Chapter 6 examines what makes discrimination and microaggressions (as a form of discrimination) wrongful. Discrimination involves differential treatment where some people are treated in different, unequal, and worse ways compared to others, and where that differential treatment is based on possessing a socially undesirable trait that marks a person as bad and inferior. Discrimination is wrongful because it harms people in a variety of ways, impacting their circumstances, resources and opportunities, options, agency, autonomy, and well-being. It causes material disadvantage and distributive injustice that denies people access to resources and opportunities and prevents them from having the basic goods necessary to participation in society. It also demeans people and leads to unfair subordination, loss of deliberative freedom, and decreased autonomy. This chapter reviews the philosophical literature on discrimination to provide a pluralistic account of the many harms discrimination and microaggressions cause to people with mental illness, which altogether make discrimination wrongful.

Chapter 2 assesses what stereotypes are and explains what makes them both wrongful and harmful. The chapter begins by defining stereotypes, explaining their relationship to prejudice and implicit bias, and showing how they are maintained due to cognitive biases. I examine factors that go into making the judgments involved with stereotyping. Then I analyze what makes stereotypes wrongful, including their rigidity, their falsity, and the way they overgeneralize about a person’s experience so as to erase its nuance and complexity. I look at descriptive and normative components of stereotypes and show that negative stereotypes always make a normative judgment about the badness and inferiority of a person who fits the stereotype.

The field of drug studies is increasingly challenged by the rapid digitalisation of drug markets, raising the importance of reconsidering how drug laws and policies respond to the role of technologies in the drug trade, and their social impact. This chapter considers the famous case of Maximilian Schmidt, who was accused of setting up Germany’s largest digital drug shop under the alias Shiny Flakes and became the subject of media stories and Netflix TV productions. The case offers an opportunity to explore how the move to digitally mediated drug supply has altered the ways in which phenomena such as the ‘dealer’ and ‘dealing’ are constituted in socio-technical and legal contexts.1 Research shows that digital drug markets pose serious challenges to jurisdictional and regulatory frameworks and governments require costly and laborious police operations to adapt to the rapid development of these markets (EU Drugs Strategy 2021–2025, 2021; UNODC, 2022). Following the transition of drug markets and traditional dealer activities to digitally mediated formats, it has become important to consider how drug dealers and dealing are constituted and handled in law, and whether the technological means of dealing are reshaping how questions of responsibility, ‘harm’ and entrepreneurship are being understood.

This chapter studies how property rights are protected and recognized in common law. In doctrine, substantive rights are not recognized expressly but indirectly. Rights are recognized via doctrines that prohibit wrongs to rights. Common law protects rights in this manner for practical reasons. Courts are better equipped to enforce duties between rights-holders and aggressors than they are to work out the full scope of rights, and when the law prohibits wrongs to rights, it leaves to people the freedom to do whatever does not violate the prohibitions. To secure rights, however, legal duties and prohibitions are structured as seems likely to secure rights. This chapter illustrates nuisance and tort suits over train sparks. Both doctrines secure to owners and occupants rights to use land. The harm, interference, and unreasonability elements of nuisance are structured to secure use rights, and sparks doctrine rules out contributory negligence to secure the same use rights. This way of thinking about rights and wrongs goes against contemporary law and economic scholarship, and this chapter contrasts law and economic studies of rights with the approach developed in this chapter.

• Psychoactive drug use can cause physical, psychological and social harm.

• Drug-related harm depends on factors related to the drug and factors related to the person taking the drug.

• Drug-related factors include the type of drug, how it is used, the amount taken and the length of use.

• Person-related factors include genetic make-up as well as mental, physical and social health.

• Drug use can be broadly classified as recreational use, harmful use or dependence.

• For some people, the risk of drug dependence results from faulty brain functioning.

• Understanding patterns of harm helps clinicians decide if treatment is needed and, if so, which treatment is most likely to help.

• Some behaviour, such as gambling, can cause brain changes similar to those seen in drug dependence.

A broad consensus has emerged in recent years that although rumours, conspiracy theories and fabricated information are far from new, in the changed structure and operating mechanisms of the public sphere today we are faced with something much more challenging than anything to date, and the massive scale of this disinformation can even pose a threat to the foundations of democracy. However, the consensus extends only to this statement, and opinions differ considerably about the causes of the increased threat of disinformation, whom to blame for it, and the most effective means to counter it. From the perspective of freedom of speech, the picture is not uniform either, and there has been much debate about the most appropriate remedies. It is commonly argued, for example, that the free speech doctrine of the United States does not allow for effective legal action against disinformation, while in Europe there is much more room for manoeuvre at the disposal of the legislator.

State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem.

The words ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have different senses and referents. The idea of the environment is keyed to what surrounds us, and we can speak of natural and built environments as well as others. This book is concerned with ethical questions about the environment. Many of these concern problems that occur at different scales and cause harms of various types. Environmental problems can be viewed from technological, economic, religious, and aesthetic perspectives, among others. No single perspective provides the sole correct or exhaustive way of viewing environmental problems. There is an ethical dimension to most environmental problems and that is the focus of this book.

The chapter discusses the position of victims in international criminal justice and the evolution of their status and modalities of their involvement in the administration of justice by international criminal jurisdictions, with a particular focus on the legal regime of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The chapter highlights the centrality of victims as the core constituency of international criminal law and the mismatch between this aspiration and the limited recognition of their agency and rights before the UN ad hoc tribunals. It then examines how the ICC’s architects have sought to bridge this gap in the Court’s Statute and Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The ICC’s legal framework is unprecedented in this respect. Over and above the protective measures necessary on account of their engagement in the proceedings, it granted victims extensive rights to participate and be legally represented at different stages the ICC proceedings as well as the autonomous right to obtain reparations. The chapter surveys the key challenges this ambitious scheme has raised, as far as the admission of victims to participate, the organisation of their legal representation, and the implementation of reparations are concerned, and solutions that have been developed in the Court’s practice to date.

This chapter deals with all manner of state-derived prohibitions. Ancient states prohibited a broad variety of behaviours, threatening punishment for those who would transgress boundaries. The logic of prohibition was wide-ranging: from the marking of spaces, objects and officials as somehow distinct from the rest of ‘society’, leading factions within ancient states sought to preserve and protect their individual prerogatives. They also sought to reinforce their claims to leadership by incentivizing subjects to settle their disputes in state-sanctioned venues. The evidence for such prohibitions is extensive, but did they add up to something that we might legitimately call ‘social control’? Did ancient states succeed at inducing subject populations to accept their claims to rule? If so, how? This chapter suggests that the logic of prohibition was a site of contestation for both statecraft and subject-craft.