LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Barbara Fried
Stanford University
Facing Up to Risk
Friday, March 21, 2014
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Over the past fifty years, the lion’s share of attention in Anglo-American moral and political philosophy-- Kantian, contractualist and deontological alike—has gone to developing (in Rawls's words) a "viable, systematic" alternative to interpersonal aggregation to resolve competing claims for scarce resources. One of the striking features of the anti-aggregationist literature is how little attention contributors have paid to the problem of decision making under uncertainty (risk). The omission is striking, because in the real world, no decisions are made with determinate knowledge of the consequences. In the paper, I argue the omission is not coincidental. As nonaggregationists themselves have acknowledged, nonaggregative principles cannot handle garden-variety decision making under uncertainty. As a result, such principles will seem to present a plausible, systematic alternative to aggregation only as long as the problem of uncertainty is sidelined. I discuss the pervasive structural features of the nonaggregationist literature that have allowed it to be sidelined. The same features, I suggest, are firmly entrenched in commonsense morality, with disastrous public policy consequences
Barbara Fried is the William W. and Gertrude S. Saunders Professor of law at Stanford University. She has written extensively on questions of distributive justice in the areas of tax policy, property theory and political theory. She is also the author of an intellectual history of the progressive law and economics movement in the 1880s-1930s, focusing on the work of Robert Hale, a leading legal realist. Her more recent work has addressed the limits of nonconsequentialism in political theory, moral theory and law.
The Legal Theory Workshop is not open to the general public. We welcome individuals affiliated with the Faculty of Law and closely related departments, including political science, philosophy, criminology, history and the Centre for Ethics. All other individuals interested in attending must seek prior approval from the organizers of the workshop.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
