I make the observation that English sentences such as 添ou have reason to take the bus or to take the train� do not have the logical form that they superficially appear to have. I find in these sentences a conjunctive use of 登r,� as found in sentences like 添ou can have milk or lemon in your tea,� which gives you a permission to have milk, and a permission to have lemon, though no permission to have both. I argue that a confusion of genuine disjunctions with sentences of the above form has motivated the mistaken acceptance by some philosophers of principles like the one I call 鏑iberal Transmission.� This is the principle that if you have a reason to do something, then you have a reason to do it in each of the possible ways in which it can be done (though not more than one of them). I argue that Liberal Transmission and its close relatives are false. Wide-scope reasons are defined as reasons that have a conditional or other logical connective within the scope of the reason operator. For example, a wide-scope instrumental reason might be: reason(if you have an end, take the means). By refuting Liberal Transmission, I show that you could have wide-scope instrumental reasons like this while nevertheless lacking any narrow-scope reason to take the means, or narrow-scope reason to not have the end. This enables me to respond to two major objections to the wide-scope approach to the instrumental principle that have been developed by Joseph Raz and by Niko Kolodny.
Thousands of lives are lost each year because of a lack of organs available for transplant, but currently, in the UK and many other countries, organs cannot be taken from a deceased donor without explicit consent from the donor or his or her relatives. Switching to an 'opt-out' (or 'presumed consent') system for organ donation could substantially increase the supply of organs, and save many lives. However, it has been argued in some quarters that there are serious ethical objections to an opt-out policy, and that it would be better to adopt a different policy known as the 'presumptive approach', that requires explicit consent while also attempting to sway the choices of potential donors and family in the direction of donating, using various persuasive techniques.This article shows how reflection on the impact of a well-known cognitive bias known as 'status quo bias' can explain (i) why moving from the status quo to an opt-out policy might be effective in increasing organ availability, even without impinging on anyone's autonomous choices, (ii) why we might have overestimated the strength of the objections to an opt-out policy, and (iii) why the presumptive approach is morally objectionable, while an opt-out policy is not.
There is a libertarian argument for live donor organ markets, according to which live donor organ markets would be permitted if we simply refrained from imposing any substantive and controversial moral assumptions on people who reasonably disagree about morality and justice. I argue that, to the contrary, this endorsement of live donor organ markets depends upon the libertarians’ adoption of a substantive and deeply controversial conception of strong, extensive property rights. This is shown by the fact that these rights would prevent states intervening in cases of preventable and intuitively impermissible wronging of others that can arise when free individuals engage in voluntary offers and exchanges. I outline two forms of such wronging: discrimination and disrespectful demands. I argue that although these types of acts are morally impermissible, the policy question of whether and how they should be regulated by states is non-trivial. I then argue that there is good reason to think that organ markets would rely on disrespectful demands. This may help explain the widespread moral repugnance people feel toward organ trading. It also provides a , though not decisive, case for states to prohibit such markets.
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