Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2799
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Item The Defeasibility of Rights(2024) Gomez, Cody; Horty, John; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Consider the following puzzle. Presumably, you and I both have an equal right to life. But what happens if I try to kill you, and you kill me in self-defense? By most accounts, you did something morally permissible by killing me in this scenario. But, if killing me is permissible, then what happened to the initially granted right to life we both started out with? There is currently significant debate over how to explain this situation. Some have argued that my violent transgressions altogether forfeit my initial right. Due to my actions, I no longer have the right to life at all. Others have claimed that while I still generally have the right to life, this scenario satisfies criteria for a built-in exception to that standing right: I have the right in other cases, but not this one. Finally, others have suggested that I maintain my right to life in this scenario, but that it takes a lower priority in comparison to the right of the defendant, i.e., it is overridden. While the differences between these understandings of rights may appear subtle, they have drastically different implications. How we solve this puzzle affects how we adjudicate apparent conflicts of rights, how we make sense of what is owed when rights are intruded upon, and how rights function within our broader ethical and legal theories.In this dissertation, I develop a model of the last of these positions. To substantiate my view, I offer a precise model of the defeasibility of rights—situated in non-monotonic/default logic, a kind of non-classical logic—and highlight its strengths against competing views. Specifically, I show that this new schema not only salvages intuitions about infringement, but also prevents the unwieldy proliferation of rights. This is an especially desirable outcome, as it avoids blurring the line between rights and other important normative considerations. The first paper, Hohfeldian Conceptions of Rights and Rights Proliferation, argues that competing theories allow for wild proliferation of rights by adopting some form of the “correlativity doctrine,” wherein myriad duties and permissions are equivalent to rights, e.g., an act of charity no longer seems charitable if the recipient has “a right” to aid. The second paper, Rights as Defaults remedies this by rejecting the correlativity doctrine in favor of my Rights-as-Defaults Model. Using US free speech case law and work in default logic, I argue that fundamental rights are best understood as modifiable collections of defeasible generalizations. This model allows the right to free speech and its protections to accommodate new cases without building long lists of exceptions into the rights themselves while avoiding proliferation. Finally, the third paper, Revising the Right to do Wrong, applies this model to the question: do we have a moral right to do wrong? Do I have a moral right to offend a stranger even if I am required not to? I claim that there is no need for a standalone “right to do wrong” because understanding rights as defeasible means that any right can be overridden (or override competing considerations). I show how it is not paradoxical to say I have the right to offend you even though I, all-things-considered, should not, and even if we think interference would be justified.Item A Theory of Leadership and Its Applications(2023) Schwab, Leisa Elizabeth; Horty, John F; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)No system of laws and political institutions is without gaps, and leaders are required—often in the face of uncertainty and under a heavy burden of risk—to fill them. This project adopts a view of individual leadership that finds its roots in the ancient world with Plato, but which speaks to modern problems like the role of appointed administrative officials in a complex democracy and the problems of autonomous weapons. It is composed of a series of papers exploring this gap-filling leadership activity in a modern democratic state from both normative and descriptive perspectives. The first paper, “Making Ourselves Accountable: An Ethics for the Administrative State” addresses the discretionary decision making by un-elected officials through which many of our society’s important leadership decisions are made. It argues for the necessity of these leaders and recommends criteria to guide their decision making in conformity with contemporary democratic ideals. The second paper, “Seeking Standards for Leadership Reasoning in the Executive Branch by Analogy to Representation and Judicial Reasoning,” looks deeper into the work of such leaders to better understand the place of their role in shaping the law alongside legislative representation and judicial discretion. The third paper, “A Different Kind of Responsibility Gap: Trust and the Burden of Risk as a Limit on Military Automation” considers the problem of autonomous weapons in the context of this theory of the individual leader as a necessary component within the legal and institutional system. Inspired by ancient notions of the activity of governing as an activity fundamentally about leaders before it is about laws, it argues that even fallible human leaders who fall short of the ideal remain necessary no matter how sophisticated or accurate an automated system we may devise.Item A New Theory of Individualized Evidence(2021) Barclay, Charles Arthur; Horty, John F; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Theories of individualized evidence have been offered to show why, inter alia, we are not justified in finding a defendant legally responsible on the basis of mere statistical evidence even if the probability of his guilt is very high. Yet, there is little discussion of properties that we would want in a robust theory of individualized evidence. In my dissertation, I have four primary goals. First, I propose four desiderata that a robust theory of individualized evidence ought to possess. Then, I show how many contemporary theories of individualized evidence do not possess all four of the desirable properties. I then develop, what I call, legally relevant alternatives (or, LRA for short) - a theory of individualized evidence that is rooted in the relevant alternatives account of knowledge in epistemology. Finally, I show how LRA does satisfy the aforementioned desiderata.