Dr Lucas Miotto

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the 'man on the Clapham Omnibus' would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive 'enjoys widespread support among laypersons'. This is obviously an empirical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the 'man on the Clapham Omnibus'. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion.

Up until recently, most legal philosophers have argued that an action is a token of sanctioning if, and only if, (i) its performance brings about unwelcome consequences to the targets, and (ii) it is performed as a response to the breach of a duty. In this paper I take issue with this account. I first add some qualifications to it in order to present it in its most plausible form. After doing this, I advance a series of hypothetical cases which suggests that this account fails. I then propose a new account of sanctioning, whereby an action is a token of sanctioning if, and only if, it is performed in an appropriate context and is apt for punishing wrongdoers.

The relationship between law and coercion has been, and still is, a central topic in legal philosophy. Despite this, discussion about it is immersed in confusion. Some philosophers have noticed this, but hardly any work has been done to attempt to solve or even identify the confusions. This paper aims to fill this gap. Here I propose distinctions and qualifications that help us clarify the relationship between law and coercion and avoid confusion. Building on the clarificatory work, I then argue that despite there being several distinct philosophical discussions about the relationship between law and coercion, one of them should be prioritised.

Rather than making another attempt at proposing a single and unifying theory of global health justice, this timely collection brings together, instead, scholars from a range of traditions to frame the issue more broadly, highlighting not only different perspectives but also key topics and debates. The volume features chapters that offer both new theoretical approaches to global health justice, as well as fresh takes on existing frameworks. Others adopt a bottom-up approach to tackle specific problems, including the sexual rights of children and adolescents, artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, framing of neglected tropical diseases, securitization of health, and trademarks in global health. Brought together within one volume, the breadth of these chapters provides a unique and enlightening contribution to the wider Global Health field. This important volume will be a fascinating read for students and researchers across Global Health, Bioethics, Political Philosophy, and Global Development.

A non-coercive legal system is ‘humanly impossible but logically possible’.Footnote1 This has, roughly, been the orthodox view about ‘law and coercion’ in analytical jurisprudence since the 1960s. However, recent years have proven to be difficult for this view. Only a few years ago, for instance, Frederick Schauer argued in The Force of Law that the orthodox view is tied to what he thinks is a shaky philosophical methodology; namely, a search for necessary truths about the nature of law.Footnote2 Once this methodological approach is rejected – Schauer claims – the orthodox view loses most of its appeal as it seems unable to explain the centrality and importance of coercion to our legal systems.

Neste artigo defendo a tese de que o direito de não saber é independente do direito à privacidade. Há duas diferenças fundamentais entre esses dois direitos que os tornam independentes: (1) a direção da informação do direito de não saber é oposta a do direito à privacidade e (2) o âmbito do direito de não saber é maior do que o do direito à privacidade. Pretendo clarificar essas diferenças e fazer algumas qualificações sobre o direito de não saber, tal como os requisitos para o seu exercício e os limites desse direito. Apesar de o foco da análise não ser sobre um direito jurídico de não saber, ela traz implicações relevantes para o tratamento jurídico tanto do direito de não saber, quanto para o direito à privacidade.Palavras-chave: Direito de Não saber; Privacidade; Intimidade; Direitos Morais; Teoria do Direito. 

Resources must be fairly distributed. Hardly anyone would disagree with this statement. Besides, most people would agree that the fair distribution of resources is something valuable which we should care about. And people do care about it. Many of the heated debates about social security, social benefits, education, public health and immigration which have recently caught the attention of the public and the media are – or at least are connected to – debates about the fair distribution of resources. It is no exaggeration to say that debates about the fair distribution of resources are at the core of past and present public debate.

The idea that legal systems conditionally threaten citizens is taken by most legal and political philosophers as 'reasonably uncontroversial,' obvious,' or as portraying 'a large part of how law operates.' This paper clarifies and ultimately rejects this idea: our legal systems, it is argued, rarely address citizens via conditional threats. If correct, the conclusion defended in this paper might force us to re-examine core debates in legal and political philosophy that rely on the assumption that legal systems often threaten citizens: debates about the justification of the state, global justice, and the coerciveness of law.

Technology scholars and journalists have recently called attention to digital platforms' and devices' ability to influence users based on their present moods, stress level, hunger, and other transient features. For them, such influence based on users' present status - what the chapter calls "real-time profiling" - is not only a clear form of wrongful manipulation but also online manipulation's future. The chapter aims to explain what makes real-time profiling wrong (when wrong) and discusses problems associated with its regulation. After explaining what real-time profiling consists in and showing that it can be presumed to be a form of manipulation, the chapter argues that real-time profiling is wrong both because the profiler psychologically hijacks profiled subjects and because it works as a gateway to further wrongs. Towards the end, the chapter discusses some implications of the proposed account for the legal regulation of online manipulative technologies like real-time profiling. It is argued that existing legal frameworks are not fine-grained enough to deal with the wrongs associated with real-time profiling and related forms of online manipulation.

The assumption that coercion is largely responsible for our legal systems’ efficacy is a common one. I argue that this assumption is false. But I do so indirectly, by objecting to a thesis I call “(Compliance),” which holds that most citizens comply with most legal mandates most of the time at least partly in virtue of being motivated by legal systems’ threats of sanctions and other unwelcome consequences. The relationship between (Compliance) and the efficacy of legal systems is explained in Sect. 2. There I also show that (Compliance) must be rejected for it relies on unsubstantiated empirical assumptions. In Sect. 3, I claim that an alternative and more refined formulation of (Compliance) also lacks adequate support. I conclude with a few general remarks about the centrality of coercion in our thought and talk about legal systems.

Most legal and political philosophers agree that typical legal systems are coercive. But there is no extant account of what typically makes typical legal systems coercive when they are coercive. This paper presents such an account and compares it with four alternative views. Towards the end I discuss the proposed account's payoffs. Among other things, I show how it can help us explain what I call `comparative judgements' about coercive legal systems (judgements such as `Legal system a is more coercive than legal system b') and how it can help the development of social scientific inquiries into the coerciveness of our legal systems.

In this paper we extend Heidi Hurd's "correspondence thesis" to the termination of pregnancy debate and argue that the same reasons that determine the permissibility of abortion also determine the justifiability of acts involving conscientious objection against its performance. Essentially, when abortion is morally justified, acts that prevent or obstruct it are morally unjustified. Therefore, despite conscientious objection being legally permitted in some global south countries, we argue that such permission to conscientiously object would be morally wrong in cases of morally justifiable termination of pregnancy. After presenting and defending our "correspondence argument" we suggest that conscientious objection should be denied as a matter of public health policy in developing counties, even in cases where adequate referral services are possible. Towards the end, we extend our argument to midwives, nurses, and prospective students in the field. Given their essential position in resource-poor contexts; they too have no claim to conscientious objection.

O meu objetivo neste ensaio é mostrar que alguns dos argumentos geralmente fornecidos pelos movimentos feministas e pelos conservadores contra a pornografia não são argumentos sólidos e, por essa razão, são insuficientes para sustentar que a pornografia é moralmente errada.

In the past few years, health and human rights scholars have stressed upon the need for rebuilding or reforming our health systems to make them both more resilient to health emergencies and less prone to nurturing inequalities. Discussions about health reform often centre on the ends of reform: the kind of health systems that should be built and the demands of justice that they should be able to satisfy once reformed. However, little has been said about the demands of justice in or during health reforms. This chapter intends to start that discussion. Borrowing from the literature on transitional justice, we argue that an analogous problem of transitional justice exists in the context of health. We outline some of the key elements of transitional health justice, including some of its key demands, practices, and corresponding institutional framework. We conclude by highlighting an important relationship between transitional health justice and transitional justice.

This chapter introduces what this book is about. Our contributors, from varied disciplines, have thought of some problems in global health and have given reasons for why we would all be better off in thinking of a given problem in a particular way. Some have provided legal solutions; others have questioned the way we frame issues. Some have proposed newer frameworks that could be used to tackle injustices in global health, while others have used pre-existing theories of justice and applied them to modern-day health issues. But the goal of each chapter in this edited volume is the same – to provide some guidance on what would aid the field of global health in achieving its lofty aspiration of improving health for all people worldwide. We choose the overarching language of justice to do so.

Whether legal systems are necessarily coercive raises normative concerns. Coercion carries a presumption of illegitimacy and a special justificatory burden. If legal systems are necessarily coercive, coerciveness necessarily taints our legal institutions. Traditionally, legal systems have been regarded as contingently coercive. This view is mainly supported by the society of angels thought experiment. For the past few years, however, this traditional view has been under attack. Critics have challenged the reliability of the thought experiment and have urged us to centre the discussion on typical legal systems: legal systems made by humans to address human needs. Once we do so - they claim - we would inevitably reject the traditional view. This paper argues that the critics are wrong. After discussing key features of the society of angels thought experiment and responding to objections, it is argued that even typical legal systems are contingently coercive. Coerciveness is a feature that our legal systems can and should strive to get rid of.

When do people regard punishment as coercive? And do judgements about coerciveness mirror judgements about the justice of a punishment? This post describes our empirical findings about the relationships between coercion, punishment, and justice.