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This thesis examines some of the contested meanings of what it is to be a self, person and individual. The law of obligations sets the context for this examination. One of the important aspects of contemporary feminist philosophy has been its move beyond highlighting inconsistencies in political and legal theory, in which theoretical frameworks can be shown to rely upon an ambiguous treatment of women. The feminist theorists whose work is considered use these theoretical weaknesses as a point of departure to propose different conceptual frameworks. I start by analysing contemporary work on the self from within both philosophy of science and feminist metaphysics to draw out common approaches from these diverse positions. These themes are then discussed in the context of the law. I then critically examine the concept of legal personhood in the work of Drucilla Cornell and her proposals for the amendment of tort law. This is juxtaposed with an analysis of the practical operation of tort law by adapting François Ewald's work on risk and insurance to English law. I concentrate on women's ambiguous position with regard to both risk and to the image of the individual that is the subject of Ewald's critique. This is followed by an examination of the changing position of women with regard to 'possessive individualism', 'self-ownership' or 'property in the person' in relation to contract law and social contract theory. There are a number of different social contracts discussed in the thesis: Cornell's reworking of John Rawls and the stories of Thomas Hobbes and of Carole Pateman. The final 'social contract' to be discussed is that of 'new contractualism', the employment of contract as a technique of government. I argue that Pateman's critique of possessive individualism continues to be relevant at a time when the breadwinner/housewife model has broken down.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Alfred Mele, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Philosophy. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 15, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 174 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

The thesis is a study of relational norms - those norms that regulate how we behave in our valuable relationships. I argue that the presence of relational norms in the law reflects its capacities and limitations as an instrument for the guidance of conduct. I make three arguments in support of this claim. First, I argue that we have norms that are constitutive of our practically significant relationships. Second, I argue that the content and justification of these relationships is not necessarily reflected in their legal forms. Third, I argue that we can have relationships that are justified by their instrumental value. There are three Parts to this thesis, each of which is devoted to one of these claims. Part I discusses relational norms in practical reasoning. I identify relational norms as norms that constitute a relationship of value. I then argue that we can owe obligations to one another in what I call the 'relationship sense'. These obligations are neither necessarily enforceable, nor necessarily correlate with the rights of others. Part II discusses relational norms in law. I consider various constraints on the incorporation of relational norms in law, as well as the various relationships of correlativity that are sometimes said to define private law. I also consider the nature of legal rights to perform certain relational duties. I argue that although the duties are burdensome, these rights promote our interests, or at least are claimed to do so by legal officials. Part III considers the significance of relational norms to the general character of law. First I argue that we can have instrumental relationships - relationships that possess their value in virtue of some end that they serve. I then argue that any authoritative relationship that exists between legal officials and their subjects must be instrumentally justified.

This thesis calls for a reconfiguration of hate speech as a primarily normative phenomenon. All hate speech strives to weaken the social-moral normative status of its targets and in doing, justifies violence against its target. In light of this normative function, the harm of hate speech is reconsidered. Against traditional defenders of hate speech regulation, I claim that individual and collective harm is a highly likely, but not a necessary consequence of hate speech, while intrinsic harm and reckless risk necessarily follow from hate speech’s normative capacity. In light of the normative origin of such harms, a societal response with normative clout is required. However, while individual responses are insufficient to block the normativity of hate speech, I suggest that the legal system is characteristically well-suited to do so. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

One way to prompt people to act is to claim that one’s commands impose duties upon some persons to act and subsequently to command those persons. This is the approach of practical authority. The claim of practical authority is ingredient to a predominant conception of the state. This thesis argues that the state’s claim to practical authority is both unjustified and morally wrong; it defends philosophical anarchism. The philosophical anarchist argument advanced here begins with a defence of a presumption against practical authority. It then argues that no argument for the practical authority of the state overcomes that presumption. Thus the state’s claim to practical authority is unjustified. The philosophical anarchist’s position suggests that we rethink both the normative claim ingredient to the concept of the state and the relationship between states and persons. This thesis suggests that states claim legitimacy – that is, states claim that the potentially coercive legal directives that they enact are all-things-considered morally permissible. The thesis outlines the ideal of legitimacy in political philosophy, an ideal distinct from authority. An analysis of legitimacy requires an analysis of coercion. The thesis develops a specific account of the pro tanto wrongfulness of coercion that locates the wrongfulness of coercion not with the badness of the outcomes that the coercee faces but rather with the beliefs and intentions of the coercer. Two upshots emerge from that account. The first is that legal directives are not necessarily coercive. The second is that the conditions which render coercion pro tanto wrongful also render the state’s claim to practical authority wrongful. However, whereas coercion is justifiable by an appeal to reasons that defeat its pro tanto wrongfulness, the philosophical anarchist shows that the state’s claim to practical authority is not so justifiable. Therefore, the state’s claim to practical authority is decisively wrongful.

This thesis is about the legal and moral status of abortion. It is primarily concerned with the metaphysical status of the foetus, with particular attention to the question whether the foetus is properly characterised as a person in the philosophical sense. The argument of the thesis proceeds in two parts. The first part surveys certain lines of argument to the effect that the question of prenatal personhood is immaterial to the moral and legal permissibility of abortion. Against these claims, it argues that the personhood status of the foetus is indeed central to the moral and legal appraisal of abortion practice. The second part focuses on the metaphysical question in its own right. The thesis proposes a theoretical underpinning for the ‘gradualist’ view of human life before birth, according to which the human foetus is a fuller instantiation of a person the more biologically developed it is. It sets out to defend the kernel of the gradualist thesis against a cluster of criticisms, commonly advanced by those who endorse the belief that the personhood of human beings begins at conception. One notable challenge of this sort, which the thesis aims to address, asserts that any graduated account of personhood before birth is logically inconsistent with basic human equality. Finally, the thesis considers a few practical implications for the legal regulation of abortion stemming from the gradualist thesis, and the rule of law standards by which a regulatory framework must abide.

The legal restriction of hate speech – i.e. speech that expresses contempt for people on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, or sexuality – is now commonplace in liberal legal systems outside the United States. This thesis takes up the question of whether restrictions on hate speech are generally justifiable. I begin by explaining why liberals should not dismiss anti-hate speech law from the outset as an intolerable violation of free speech. My analysis of the case for anti-hate speech law is thereafter framed by two main concerns. Firstly, I stress that if we are to impose legal restrictions on hate speech, we must establish not just that there are harmful outcomes associated with hate speech, but that those who engage in hate speech are responsible for those outcomes. Secondly, I argue that restrictions on hate speech should be assessed in two distinct classes. Inquiries into the justificatory bases of anti-hate speech law are typically conducted as if informative generalisations can be made about how the law should respond to anything that is properly called hate speech. Against this approach, I argue that while the liberal state can and should impose restrictions on directly harmful hate speech (in which hate speech is used to threaten, harass, and incite violence), restrictions on indirectly harmful hate speech – in which hate speech (allegedly) contributes to identity-based social hierarchies and their concomitant harms – are not justifiable. The problem with restrictions on indirectly harmful hate speech is not the structure of the liability-ascription framework under which they operate. Rather, I argue, the problem is epistemic: we cannot confidently judge that hate-speakers are in fact responsible for contributing, more than trivially, to the harmful patterns of identity-based inequality and disadvantage in light of which restrictions on indirectly harmful hate speech may be defended in principle.

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This thesis claims that if law has a distinctive and genuine normative force, then it is thanks to the fact that law’s authority originates from a particular institutional layout that allows for a division of moral labour between legislation and adjudication. After establishing what the moral dimension of authority is a matter of, and how law’s normative force can be justified by reference to it, this thesis defends a comprehensive-moral account of law’s authority. In this respect, the thesis argues that the moral dimension of law’s authority can be highlighted well if we consider it as emerging through a morally meaningful institutional distinction between legislation and adjudication: the institutional profile of legislative authority and that of adjudicative authority differ from each other, in that each can be said to be underlain by its own evaluative standards. On the one hand, the particularity of legislative authority is a matter of its community-driven, forward-looking character and of its consensual structure; as well as of the declaratory nature and the agent-relative status of reasons issued by legislative provisions. On the other hand, adjudicative authority is distinctive because it has a litigant-driven, remedial character and employs an adversarial structure so that it accomplishes its impartial investigatory task through the issuance of agent-neutral reasons. So understood, the institutional profile of legislative authority is considered to be morally meaningful in the sense that it incorporates a rule-consequentialist and value-pluralist rationale; while that of adjudicative authority is taken to owe its own moral meaningfulness to the fact that it fosters reciprocity between litigants.