Research output per year
Research output per year
Heidi M. Hurd, David C. Baum
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
This chapter lays out the foundations for a new positive theory of the consumer bankruptcy discharge that better coheres with common normative commitments and more persuasively explains doctrines that centrally define and limit today's right of discharge. It argues that our practices of debt-forgiveness are not about maximizing aggregate welfare, or about protecting individual rights, or about spreading wealth so as to achieve a more just distribution across society. Rather, they are about achieving and expressing personal virtue-not that of creditors or of debtors but of ordinary people, as citizens of a just and wealthy society. In short, the bankruptcy system is about the people, it is not about them; it is an institution required by persons of good character who live in a world of scarce resources with others of variable talents, dispositions, opportunities, and luck. It reflects the aggregation and coordination of the demands of the best "aretaic" theory-the best theory of what it means to be a person possessed of sound moral character within a society of unequally distributed benefits and burdens. When debtors are rightly forgiven, it is under circumstances in which all those to whom their debts are owed ought to forgive their debts, and all those to whom the costs of their default are passed ought to be willing to shoulder those losses.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | A Debtor World |
Subtitle of host publication | Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Debt |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 317-344 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9780199980000 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780199873722 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 24 2013 |
Externally published | Yes |
Research output: Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book