In this brief essay, I address the way in which "new originalists" Jack Balkin and Lawrence Solum use the Domestic Violence Clause in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution to support their theories. Balkin uses the Domestic Violence Clause to provide an example of an impermissible departure...

Theories of distributive justice are most severely tested in the area of disability. In this book (Introduction available for download), Mark Stein argues that utilitarianism performs better than egalitarian theories in dealing with the problems of disability. Egalitarian theories either give...

A common charge against utilitarianism is that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. The most straightforward meaning of the “separateness” charge is that utilitarianism conflates people, treating them as if they were not separate, as if they were parts of one person. In this...

Utilitarianism is more convincing than resource egalitarianism or welfare egalitarianism as a theory of how resources should be distributed between disabled people and nondisabled people. Unlike resource egalitarianism, utilitarianism can redistribute resources to the disabled when they would...

Neuroimaging studies of brain-damaged patients diagnosed as in the vegetative state suggest that the patients might be conscious. This might seem to raise no new ethical questions given that in related disputes both sides agree that evidence for consciousness gives strong reason to preserve...

There is a rich tradition in bioethics of gathering empirical data to inform, supplement, or test the implications of normative ethical analysis. To this end, bioethicists have drawn on diverse methods, including qualitative interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies, and opinion surveys to...

Scientific momentum is increasing behind efforts to develop geoengineering options, but it is widely acknowledged that the challenges of geoengineering are as much political and social as they are technical. Legislators are looking for guidance on the governance of geoengineering research and...