This article offers a new critical evaluation of the Rawlsian model of global public reason (‘GPR’), focusing on its ability to serve as a normative standard for guiding international diplomacy and deliberation in matters of war. My thesis is that, where war is concerned, the model manifests two fatal weaknesses. First, because it demands extensive neutrality over the moral status of persons – and in particular over whether they possess equal basic worth or value – out of respect for the beliefs of inegalitarian yet ‘decent’ societies, or ‘peoples’, Rawlsian GPR renders calculations of proportionality in war impossible. Second, because its content is provided by a conception of global justice (the so-called ‘Law of Peoples’) whose injunctions are addressed exclusively to peoples, as corporate agents, Rawlsian GPR pushes the moral evaluation of the independent wartime choices of individuals off the agenda of the global public forum altogether.

When Charles Bannelier’s French translation of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was published in 1877, it elicited discussions among French musicians and critics that can seem puzzling from our twenty-first century vantage point. The French were almost entirely ambivalent to the issue of descriptive versus non-programmatic music and were perfectly comfortable disregarding this seemingly central point of contention in Hanslick’s treatise. French critics focused instead on issues that seem tangential to the main thrust of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: German music education, the merits of philosophy versus philology, and so forth.

The French reception of Hanslick becomes less puzzling, however, when we consider the conceptual framework within which French musical discourse operated in the late nineteenth century. By 1877, musical aesthetics and criticism in France were an extension of broader trends in French intellectual culture, in which a materialist, realist view of the world vied with a metaphysical, idealist conception of the divine. Between these two ideological poles lay a rich spectrum of ideas that had profound ramifications for music and art criticism. The degree to which works of art could be understood as products of historical circumstances, for example, or whether art embodied ineffable meanings resisting explanation, were questions whose answers depended on one’s position along this realist–idealist spectrum.

In this article, I show how this tension between realism and idealism formed the conceptual framework for French critics’ readings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. I survey writings by Théodule Ribot, Jules Combarieu, Camille Bellaigue and others to show how this network of texts, when placed alongside each other, was effectively a manifestation of the realist–idealist spectrum. By putting these writings in conversation with each other, this article brings to light the intellectual premises of French writings on music in the nineteenth century. Only by understanding these premises, I argue, can we make sense of the French reception of Hanslick.

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework.

Explorer Joseph Elzéar Bernier's famous 1909 sector claim on Melville Island is often described as a key moment in the evolution of Canada's sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago. Writers such as Yolande Dorion-Robitaille and Marjolaine Saint-Pierre have argued that Bernier was unfairly deprived of the credit he deserved for his sovereignty contributions. Alan MacEachern has recently stated in Polar Record that civil servants in the 1920s were to blame for this supposed unfair treatment. In particular, he sees Oswald Finnie of the Department of the Interior as a man who was determined at all costs to rewrite the historical record. This article contests MacEachern's depiction of Finnie and his colleagues, based on a range of primary source documents. It also emphasises the little-known but very significant role played by James White, who first placed the sector lines on an official map five years before Bernier's 1909 proclamation. The article thus clarifies the complicated relationship between White's 1904 map, Bernier's 1909 claim, an earlier sector claim made by Bernier in 1907, and the views on the sector theory held by influential members of the Canadian civil service at the time when an official sector claim was made by Ottawa in 1925.

The origins of contemporary exclusion of surgical methods from patenting lie in the complexities of managing credit claims in operative surgery, recognized in the nineteenth century. While surgical methods were not deemed patentable, surgeons were nevertheless embedded within patent culture. In an atmosphere of heightened awareness about the importance of ‘inventors’, how surgeons should be recognized and rewarded for their inventions was an important question. I examine an episode during the 1840s which seemed to concretize the inapplicability of patents to surgical practice, before looking at alternatives to patenting, used by surgeons to gain social and financial credit for inventions.

Brad Hooker argues that the cost of inculcating in everyone the prevent disaster rule places a limit on its demandingness. My aim in this article is show that this is not true of existential risk reduction. However, this does not spell trouble for the reason that removing persistent global harms significantly improves our long-run chances of survival. We can expect things to get better, not worse, for our population.

The attitudes of physicians and drug manufacturers in the US toward patenting pharmaceuticals changed dramatically from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Formerly, physicians and reputable manufacturers argued that pharmaceutical patents prioritized profit over the advancement of medical science. Reputable manufactures refused to patent their goods and most physicians shunned patented products. However, moving into the early twentieth century, physicians and drug manufacturers grew increasingly comfortable with the idea of pharmaceutical patents. In 1912, for example, the American Medical Association dropped the prohibition on physicians holding medical patents. Shifts in wider patenting cultures therefore transformed the ethical sensibilities of physicians.

Secret, owned, Georgian medicines were normally known as patent medicines, though few had a current patent. Up to 1830, just 117 medicines had been patented, whilst over 1,300 were listed for taxation as ‘patent medicines’. What were the benefits of patenting? Did medicine patenting affect consumer perception, and how was this used as a marketing tool? What were the boundaries of medical patenting? Patents for therapeutic preparations provided an apparent government guarantee on the source and composition of widely available products, while the patenting of medical devices seems to have been used to grant a temporary monopoly for the inventor's benefit.

From the late nineteenth century onwards there emerged an increasingly diverse response to escalating patenting activity. Inventors were generally supportive of legislation that made patenting more accessible, while others, especially manufacturers, saw patenting culture as an impediment. The medical profession claimed that patenting represented ‘a barrier to medical treatment’ and was thus detrimental to the nation's health, yet, as I argue, the profession's development of strict codes of conduct forbidding practitioners from patenting resulted in rebellion from some members, who increasingly sought protection for their inventions. Such polarized opinions within the medical trade continue to affect current medical practice today.

One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the 'QALY trap': we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing responses to the QALY trap and argues that all are problematic. Instead, we argue that adopting a moderate form of prioritarianism avoids the QALY trap and disability discrimination.

Nowhere in legal history has the nexus between past and present received more attention in recent years than in the study of slavery. The memory of slavery has become a field of study in itself, and competing histories of slavery have animated contemporary legal and political debates. Today, new histories of capitalism have further illuminated the central role of slavery and the slave trade in building the modern Atlantic world. Across Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, new memorials, museums, and commemorations of slavery and abolition have brought new kinds of public engagement to the slave past. In the era of Black Lives Matter, understanding the connections between that past and the present day has never seemed more important, and historians are struggling with the question of how to engage the present in a historically nuanced way. One kind of engagement between past and present, among historians, lawyers, and activists, has been to draw connections between slavery in the past and in the present.

If group members aim to fulfil a collective obligation, they must act in such a way that the composition of their individual actions amounts to a group action that fulfils the collective obligation. We study a strong sense of joint action in which the members of a group design and then publicly adopt a group plan that coordinates the individual actions of the group members. We characterize the conditions under which a group plan successfully coordinates the group members’ individual actions, and study how the public adoption of a plan changes the context in which individual agents make a decision about what to do.