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What is the point of equality

Ethics 109 (2):287-337 (1999)

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  1. Scaffolding informed consent.Dominic Wilkinson & Neil Levy - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    The principle of respecting patient autonomy underpins the concept and practice of informed consent. Yet current approaches to consent often ignore the ways in which the exercise of autonomy is deeply epistemically dependent.In this paper, we draw on philosophical descriptions of autonomy ‘scaffolding’ and apply them to informed consent in medicine. We examine how this relates to other models of the doctor–patient relationship and other theories (eg, the notion of relational autonomy). A focus on scaffolding autonomy reframes the justification for (...)
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  • What is the Point of Political Equality?Daniel Wodak - 2024 - Philosophical Review 133 (4):367-413.
    Political egalitarians hold that there is a distinct ideal of political equality, which defines and justifies democracy. So what is political equality? The orthodox view says it is equality of opportunity for political influence, not equality of political influence. The first goal of this article is to argue against this view about the nature of political equality. From 1962 to 1983, Australia’s First Nations citizens had the right to vote, but unlike other citizens they did not have the duty to (...)
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  • Exploitation’s grounding problem.Benjamin Ferguson - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-19.
    Standard accounts of what makes exploitation wrong ground its wrong in distributive unfairness: when A exploits B he wrongs her by taking a greater share of the benefits from their interaction than he ought. I argue that this standard account does not succeed; distributive unfairness is neither the sole, nor the primary wrong of exploitation. I assume that distributive unfairness is pro tanto wrong. However, I argue that in situations where transactors’ consent to a transaction is morally valid, it is (...)
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  • Stigma and Rawlsian Liberalism.Euan Allison - forthcoming - Journal of Social Philosophy.
    Rawlsian liberals face the challenge of providing reasons to oppose stigma that do not appeal to a rejection of controversial stigmatic attitudes, but rather to political values that are undermined by stigma. One prominent strategy (the Self-Respect Strategy) appeals to the threat stigma poses to self-respect. Another strategy (the Hierarchy Strategy) appeals to the dependence of stigmas on social hierarchies, which are taken to be intrinsically problematic. I argue that the Self-Respect Strategy needs further resources in order to answer important (...)
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  • Do We Have Relational Reasons to Care About Intergenerational Equality?Caleb Althorpe & Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - manuscript
    Relational egalitarians sometimes argue that a degree of distributive equality is necessary for social equality to obtain among members of society. In this paper, we consider how such arguments fare when extended to the intergenerational case. In particular, we examine whether relational reasons for distributive equality apply between non-overlapping generations. We claim that they do not. We begin by arguing that the most common reasons relational egalitarians offer in favour of distributive equality between contemporaries do not give us reasons to (...)
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  • Equality, efficiency and hierarchy in the workplace.Alexander Motchoulski - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (3):711-730.
    Relational egalitarians argue that workplace hierarchy is wrong or unjust. However, even if workplace hierarchy is morally deficient in one respect, the efficiency of hierarchical cooperation might vindicate hierarchy. This paper assesses the extent to which relational egalitarians must make concessions to workplace hierarchy for the sake of efficiency. I argue that considerations of hierarchy provide egalitarians with reasons that make workplace hierarchy tolerable despite being unjustified, and, moreover, that under a predominantly hierarchical status quo, the practical import of egalitarian (...)
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  • Relational Egalitarianism and Aesthetic Equality.Joshua Brecka - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-18.
    Relational egalitarians differ from distributive egalitarians by focusing on the structure of social relationships—a just society is one in which citizens relate as equals. While we can relate (un)equally along different dimensions, the importance of relating as aesthetic equals has been underexplored. Here, I offer an account of aesthetic equality in relational egalitarian terms. I argue that, to relate as aesthetic equals, individuals must be subject to the same basic normative aesthetic rules, not be stigmatized or feel inferior because of (...)
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  • The Distributive Demands of Relational Egalitarianism.Jan-Christoph Heilinger - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (4):619-634.
    The article outlines the distributive demands of relational equality in the form of a dynamic corridor of legitimate distributive inequality. It does so by complementing the already widely accepted sufficientarian floor with a limitarian ceiling, leading, in a first step, to a "corridor" of limited distributive inequality as a necessary condition for relational equality. This corridor alone, however, only provides necessary distributive conditions for relational equality and still allows for degrees of distributive inequality that would risk undermining egalitarian relations. Thus, (...)
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  • Moral equality and social hierarchy.Han van Wietmarschen - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Social egalitarianism holds that justice requires that people relate to one another as equals. To explain the content of this requirement, social egalitarians often appeal to the moral equality of persons. This leads to two very different interpretations of social egalitarianism. The first involves the specification of a conception of the moral equality of persons that is distinctive of the social egalitarian view. Social (or relational) egalitarianism can then claim that for people to relate as equals is for the relations (...)
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  • Justice as the Virtue of Respect.Paul Bloomfield - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (4):743-768.
    Plato's _Republic_ divided subsequent study of justice in two, as a virtue of people and of institutions. Here, the start of a reunification is attempted. Justice is first understood personally as the virtuous mean between arrogance and servility, where just people properly respect themselves and others. Because justice requires that like cases be treated alike and self-respect is a special instance of respect generally, justice requires a single standard for self and others. In understanding justice in terms of respect, structural (...)
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  • Equal Societies, Autonomous Lives: Reconciling social equality and relational autonomy.Hugo Cossette-Lefebvre - forthcoming - Journal of Social Philosophy.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Right-Libertarianism and Luck Sufficientarianism.Konstantin Morozov - 2024 - Tomsk State University Journal of Philosophy, Sociology and Political Science 79:125-133.
    Most right-libertarians deny the permissibility of government redistribution, referring to the inviolability of private property rights. In a rare exception, Eric Mack offers a right-libertarian argument for luck sufficientarianism based on the catastrophe clause. In this view, people who find themselves in trouble through no fault of their own may violate someone else’s property rights in minor ways to save their own lives. But since a literal interpretation of this clause makes property rights too uncertain, Mack proposes a system of (...)
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  • In Defense of Rawlsian Egalitarianism.Konstantin Morozov - 2024 - Politeia 113 (2):62-75.
    The liberal-egalitarian concept formulated by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice is still vehemently debated today. Critics of this concept include, among others, Rodion Belkovich and Sergei Vinogradov, according to whom Rawlsians inevitably face a dilemma: they need to reject either the difference principle or luck egalitarianism, and each of these solutions leads to the erosion of the basic foundations of Rawls’s theory. The article presents a detailed analysis of the arguments put forward by Belkovich and Vinogradov (...)
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  • Equal and ashamed? Egalitarianism, anti-discrimination, and redistribution.Bastian Steuwer - forthcoming - Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
    One prominent criticism of luck egalitarianism is that it requires either shameful revelations or otherwise problematic declarations by the state toward those who have had bad brute luck. Relational egalitarianism, by contrast, is portrayed as an alternative that requires no such revelations or declarations. I argue that this is false. Relational equality requires the state to draft anti-discrimination laws for both state and private action. The ideal of relational egalitarianism requires these laws to be asymmetric, that is to allow affirmative (...)
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  • Aesthetic Injustice.Rachel Fraser - 2024 - Ethics 134 (4):449-478.
    Our aesthetic judgments are embedded in and shaped by unjust social orders. But can our aesthetic judgments themselves—“this is beautiful; that is not”—be unjust? This article argues that they can. Admitting that this is so does not require us to be unduly revisionary with respect to our concept of justice. Rather, the thought that aesthetic judgments are unjust flows naturally from familiar egalitarian constraints.
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  • Begging & Power.Dan Khokhar - 2024 - Philosophical Studies (6).
    Much philosophical work has examined both imperatival and non-imperatival forms of address that aim to motivate others to action. But one such kind of address has received relatively little attention: begging. This is partly surprising as begging, both as an individual act and as a widespread social practice, raises acute, yet difficult to articulate, moral and political concerns. In this paper, I identify a central form of the phenomenon which constitutively involves communicating one’s relative powerlessness as a means of motivating (...)
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  • The Egalitarian Objection to Coercion.Adam Lovett - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):392-417.
    I develop an egalitarian account of what's objectionable about coercion. The account is rooted in the idea that certain relationships, like those of master to slave or lord to peasant, are relationships of subordination or domination. These relationships are morally objectionable. Such relationships are in part constituted by asymmetries of power. A master subordinates a slave because the master has more power over the slave than vice versa. Coercion is objectionable, I argue, because it creates such asymmetries of power and (...)
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  • Social Equality and Wrongful Discrimination: Introduction to the Special Issue on Moreau's Faces of Inequality.Hugo Cossette-Lefebvre - 2024 - Dialogue 63 (1):1-7.
    In this introduction, I briefly summarize Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality. I situate her monograph within two highly contemporary bodies of literature — relational egalitarianism and discrimination theory — to show how it provides important insights for understanding both what it means to treat others as equals in society and how to define wrongful discrimination. Moreau's work on discrimination is of great relevance for philosophers and socio-legal theorists alike as the commentaries from the symposium contributors demonstrate, including Dale Smith, Pablo (...)
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  • Ambivalent Stereotypes.Andreas Bengtson & Viki Møller Lyngby Pedersen - forthcoming - Res Publica.
    People often discriminate based on negative or positive stereotypes about others. Important examples of this are highlighted by the theory of ambivalent sexism. This theory distinguishes sexist stereotypes that are negative (hostile sexism) from those that are positive (benevolent sexism). While both forms of sexism are considered wrong towards women, hostile sexism seems intuitively worse than benevolent sexism. In this article, we ask whether the difference between discriminating based on positive vs. negative stereotypes in itself makes a morally relevant difference. (...)
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  • Gender Equality through “Daddy Quotas”? Paternalism and the Limits of Parental Autonomy.Viki Møller Lyngby Pedersen - forthcoming - Social Theory and Practice.
    The policy of earmarked paternity leave aims to promote mothers’ position in the labor market and fathers’ relationship with their child. Critics argue that the policy prevents parents from pursuing their own ideas about what is best for them. This provides reason to consider whether the policy is paternalistic or, in other ways, disrespectful of parental autonomy. I argue that the state implicates itself in the gender inequalities that result from parents’ unequal parental leave agreements when the state financially facilitates (...)
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  • Methodological Anarchism.Jason Lee Byas & Billy Christmas - 2020 - In Gary Chartier & Chad Van Schoelandt (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought. Routledge. pp. 53-75.
    There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally – both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are (...)
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  • Unjust Equal Relations.Andreas Bengtson - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-21.
    According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. In this paper, I ask the question: can equal relations be unjust according to relational egalitarianism? I argue that while on some conceptions of relational egalitarianism, equal relations cannot be unjust, there are conceptions in which equal relations can be unjust. Surprisingly, whether equal relations can be unjust cuts across the distinction between responsibility-sensitive and non-responsibility-sensitive conceptions of relational egalitarianism. I then show what follows if one accepts a conception in which equal (...)
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  • The many faces of laziness.Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    What do we owe to the lazy? On the assumption that the lazy are a paradigmatic case of people who are worse off, when they are through a fault, or choice, of their own, one might suspect that the answer is: not very much. This article shows that this suspicion is simple-minded. Four notions of laziness are distinguished. It is then shown that these notions differ – even from a luck egalitarian perspective – in ways bearing on the question of (...)
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  • Premature Death as a Normative Concept.Preben Sørheim, Mathias Barra, Ole Frithjof Norheim, Espen Gamlund & Carl Tollef Solberg - 2024 - Health Care Analysis 32 (2):88-105.
    The practical goal of preventing premature death seems uncontroversial. But the term ‘premature death’ is vague with several, sometimes conflicting definitions. This ambiguity results in several conceptions with which not all will agree. Moreover, the normative rationale behind the goal of preventing premature deaths is masked by the operational definition of existing measures. In this article, we argue that ‘premature death’ should be recognized as a normative concept. We propose that normative theories should be used to justify measures of premature (...)
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  • Can Relational Egalitarians Supply Both an Account of Justice and an Account of the Value of Democracy or Must They Choose Which?Andreas Bengtson & Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Construed as a theory of justice, relational egalitarianism says that justice requires that people relate as equals. Construed as a theory of what makes democracy valuable, it says that democracy is a necessary, or constituent, part of the value of relating as equals. Typically, relational egalitarians want their theory to provide both an account of what justice requires and an account of what makes democracy valuable. We argue that relational egalitarians with this dual ambition face the justice-democracy dilemma: Understanding social (...)
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  • What is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice?Richard Pettigrew - manuscript
    My aim in this paper is to identify the wrong that is done in all cases of testimonial injustice, if there is one. Miranda Fricker (2007) proposes one account of this distinctive wrong, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (2014) offers another. I think neither works. Nor does an account based on giving due respect to the testifier's epistemic competence. Nor does an account based on exposing the testifier to substantial risk of harm. Rachel Fraser (2023) describes a further account, and the (...)
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  • Is discrimination wrong because it is undeserved?Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Several leading theorists embrace the Simple Desert Account of Discrimination. This account involves two claims: it claims that a mismatch between what people deserve, on the one hand, and what they get, on the other hand, is (a) integral to discrimination, and (b) wrong. I shall query (a). First, I challenge what I see as the principal, positive argument for the Simple Desert Account. Second, in some cases wrongful discrimination brings about a better match between desert and what people get. (...)
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  • Left-Libertarianism and Genetic Justice.Konstantin Morozov - 2023 - Ethical Thought 23 (1):95-108.
    Distributive justice is one of the central questions of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Discussions on this topic are often presented as a confrontation between two groups of thinkers: libertarians and luck egalitarians. The former emphasize the dependence of the existing distribution on the individual choice and personal responsibility of people, and therefore are skeptical about various redistribution programs. The latter, on the contrary, emphasize the influence of morally arbitrary luck on the economic situation of people, and therefore welcome redistributive (...)
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  • Social equality and the conditional justifiability of political inequality.Takuto Kobayashi - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (3):252-272.
    Social or relational egalitarians try to defend democracy non-instrumentally as a constitutive element of a society where no one stands as inferior or superior to anyone else. However, they face an instrumentalist challenge from within: Why not uphold a non-democratic regime if it outperforms democracy in protecting or promoting egalitarian social relations, for example, by stably producing substantive political decisions that guard against social hierarchies? This article explores the best response to this challenge from the social egalitarian non-instrumentalist standpoint. It (...)
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  • Justice for women/gestators: superior personhood or plain old feminism?Amanda Roth - 2024 - Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (1):22-23.
    Robinson offers the ‘superior personhood’ approach (SPA) to capture the value of gestation and ground justice for women/gestators.1 SPA holds that women/gestators are more than mere persons given the reality of pregnancy and the vital role women/gestators play in reproduction.1 In this commentary, I speak to some background context perhaps relevant to SPA, lay out areas of agreement with Robinson and then raise four worries about the approach. In my view, the devaluing of gestation and injustice for women/gestators need rectifying, (...)
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  • Why Be a Relational Egalitarian?Xuanpu Zhuang - 2024 - Philosophical Forum 55 (1):3-26.
    Relational egalitarians claim that a situation is just only if everyone it involves relates to one another as equals. It implies that relational egalitarians believe the ideal of “living as equals” (for short) is desirable, and furthermore, necessary for justice. In this paper, I distinguish three accounts of the desirability of the ideal: the instrumental value account, the non‐instrumental value account, and the non‐consequentialist account. I argue that the former two accounts cannot provide satisfying reasons for being a relational egalitarian. (...)
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  • Emotional Imperialism.Alfred Archer & Benjamin Matheson - 2023 - Philosophical Topics 51 (1):7-25.
    How might people be wronged in relation to their feelings, moods, and emotions? Recently philosophers have begun to investigate the idea that these kinds of wrongs may constitute a distinctive form of injustice: affective injustice. In previous work, we have outlined a particular form of affective injustice that we called emotional imperialism. This paper has two main aims. First, we aim to provide an expanded account of the forms that emotional imperialism can take. We will do so by drawing inspiration (...)
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  • (1 other version)Meaning, medicine, and merit.Andreas Mogensen - manuscript
    Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought of as semiotic: i.e. as having to do with what this practice would mean, convey, or express about a person’s standing. I explore the implications of this conclusion when taken (...)
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  • Desert and Economic Interdependence.Evan Behrle - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only (...)
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  • Embodied Experience, Embodied Advantage, and the Inclusion of Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sport: Expanded Framework, Criticisms, and Policy Recommendations.Francisco Javier Lopez Frias & Cesar R. Torres - forthcoming - Sport, Ethics and Philosophy:1-21.
    In a previous paper entitled ‘Beyond Physiology: Embodied Experience, Embodied Advantage, and the Inclusion of Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sport,’ we claim that analyses of the inclusion or exclusion of transgender athletes in competitive sport must go beyond physiological criteria and incorporate the notions of embodied experience and embodied advantage. Our stance has recently been challenged as impractical and excessively exclusionary. In this paper, we address these challenges and build upon them to expand on the policy implications of our original (...)
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  • (1 other version)Racial Integration and Devaluation: Reply to Stanley, Valls, Basevich, Merry, and Sundstrom.Dale C. Matthew - 2023 - Dialogue 62 (1):3-45.
    In “Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation,” I argue that blacks should reject racial integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. Integration will intensify the self-worth harms of stigmatization and phenotypic devaluation by leading blacks to more fully internalize their devaluation, and while the integrating process itself might reduce the former, it may well leave in place the latter. In this paper, I reply to the challenges to these arguments presented by Sharon Stanley, Andrew Valls, Elvira Basevich, Michael Merry, (...)
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  • Ectogestative Technology and the Beginning of Life.Lily Frank, Julia Hermann, Ilona Kavege & Anna Puzio - 2023 - In Ibo van de Poel (ed.), Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. pp. 113–140.
    How could ectogestative technology disrupt gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘body’, or ‘parent’? In this chapter, we situate this emerging technology in the context of the history of reproductive technologies and analyse the potential social and conceptual disruptions to which it could contribute. An ectogestative device, better known as ‘artificial womb’, enables the extra-uterine gestation of a human being, or mammal more generally. It is currently developed with the main goal of improving the survival chances of (...)
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  • The Voting Rights of Senior Citizens: Should All Votes Count the Same?Andreas Bengtson & Andreas Albertsen - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-17.
    In 1970, Stewart advocated disenfranchising everyone reaching retirement age or age 70, whichever was earlier. The question of whether senior citizens should be disenfranchised has recently come to the fore due to votes on issues such as Brexit and climate change. Indeed, there is a growing literature which argues that we should increase the voting power of non-senior citizens relative to senior citizens, for reasons having to do with intergenerational justice. Thus, it seems that there are reasons of justice to (...)
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  • Meritocracy.Thomas Mulligan - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Doxastic Affirmative Action.Andreas Bengtson & Lauritz Aastrup Munch - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):203-220.
    According to the relational egalitarian theory of justice, justice requires that people relate as equals. To relate as equals, many relational egalitarians argue, people must (i) regard each other as equals, and (ii) treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that, under conditions of background injustice, such relational egalitarians should endorse affirmative action in the ways in which (dis)esteem is attributed to people as part of the regard-requirement for relating as equals.
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  • The Interdependence of Domestic and Global Justice.Valentin Beck - 2019 - Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy 4 (1):75-90.
    This article focuses on the challenge of determining the relative weight of domestic and global justice demands. This problem concerns a variety of views that differ on the metric, function, scope, grounds and fundamental interpretation of justice norms. I argue that domestic and global economic justice are irreducibly interdependent. In order to address their exact relation, I discuss and compare three theoretical models: (i) the bottom-up-approach, which prioritizes domestic justice; (ii) the top-down-approach, which prioritizes global justice; and (iii) the horizontal (...)
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  • The Aptness of Envy.Jordan David Thomas Walters - 2023 - American Journal of Political Science 1 (1):1-11.
    Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...)
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  • Basic equality: A Hegelian resolution.Jonny Thakkar - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (2):507-531.
    Contemporary political philosophers often take for granted that for political purposes all humans are to be considered of equal worth. The difficulty, as Bernard Williams observed, is to find an interpretation of this claim that does not collapse into absurdity or triviality. I show that the principal attempts to solve this problem all beg the question against an Aristotelian proponent of natural hierarchy. I then explore existing proposals for dissolving the problem of basic equality, whether by denying the need for (...)
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  • Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2023 - Dissertation, University College London
    This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of (...)
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  • Stratified social norms.Han van Wietmarschen - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (2).
    This article explains how social norms can help to distinguish and understand a range of different kinds of social inequality and social hierarchy. My aim is to show how the literature on social norms can provide crucial resources to relational egalitarianism, which has made social equality and inequality into a central topic of contemporary normative political theorizing. The hope is that a more discriminating and detailed picture of different kinds of social inequality will help relational egalitarians move beyond a discussion (...)
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  • Should Canada have oaths of allegiance?Adam Lovett - 2023 - Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 1.
    The Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration has recently proposed to make in-person citizenship ceremonies optional. These ceremonies are oaths of allegiances: naturalizing citizens swear loyalty to King Charles and obedience to the laws of Canada. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration proposes to allow naturalizing citizens to take these oaths by checking a box online rather than by taking part in an in-person ceremony. In this commentary, I argue that Canada should go much further. It should stop forcing naturalizing (...)
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  • (1 other version)Economic inequality and the long-term future.Andreas T. Schmidt & Daan Juijn - 2023 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics (1):67-99.
    Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects. Such instrumental arguments, however, often concern only the static effects of inequality and neglect its intertemporal conse- quences. In this article, we address this striking gap and investigate income inequality’s intertemporal consequences, including its potential effects on humanity’s (very) long-term future. Following recent arguments around future generations (...)
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  • Longtermist Political Philosophy: An Agenda for Future Research.Andreas T. Schmidt & Jacob Barrett - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field by exploring the case for, and the implications of, ‘institutional longtermism’: the view that, when evaluating institutions, we should give significant weight to their very long-term effects. We begin by arguing that the standard case for longtermism may be more robust when applied to institutions than to individual actions or policies, both because institutions have large, broad, and long-term effects, and because institutional longtermism can plausibly sidestep various objections to individual (...)
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  • Am I Socially Related to Myself?Andreas Bengtson - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-18.
    According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. The theory applies to those who stand in the relevant social relations. In this paper, I distinguish four different accounts of what it means to be socially related and argue that in all of them, self-relations—how a person relates to themselves—fall within the scope of relational egalitarianism. I also point to how this constrains what a person is allowed to do to themselves.
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  • Luck egalitarianism and non‐overlapping generations.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2023 - Ratio 36 (3):215-223.
    This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it might be required (...)
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