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  1. Fairness, Distributive Justice and Global Justice.Adam Hosein - manuscript
    In this paper I discuss justice in the distribution of resources, both within states and across different states. On one influential view, it is always unjust for one person to have less than another through no fault of her own. State borders, on this account, have no importance in determining which distributions are just. I show that an alternative approach is needed. I argue that distributions of wealth are only unjust in so far as they issue from unfair treatment. It (...)
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  2. Autonomy, Equality, and Freedom: Commentary and Expansion on Three Central Political Concepts.Lantz Fleming Miller - manuscript
    Autonomy, equality and freedom often appear to be significantly interrelated with one another. However, it has been a challenge to unite these concepts. This article attempts to take up the challenge and demonstrate how these interrelate: .
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  3. Must Prioritarians Be Antiegalitarian?Gustav Alexandrie - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-15.
    It has been argued that Prioritarianism violates Risky Non-Antiegalitarianism, a condition stating roughly that an alternative is socially better than another if it both makes everyone better off in expectation and leads to more equality. I show that Risky Non-Antiegalitarianism is in fact compatible with Prioritarianism as ordinarily defined, but that it violates some other conditions that may be attractive to prioritarians. While I argue that the latter conditions are not core principles of Prioritarianism, the choice between these conditions and (...)
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  4. Discrimination and the Value of Lived Experience in Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality. [REVIEW]Erin Beeghly - forthcoming - University of Toronto Law Journal.
    In Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination, Sophia Moreau embarks on a classic philosophical journey. It’s what philosophers nowadays call an explanatory project. The goal of explanatory projects is to deepen our understanding of wrongful actions and what they share in common. In this review essay, I argue that Moreau’s book embodies a valuable explanatory project and contribution to discrimination theory that ought to be on the radar of lawyers, legal theorists, and philosophers. After sketching the book’s arguments, (...)
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  5. Identified Person "Bias" as Decreasing Marginal Value of Chances.H. Orri Stefánsson - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of survival chances. I identify (...)
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  6. Egalitarian Justice as a Challenge for the Value-Based Theory of Practical Reasons.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2023 - In Andrés Garcia, Mattias Gunnemyr & Jakob Werkmäster (eds.), Value, Morality & Social Reality: Essays dedicated to Dan Egonsson, Björn Petersson & Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen. Lund: Department of Philosophy, Lund University. pp. 239-249.
    In this essay, I argue that the objections that have been raised against the view that equality is intrinsically valuable also provide objections to the view that all practical reasons can be explained in terms of value. Plausible egalitarian principles entail that under certain conditions people have claims to an equal share. These claims entail reasons to distribute goods equally that cannot be explained by value if equality has no intrinsic value.
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  7. The ethics of asymmetric politics.Adam Lovett - 2023 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (1):3-30.
    Polarization often happens asymmetrically. One political actor radicalizes, and the results reverberate through the political system. This is how the deep divisions in contemporary American politics arose: the Republican Party radicalized. Republican officeholders began to use extreme legislative tactics. Republican voters became animated by contempt for their political rivals and by the defense of their own social superiority. The party as a whole launched a wide-ranging campaign of voter suppression and its members endorsed violence in the face of electoral defeat. (...)
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  8. The Possibility of Democratic Autonomy.Adam Lovett & Jake Zuehl - 2022 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 50 (4):467-498.
    What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of (...)
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  9. Profile Evidence, Fairness, and the Risks of Mistaken Convictions.Marcello Di Bello & Collin O’Neil - 2020 - Ethics 130 (2):147-178.
    Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...)
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  10. The Levelling-Down Objection and the Additive Measure of the Badness of Inequality.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2020 - Economics and Philosophy 36 (3):401-406.
    The Levelling-Down Objection is a standard objection to monistic egalitarian theories where equality is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Most egalitarians, however, are value pluralists; they hold that, in addition to equality being intrinsically valuable, the egalitarian currency in which we are equal or unequal is also intrinsically valuable. In this paper, I shall argue that the Levelling-Down Objection still minimizes the weight that the intrinsic badness of inequality could have in the overall intrinsic evaluation of outcomes, given (...)
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  11. Educational inequality and state-sponsored elite education: the case of the Dutch gymnasium.Michael Merry & Willem Boterman - 2020 - Comparative Education 56 (4):522-546.
    In this paper we examine the role the Dutch gymnasium continues to play in the institutional maintenance of educational inequality. To that end we examine the relational and spatial features of state-sponsored elite education in the Dutch system: the unique identity the gymnasium seeks to cultivate; its value to its consumers; its geographic significance; and its market position amidst a growing array of other selective forms of schooling. We argue that there is a strong correlation between a higher social class (...)
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  12. Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance.Jacob M. Nebel - 2020 - Ethics 131 (1):87-106.
    Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...)
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  13. Pragmatist Egalitarianism Revisited: Some Replies to my Critics.David Rondel - 2019 - Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (4):337-347.
    In this article, I reply to some criticisms of my book, Pragmatist Egalitarianism, offered by professors Robert Talisse, Susan Dieleman, and Alexander Livingston. Some of the major themes and questions I address include the following: How are conflicts between different egalitarian ideals best understood and addressed? Does the quest for equality have a fundamental locus, or are the different egalitarian variables I identify in the book, conceptually speaking, on an equal footing? What is the relationship between justice and equality? How (...)
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  14. John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice.Piers Norris Turner - 2019 - In Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck. Routledge. pp. 80-93.
    My aim in this chapter is to place John Stuart Mill’s distinctive utilitarian political philosophy in the context of the debate about luck, responsibility, and equality. I hope it will reveal the extent to which his utilitarianism provides a helpful framework for synthesizing the competing claims of luck and relational egalitarianism. I attempt to show that when Mill’s distributive justice commitments are not decided by direct appeal to overall happiness, they are guided by three main public principles: an impartiality principle, (...)
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  15. Power and Equality.Daniel Viehoff - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 5:1-38.
    Several democratic theorists have recently sought to vindicate the ideal of equal political power (“political equality”) by tying it to the non-derivative value of egalitarian relationships. This chapter critically discusses such arguments. It clarifies what it takes to vindicate the ideal of political equality, and distinguishes different versions of the relational egalitarian argument for it. Some such arguments appeal to the example of a society without social status inequality (such as caste or class structures); others to personal relationships among equals, (...)
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  16. Why Health-Related Inequalities Matter and Which Ones Do.Alex Voorhoeve - 2019 - In Ole Frithjof Norheim, Ezekiel Emmanuel & Joseph Millum (eds.), Global Health Priority-Setting: Beyond Cost-Effectiveness. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 145-62.
    I outline and defend two egalitarian theories, which yield distinctive and, I argue, complementary answers to why health-related inequalities matter: a brute luck egalitarian view, according to which inequalities due to unchosen, differential luck are bad because unfair, and a social egalitarian view, according to which inequalities are bad when and because they undermine people’s status as equal citizens. These views identify different objects of egalitarian concern: the brute luck egalitarian view directs attention to health-related well-being, while social egalitarianism focuses (...)
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  17. Consciencism, Ubuntu, and Justice.Martin Ajei & Richmond Kwesi - 2018 - Nigerian Journal of Philosophy 26:61-90.
    Mkhwanazi (2017) has argued that Consciencism is an “expression of ubuntu” and that it “represents the essential elements of ubuntu”. Both Consciencism and ubuntu, according to him, are engaged with the re-humanization of African society for they both advocate for the restitution of humanist and egalitarian principles found in traditional African societies. In this paper, we argue that while Consciencism and ubuntu share common principles, the one cannot be understood as an expression or representation of the other. Rather, the principles (...)
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  18. Equality and Educational Justice.Michael Merry - 2018 - In M. A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer.
    Taking equality seriously means that we ought to consider the ways in which persons are not only unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged from the start – e.g., through genetic inheritance, wealth, or a parent’s educational background – but also how opportunities and rewards that result from these basic inequalities are later exacerbated in the distribution of goods and opportunities. The basic point of equality as a normative principle is not that everyone have similar things or achieve similar outcomes, that would be (...)
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  19. Equality versus Priority.Michael Otsuka & Alex Voorhoeve - 2018 - In Serena Olsaretti (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 65-85.
    We discuss two leading theories of distributive justice: egalitarianism and prioritarianism. We argue that while each has particular merits and shortcomings, egalitarian views more fully satisfy a key requirement of distributive justice: respect for both the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons.
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  20. May a Government Mandate More Comprehensive Health Insurance than Citizens Want for Themselves?Alex Voorhoeve - 2018 - In David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne & Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Vol 4. Oxford University Press. pp. 167-191.
    I critically examine a common liberal egalitarian view about the justification for, and proper content of, mandatory health insurance. This view holds that a mandate is justified because it is the best way to ensure that those in poor health gain health insurance on equitable terms. It also holds that a government should mandate what a representative prudent individual would purchase for themselves if they were placed in fair conditions of choice. I argue that this common justification for a mandate (...)
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  21. Review of "The Equal Society: Essays in Theory and Practice", ed. by George Hull, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. [REVIEW]Valentin Beck - 2017 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2017.
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  22. Taking Risks Behind the Veil of Ignorance.Buchak Lara - 2017 - Ethics 127 (3):610-644.
    A natural view in distributive ethics is that everyone's interests matter, but the interests of the relatively worse off matter more than the interests of the relatively better off. I provide a new argument for this view. The argument takes as its starting point the proposal, due to Harsanyi and Rawls, that facts about distributive ethics are discerned from individual preferences in the "original position." I draw on recent work in decision theory, along with an intuitive principle about risk-taking, to (...)
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  23. The priority view.David McCarthy - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (2):215–57.
    According to the priority view, or prioritarianism, it matters more to benefit people the worse off they are. But how exactly should the priority view be defined? This article argues for a highly general characterization which essentially involves risk, but makes no use of evaluative measurements or the expected utility axioms. A representation theorem is provided, and when further assumptions are added, common accounts of the priority view are recovered. A defense of the key idea behind the priority view, the (...)
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  24. Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People.Jacob M. Nebel - 2017 - Ethics 127 (4):896-911.
    How should we choose between uncertain prospects in which different possible people might exist at different levels of wellbeing? Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey offer an egalitarian answer to this question. I give some reasons to reject their answer and then sketch an alternative, which I call person-affecting prioritarianism.
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  25. Why inequality matters: luck egalitarianism, its meaning and value. [REVIEW]Alex Voorhoeve - 2017 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 3.
    I review Shlomi Segall's book 'Why Inequality Matters'. I argue that it conclusively establishes that alongside egalitarians, prioritarians and sufficientarians must sometimes regard a prospect as better (in at least one respect) when it is not better (in terms of well-being) for anyone. Sufficientarians and prioritarians must therefore relinquish a treasured anti-egalitarian argument. It also makes a powerful case that among these three views, egalitarians are in the best position to explain such departures from what is in each person’s prudential (...)
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  26. Egalitarianism.Ryan Long - 2016 - In James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  27. Luck Egalitarianism, Responsibility, and Political Liberalism.Ryan Long - 2016 - Dialogue 55 (1):107-130.
    Luck egalitarians argue that distributive justice should be understood in terms of our capacity to be responsible for our choices. Both proponents and critics assume that the theory must rely on a comprehensive conception of responsibility. I respond to luck egalitarianism’s critics by developing a political conception of responsibility that remains agnostic on the metaphysics of free choice. I construct this political conception by developing a novel reading of John Rawls’ distinction between the political and the comprehensive. A surprising consequence (...)
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  28. On the Scope and Grounds of Social equality.Rekha Nath - 2015 - In Fabian Schuppert and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer Edited by Carina Fourie (ed.), Social Equality: Essays on What It Means to be Equals. Oxford University Press. pp. 186-208.
    On social equality, individuals ought to relate on terms of equality. An important issue concerning this theory, which has not received much attention, is its scope: which individuals ought to relate on egalitarian terms? The answer depends on the theory’s grounds: the basis upon which demands of social equality arise when they do. In this chapter, I consider how we ought to construe the scope and the grounds of social equality. I argue that underlying the considerations social egalitarians advance for (...)
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  29. Introduction to the Symposium on Equality versus Priority.Alex Voorhoeve - 2015 - Economics and Philosophy 31 (2):201-202.
    This paper introduces a symposium on Equality versus Priority. It explains how cases involving risk are key to distinguishing these views and discusses a 'social egalitarian' critique of both 'telic egalitarians' and 'telic prioritarians'.
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  30. A Nietzschean Case for Illiberal Egalitarianism.Donovan Miyasaki - 2014 - In Barry Stocker & Manuel Knoll (eds.), Nietzsche as Political Philosopher. De Gruyter. pp. 155-170.
    This paper draws on Friedrich Nietzsche’s work to defend the (admittedly non-Nietzschean) conclusion that a non-liberal egalitarian society is superior in two ways: first, as a moral ideal, it does not rest on questionable claims about essential human equality and, second, such a society would provide the optimal psychological and political conditions for individual wellbeing, social stability, and cultural achievement. I first explain Nietzsche’s distinction between forms of egalitarianism: noble and slavish. The slavish form promotes equality, defined negatively as the (...)
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  31. The Equivocal Use of Power in Nietzsche’s Failed Anti-Egalitarianism.Donovan Miyasaki - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (1):1-32.
    In this paper I argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of egalitarianism depends on equivocation between distinct conceptions of power and equality. When these distinct views are disentangled, Nietzsche’s arguments succeed only against a narrow sense of equality as qualitative similarity (die Gleichheit as die Ähnlichkeit), and not against quantitative forms that promote equality not as similarity but as multiple, proportional resistances (die Gleichheit as die Veilheit and der Widerstand). I begin by distinguishing the two conceptions of power at play in Nietzsche’s (...)
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  32. Against Institutional Luck Egalitarianism.Rekha Nath - 2014 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (1):1-19.
    Kok-Chor Tan has recently defended a novel theory of egalitarian distributive justice, institutional luck egalitarianism (ILE). On this theory, it is unjust for institutions to favor some individuals over others based on matters of luck. Tan takes his theory to preserve the intuitive appeal of luck egalitarianism while avoiding what he regards as absurd implications that face other versions of luck egalitarianism. Despite the centrality of the concept of institutional influence to his theory, Tan never spells out precisely what it (...)
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  33. Review of Elizabeth Anderson's Imperative of Integration. [REVIEW]Michael Merry - 2013 - Theory and Research in Education 11 (1):101-106.
    Notwithstanding some merits of Anderson's celebrated book, in this review essay I challenge her belief in school integration as a proxy for justice. I offer a number of criticisms, not least of which Anderson's habit of cherry picking the empirical evidence to make her argument; the absence of social class in her analysis of racial inequality, and thus her unhelpful homogenizing of 'black America'; and finally her perhaps unintentional, yet nevertheless very real and problematic, denigration of black space.
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  34. Why Liberal Neutrality Prohibits Same-Sex Marriage: Rawls, Political Liberalism, and the Family.Matthew B. O'Brien - 2012 - British Journal of American Legal Studies 1 (2):411-466.
    John Rawls’s political liberalism and its ideal of public reason are tremendously influential in contemporary political philosophy and in constitutional law as well. Many, perhaps even most, liberals are Rawlsians of one stripe or another. This is problematic, because most liberals also support the redefinition of civil marriage to include same-sex unions, and as I show, Rawls’s political liberalism actually prohibits same- sex marriage. Recently in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, however, California’s northern federal district court reinterpreted the traditional rational basis review (...)
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  35. Jazz Bands, Camping Trips and Decommodification: G. A. Cohen on Community.N. Vrousalis - 2012 - Socialist Studies 8 (1):141-163.
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  36. The Incompleteness of Luck Egalitarianism.Ryan Long - 2011 - Social Philosophy Today 27:87-96.
    Luck egalitarianism makes a fundamental distinction between inequalities for which agents are responsible and inequalities stemming from luck. I give several reasons to find luck egalitarianism a compelling view of distributive justice. I then argue that it is an incomplete theory of equality. Luck egalitarianism lacks the normative resources to achieve its ends. It is unable to specify the prior conditions under which persons are situated equivalently such that their choices can bear this tremendous weight. This means that luck egalitarians (...)
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  37. Equal Standing in the Global Community.Rekha Nath - 2011 - The Monist 94 (4):593-614.
    What bearing does living in an increasingly globalized world have upon the moral assessment of global inequality? This paper defends an account of global egalitarianism that differs from standard accounts with respect to both the content of and the justification for the imperative to reduce global inequality. According to standard accounts of global egalitarianism, the global order unjustly allows a person’s relative life prospects to track the morally arbitrary trait of where she happens to be born. After raising some worries (...)
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  38. A Critique of the Incentives Argument for Inequalities.Max Seeger - 2011 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 25 (1):40-52.
    According to the incentives argument, inequalities in material goods are justifiable if they are to the benefit of the worst off members of society. In this paper, I point out what is easily overlooked, namely that inequalities are justifiable only if they are to the overall benefit of the worst off, that is, in terms of both material and social goods. I then address the question how gains in material goods can be weighed against probable losses in social goods. The (...)
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  39. Equality once again: Social Polic and the idea of Levelling Down.Tomer Lotan - 2010 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    The striving for a more equal society has been an inspiring ideal for social policy and a powerful engine for the foundations of the welfare state. However, equality as a political concept has been subject to ongoing criticism and has been gradually denounced. In an attempt to reclaim the appeal of economic equality, this paper endeavors to cross the common boundaries of redistribution and to offer a different equalizing strategy titled "Levelling Down". This strategy has been extensively debated in political (...)
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  40. Equality, priority, and positional goods.Harry Brighouse & Adam Swift - 2006 - Ethics 116 (3):471-497.
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  41. Postcolonial Liberalism.Duncan Ivison - 2002 - Cambridge University Press.
    Postcolonial Liberalism presents a compelling account of the challenges to liberal political theory by claims to cultural and political autonomy and land rights made by indigenous peoples today. It also confronts the sensitive issue of how liberalism has been used to justify and legitimate colonialism. Ivison argues that there is a pressing need to re-shape liberal thought to become more receptive to indigenous aspirations and modes of being. What is distinctive about the book is the middle way it charts between (...)
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