The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Ake v. Oklahoma redefined the role of psychiatrists as experts in criminal cases. In addition to the expert's serving as evaluator and witness, the Court stressed the importance of the defense having a psychiatrist available to act as a consultant in the preparation and presentation of its case. This broader conception of the expert's role has raised et...

In this article I want to construct in a simple and systematic way an ethical theory of animal equality. The goal is a consistent theory containing a set of clear and coherent universalized ethical principles that best fits our strongest moral intuitions in all possible morally relevant situations that we can think of, without too many arbitrary elements. I demonstrate that impartiality with a ...

We experimentally test whether impartial deliberation leads to stronger concern for fairness in bargaining. In the experiment a seller can invest some of his/her time in order to generate potential gains from trade with a buyer. Conditional on investment the seller proposes how to split the gain. The buyer either accepts or rejects the seller's offer. To vary the degree of impartiality, subject...

This article defines in a precise manner three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice and studies them experimentally. We consider a first-person procedure, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, the impartial spectator and the ideal observer. As a result, we find striking differences in the chosen outcome distributions by the three methods...

In one of a series of short articles on philosophical medical ethics, Gillon examines the principle of justice as it applies to adjudicating competing claims for the distribution of scarce medical resources. He describes Aristotle's theory of justice--with its demands of formal equity, impartiality, and fairness--and then considers various substantive criteria that have been proposed to justif...

In deciding Ake v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court held that, when defendants demonstrate that their sanity is likely to be a significant factor at trial, the State must assure them access to a competent psychiatrist who will not only examine them but also render other assistance to the defense. There have been 28 known subsequent decisions in which appellate courts have ruled on the validity of Ak...

We address the problem of assessing value a language. consider stylized model multilingual societies in which we introduce axioms formalizing principles impartiality, monotonicity, invariance and consistency. show that combination these characterizes family communicative benefit functions assign to each language society. The within involve two-step procedure. First, they identify groups agents ...

In this paper, I first review some of the recent empirical work on the biasing effect that moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action. Then, I use Mark Alicke’s affective model of blame attribution to explain this biasing effect. Finally, I discuss the relevance of this research—both philosophical and psychological—to the problem of the partiality of jury deliberation. ...

Empirical methodologies and philosophy are rarely discussed together but this essay is about how simulations and experiments may be useful in the pursuit of philosophical knowledge. It focuses on how these methods can illuminate some fundamental problems in political philosophy viewed as a branch of ethical philosophy. It is widely accepted that the way a social decision is made can affect not ...