it is not good enough for members in this situation to reasonably believe that others will not do their part. Rather, for a member of an obligated collective to permissibly escape doing her part in a collective obligation, she must both reasonably doubt that others will do their part and stand ready to act in case others do as well.

This necessary condition for collective obligation points the way to plausible sufficient conditions – conditions that, I argue, allow unstructured collectives to bear obligations. For (a) if a collective’s members are individually obligated to be ready to do their part, in a given collective action, and (b) if that individual readiness makes it sufficiently likely that the collective will in fact act, then it is hard to see what could block an attribution of collective obligation. In particular, in that case there ought to be no additional objection that there is no existing, organized “agent” on which the obligation might fall. For agents are, simply, things that can act. To be able to act is just to be able to succeed by trying. Unstructured collectives try to do something, I argue, when each member acts on their willingness to do their part in that thing if others do theirs; sometimes they succeed, producing a collective action. Some unstructured collectives, therefore, can succeed by trying; therefore, they can act; therefore they are agents.

Rawls’s political liberalism is centrally concerned with the conditions for that possibility of liberal justice. I argue that we ought to care about the possibility of liberal justice because we are engaged in an activity—living together on broadly liberal terms—which is permissible only on the supposition that is characteristic ends, including liberal justice, can be realized. Further, I argue, if this kind of reasonable hope for the possibility of liberal justice is required, faith that the conditions for the possibility of liberal justice can be realized is requited, too. But though these Kantian elements in Rawls's views are plausible, so far as they go, when combined with Rawls's Hegelian impulse to reconcile us to our social world, they raise the worry that our faith in the perfectibility of liberal institutions is ideological: that it blinds us to the fact that liberal justice may not be justice enough.

“We do not live in a just world,” says Tom Nagel “That may be the least controversial claim one can make in political theory.” Our world, taken as a whole, is not just. But this doesn’t mean that it’s unjust. Some things are neither just nor unjust. To understand whether and how the world is unjust, then, we need to get clear on the nature of the justice-injustice relation. But we can’t do this until we get clear on the nature of a third property, the property things have when they are unjust-if-not-just. Questions about this property are closely connected to question about what kind of justice (the justice of states of affairs, people, actions, or relationships) is most fundamental. Drawing on this connection, I argue here that there’s some reason to think that things in general are either just or unjust if they are suitably related to distributively significant social relationships.

This paper explains and defends a view on which modal judgments are a species of normative judgment. To think that a proposition is impossible, I propose, is to think that there are reasons of a certain kind not to accept it, under certain sorts of suppositions. I show that, though this view of modal concepts does not entail that modal properties are normative as well, it does promise substantial progress in modal metaphysics, by helping us to understand what could make a property ‘modal’ in the first place.

A demon threatens catastrophic destruction if you don’t value his toenail clippings. That doesn’t make them valuable. Your friend’s depressed and could really use a win. Letting him win is still not good sportsmanship. These sorts of problems arise in any activity where it makes sense to talk about there being a right way and a wrong way to engage in the activity. In all such cases there’s a question about whether reasons which go to making something the thing we ought to do go to within practice go to making it the right way to engage in that practice. But there’s also a converse questions: do considerations which bear on what counts as the right way to engage in a practice always bear on whether one ought to perform the moves of that practice? Here I show that they do not, and sketch an account of the relevant evaluative concepts which makes sense of this.

Technological measures meant to change sexual orientation are, we have argued elsewhere, deeply alarming, even and indeed especially if they are safe and effective. Here we point out that this in part because they produce a distinctive kind of 'clinical collective action problem', a sort of dilemma for individual clinicians and researchers: a treatment which evidently relieves the suffering of particular patients, but in the process contributes to a practice that substantially worsens the conditions that produce this suffering in the first place. We argue that the role obligations of clinicians to relieve the suffering of their patients put them in a poor position to solve this problem, though they can take measures to avoid complicity in the harms that would result from widespread use of individually safe and effective reorientation biotechnology. But in the end the medical community as a whole still seems obligated to provide these measures, if they become technologically ...