Articles by Annabelle Lever

I am a political philosopher/theorist who mainly works on ethics and public policy/democratic theory. I’m finishing a book on privacy for Routledge and am working on a book of democratic theory for OUP. I’ve written on privacy, sexual equality, women and rights, racial profiling, the ethics of patenting human genes, democracy and judicial review and on compulsory voting. I have just started work on a project evaluating competing forms of proportional representation for their moral and political implications in the British context. I am also organising a conference on philosophy and intellectual property for May 2009 - the web site is www. philip-conf.org.

I just wanted to make some quick comments on racial profiling.  While sympathetic to Keller’s idea that compensation is owed those wrongly stopped, does he propose to cabin this to racial profiling, or does he want all wrongful stops by police to be compensated?  The former would seem to catch the idea that there is something different and, prima facie, wrong with profiling - the latter erases the idea that there is anything particularly ethically problematic about it.  He might be interested - as might other people in this discussion- by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s article in J Pol Phil; by my response to Risse and Zeckhauser in the subsequent issue of PAPA (where there’s a terrific article on torture by David Sussman); and by the discussion in Criminal Justice Ethics, ed. by John Kleinig (vol. 26 no. 1 spring 2007) - with an article by Michael Levin that makes it clear what a fine line Risse has to ride in order to distinguish his arguments for profiling from those he would reject.  Risse there responds to Lippert-Rasmussen’s critique and mine; and I have another go at the topic.  Hope this is helpful and sorry for being self-referential, but didn’t have time to read the whole post, and thought the references might be helpful. annabelle. PS Applebaum’s article IS terrific.