When 47-year-old Simba Abalo, an unemployed retired soldier in Lomé, Togo, found out that he had AIDS in September 2007, he was unable to receive government-supplied antiretroviral drugs: “CAMEG [the state’s central medicines purchasing organization],” he said, “told me they were not taking any new cases for six months because they had run out of drugs.Stocks of antiretrovirals had become depleted after the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria suspended part of its grant to Togo in 2006 and (...) failed to approve a new grant request in 2007, reportedly because of oversight irregularities. “Even if they had the drugs,” said Abalo, “I could not have paid more than US$4 a month since I had just lost my job as a security guard earning US$70 a month.”. (shrink)

Dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has run high in recent years. Perhaps as a result, political theorists have begun to turn their attention to possible alternative modes of political dec...

This article criticizes Laura Valentini's criterion for distinguishing good and bad idealizations in normative political theory. I argue that, on an attentive reading of her criterion, all ideal theories she discusses must be written off as incorporating bad idealizations. This fact makes Valentini's criterion trivially implausible, for it is argued that there are good idealizations that succeed in promoting the action-guiding goal of ideal theory. Upon rejecting an attempt to salvage the idealizations that Valentini marks off as bad, I develop (...) an alternative criterion for demarcating good and bad idealizations. The criterion holds that the standing of a theory's idealized assumptions depends on whether the stipulated idealizations can be feasibly realized in the non-ideal world, and thus on whether the principles that the theory generates can be made relevant for real-world practice. I also claim that the feasibility criterion better reflects the function of idealization in promoting action-guidance. Unlike Valentini's criterion, the feasibility criterion yields the result that Rawls' theories of domestic and international justice both incorporate bad idealizations. (shrink)

There has recently been a revived interest in temporal justice among political philosophers. For example, lone mothers have, on average, 30 h less free time per week than people in couples without children. Recent work has focussed on free time as a distinct distributive good, but this paper argues that it would be a mistake for a theory of temporal justice to focus only on shares of free time. First, I argue that the concept of free time does not succeed (...) in tracking discretionary control over time. All of time is a resource, and the particular moral relevance of free time must be established otherwise. Second, hours of time differ in use value, and we cannot fully track our concerns about the allocation of time, whether free or necessary, without taking this into account. We care about free time but also about ‘quality time’. To explain this observation, I develop an account of the value of time as a resource. The value of time periods differs with the prospects for which a time period can be used, that is, what we can do and be with it. What we are allocating when we are allocating time is not just hours; it is hours of time with a certain value. Finally, I argue that a concern for the value of time is compatible with a resourcist theory of temporal justice. (shrink)

Fairness is one of the most prominent values in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate and, specifically, in the discussion on algorithmic decision-making (ADM). However, while the need for fairness in ADM is widely acknowledged, the very concept of fairness has not been sufficiently explored so far. Our paper aims to fill this gap and claims that an ethically informed re-definition of fairness is needed to adequately investigate fairness in ADM. To achieve our goal, after an introductory section aimed (...) at clarifying the aim and structure of the paper, in section “Fairness in algorithmic decision-making” we provide an overview of the state of the art of the discussion on fairness in ADM and show its shortcomings; in section “Fairness as an ethical value”, we pursue an ethical inquiry into the concept of fairness, drawing insights from accounts of fairness developed in moral philosophy, and define fairness as an ethical value. In particular, we argue that fairness is articulated in a distributive and socio-relational dimension; it comprises three main components: fair equality of opportunity, equal right to justification, and fair equality of relationship; these components are grounded in the need to respect persons both as persons and as particular individuals. In section “Fairness in algorithmic decision-making revised”, we analyze the implications of our redefinition of fairness as an ethical value on the discussion of fairness in ADM and show that each component of fairness has profound effects on the criteria that ADM ought to meet. Finally, in section “Concluding remarks”, we sketch some broader implications and conclude. (shrink)

Since the 16th National Congress of Communist Party of China (16th NCCPC) in 2002, more and more private entrepreneurs have appeared on the political arena in China. The article first describes the state of the phenomenon, and analyzes the reasons and the related ethical issues of private entrepreneurs participating in politics. For this purpose, the article begins by suggesting a framework of analyzing the ethical analysis of corporate political actions, then applies it to a case study of the phenomenon, and (...) finally, makes some policy suggestions to the government for regulating the practice of private entrepreneurs' involvement in politics. (shrink)

Political realism criticises the putative abstraction, foundationalism and neglect of the agonistic dimension of political practice in the work of John Rawls. This paper argues that had Rawls not fully specified the implementation of his theory of justice in one particular form of political economy then he would be vulnerable to a realist critique. But he did present such an implementation: a property-owning democracy. An appreciation of Rawls s specificationist method undercuts the realist critique of his conception of justice as (...) fairness. (shrink)

In recent work, Joseph Fishkin has helpfully enriched understandings of equality of opportunity as a feature of distributive justice schemes. One branch of his argument focuses upon the degree to which ‘merit’, as a function of talent and effort, is conceptually and practically vexing for these goals. While Thompson is in general agreement with the direction of Fishkin’s critiques and new offerings, in this article he extends and strengthens Fishkin’s analysis of talent, specifically focusing upon its role as a defensible (...) criterion for access to developmentally useful educational opportunities.Developing an account sympathetic to Fishkin’s contributions, Thompson provides a limited defense of talent as a morally relevant criterion for access to some educational opportunities. Of course, Thompson acknowledges that this relevance is not absolute and, therefore, points towards reasons why talent enjoys only this occasionally relevant status in relation to educational opportunities and what systemic issues ought to be avoided as a result. (shrink)

According to luck egalitarianism, it is not unfair when people are disadvantaged by choices they are responsible for. This implies that those who are disadvantaged by choices that prevent disadvantage to others are not eligible for compensation. This is counterintuitive. We argue that the problem such cases pose for luck egalitarianism reveals an important distinction between responsibility for creating disadvantage and responsibility for distributing disadvantage which has hitherto been overlooked. We develop and defend a version of luck egalitarianism which only (...) holds people responsible for creating disadvantage. This revision enables luck egalitarianism to offer compensation to those who are disadvantaged by preventing disadvantage to others, like dependent caretakers, without compromising the responsibility–sensitivity at the heart of luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

Are government restrictions on hate speech consistent with the priority of liberty? This relatively narrow policy question will serve as the starting point for a wider discussion of the use and abuse of nonideal theory in contemporary political philosophy, especially as practiced on the academic left. I begin by showing that hate speech (understood as group libel) can undermine fair equality of opportunity for historically-oppressed groups but that the priority of liberty seems to forbid its restriction. This tension between free (...) speech and equal opportunity creates a dilemma for liberal egalitarians. Nonideal theory apparently offers an escape from this dilemma, but after examining three versions of such an escape strategy, I conclude that none is possible: liberal egalitarians are indeed forced to choose between liberty and equality in this case and others. I finish the paper by examining its implications for other policy arenas, including markets in transplantable human organs and women’s reproductive services. (shrink)

This article discusses left-libertarian justifications of basic income. The basic income policy is designed to decouple income from employment in the monetized economy by allowing the individual to access, on a regular stipulated basis, a grant that is independent of her ability and willingness to work for remuneration. This article attempts to amend an important failure with respect to the way in which the concept of real freedom has been treated in Van Parijs’ pioneering defense of the universal grant. Van (...) Parijs’ defense of basic income does not pay substantial attention to the freedom that work-lovers would gain from the opportunity to opt out of work, which the grant would facilitate if sufficiently generous. Van Parijs’ justification of basic income is incomplete in terms of the value it places on the opportunity to enjoy freedom from employment from the purview of every member of society, not only those that will, or might, decide to lead a life (partially) outside of work. The article develops the argument that such failure results from the fact that Van Parijs’ conception of freedom is centered on the importance of actual or potential preference satisfaction as opposed to non-agent-centered reasons. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I address the distributive, inclusive, and relational dimensions of educational justice individually in relation to transnational migration. First, I thematize distributive issues with regard to immigrant students, the central question being whether these students are entitled to more or less educational resources as non-immigrant students. Second, I discuss to which extent and in which sense enabling immigrant students to participate fully in the social and political life of their receiving country is a demand of educational justice. Third, (...) I elaborate on which kinds of educational interactions – in the first place, which types of teaching – could perpetuate unjust treatment of those students in the form of disrespect. I claim that educational justice with regard to immigrated students consists in their enabling to full social and political participation by a mode of teaching that positively addresses students’ biographical experiences with migration, and by constructing school curricula which encourage inter-lingual, inter-cultural, and inter-contextual translations in the classroom. That is to say, that educational justice in context of migration is to be ultimately understood as relational justice, or more specific – as a matter of just pedagogical relations. (shrink)

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 (...) death to provide them with normative validity and public legitimacy. (shrink)

Are inborn characteristics deserved or undeserved? Using Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and Peter Strawson's objection to this theory, I argue that this question does not make sense. In order to know whether a person deserves something she has, it is necessary to evaluate what she did before having it. But people did not exist before their birth, so they did not exist before having their inborn characteristics. Therefore, talking about people deserving their inborn characteristics does not make sense: these (...) characteristics are neither deserved nor undeserved. (shrink)

Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to satisfy what this paper calls the moral tyranny constraint. According to this constraint, any acceptable theory of justice must preclude the possibility of an agent unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably leaving others with less advantage under conditions of full compliance with the theory. This paper (...) argues that claim forfeiture is built into luck egalitarianism specifically to preclude such moral tyranny. However, it contends that the dominant interpretation of luck egalitarianism fails to fully satisfy the moral tyranny constraint. It offers an alternative interpretation that both eliminates the possibility of moral tyranny and rescues the position from two other prominent objections that have been directed against luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

If D commits a wrong against V, D typically incurs a corrective duty to V. But how should we respond if V has false beliefs about whether she is harmed by D’s wrong? There are two types of cases we must consider: those in which V is not harmed but she mistakenly believes that she is those in which V is harmed but she mistakenly believes that she is not. I canvass three views: The Objective View, The Subjective View and (...) The Mixed View. The Objective View holds that V’s claim depends on the correct account of harm, rather than her false beliefs, and so D has a duty to offer damages to V in but not in in order to compensate her. The Subjective View holds that, for broadly anti-perfectionist reasons, V’s claim depends on her sincere beliefs, even if they are mistaken, and so D has a duty to compensate V in but not in. The Mixed View holds that we should defer to her beliefs in but not in, so D has a duty to compensate her in both cases. In this article, I argue that we should accept The Mixed View. (shrink)

Political philosophers often grapple with the issue of the legitimacy of state coercion. Aristotle, a perfectionist, opines that all men hold an objective account of the good life. As regards legitimacy, he entails that state policies are justified only when all its members comprehend the value that has been identified in accordance with the true notion of good. Aristotle argues that the state should facilitate the encouragement of objectively valuable notions of the good. Ronald Dworkin, a neutralist, proposes a specific (...) model of the good life so that one can live well. He holds that certain elements of the ethical conception lead to various notions of the good and, in matters of legitimacy, the state should be neutral towards the notion of good. This is so because A cannot make B’s life better by way of the coercive means of the state. This paper throws light on Aristotle’s and Dworkin’s dialogues on the moral foundations of legitimacy (conceived during their notion of the good life). Therefore, I argue that, in contrast to perfectionism, Dworkin justifies his liberal principle of legitimacy through the idea of state neutrality. But, eventually, Dworkin’s arguments overlook his ethical foundation or admissible towards perfectionism, which is emaciated enough to offer any justification for the principle of legitimacy. (shrink)

Joel Feinberg’s Offense to Others is the most comprehensive contemporary work on the significance of offense in a liberal legal system. Feinberg argues that being offended can impair a person’s liberty, much like a nuisance, and that it is therefore legitimate in principle to regulate conduct because of its offensiveness. In this article, I discuss some overlooked considerations that give us reason to resist Feinberg’s conclusion, even while granting this premise. My key claim is that the regulation of offense can (...) inadvertently increase the incidence of offense, by nurturing offense-taking sensibilities. In the course of defending this claim and spelling out its implications, I explain why concerns about the inadvertent nurturing of offense are now more pressing, given the identity–political character of contemporary offense-based social conflicts, and I discuss why a reluctance to legally regulate offensive conduct need not be insensitive to the identity–political issues that animate those conflicts. (shrink)

In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the (...) first place. Invoking symbolic arguments thus refers to how certain new technologies risk undermining our fundamental symbolic distinctions by which we organize and evaluate our interactions with the world and in society. Such symbolic distinctions, moreover, tend to be resilient against logical argumentation, mainly because they themselves form the basis on which we argue in the cultural and ethical sphere in the first place. Therefore, effective strategies to evaluate and counter these arguments require another approach, showing that these technologies either do not challenge these classifications or, if they do, how they can be accompanied by the proper actions to integrate these technologies into our society. (shrink)

Equality of Opportunity is widely thought of as the normative ideal most relevant to the design of educational institutions. One widely discussed interpretation of this ideal is Rawls' principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I argue that theories, like Rawls, that give priority to the achievement of individual autonomy, are committed to giving that same priority to a principle of sufficient opportunity. Thus, the Rawlsian's primary focus when designing educational institutions should be on sufficiency and not equality. (...) The paper then argues this commitment has at least three attractive implications. Firstly, it enables defenders of Fair Equality of Opportunity to overcome Richard Arneson's powerful objections. Secondly, it suggests a revised version of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity that is more plausible. Thirdly, it has attractive practical implications for educational provision. (shrink)

Equality of Opportunity is widely thought of as the normative ideal most relevant to the design of educational institutions. One widely discussed interpretation of this ideal is Rawls' principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I argue that theories, like Rawls, that give priority to the achievement of individual autonomy, are committed to giving that same priority to a principle of sufficient opportunity. Thus, the Rawlsian's primary focus when designing educational institutions should be on sufficiency and not equality. (...) The paper then argues this commitment has at least three attractive implications. Firstly, it enables defenders of Fair Equality of Opportunity to overcome Richard Arneson's powerful objections. Secondly, it suggests a revised version of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity that is more plausible. Thirdly, it has attractive practical implications for educational provision. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that men should take primary responsibility for protecting against pregnancy. Male long-acting reversible contraceptives are currently in development, and, once approved, should be used as the standard method for avoiding pregnancy. Since women assume the risk of pregnancy when they engage in penis-in-vagina sex, men should do their utmost to ensure that their ejaculations are responsible, otherwise women shoulder a double burden of pregnancy risk plus contraceptive responsibility. Changing the expectations regarding responsibility for contraception would (...) render penis-in-vagina sex more equitable, and could lead to a shift in the discourse around abortion access. I describe the sex asymmetries of contraceptive responsibility and of pregnancy-related risk, and offer arguments in favour of men taking primary responsibility for contraception. My arguments centre on: analogies between contraception and vaccination, and unwanted pregnancy and disease; a veil-of-ignorance approach, in which I contend that if a person were not told their sex, they would find a society in which men were expected to acquire and use effective contraceptives the fairest arrangement for everyone. (shrink)

Can outcome equality (say, in welfare) ever be unjust? Despite the extensive inquiry into the nature of luck egalitarianism in recent years, this question is curiously under-explored. Leading luck egalitarians pay little attention to the issue of unjust equalities, and when they do, they appear not to speak in one voice. To facilitate the inquiry into the potential injustice of equalities, the paper introduces two rival interpretations of egalitarianism: the responsibility view, which may condemn equalities as unjust (when they reflect (...) unequal levels of personal responsibility); and, the non-responsibility view, which does not. It then teases out the implications of these two views, in the hope of establishing that the latter is at least as plausible as the former. The paper thus establishes that the egalitarian ideal can be plausibly formulated in a way that condemns only (certain) inequalities but never equalities, and that this formulation is both coherent and attractive. (shrink)

A common concern regarding affirmative action is that it sanctions the selection of candidates whose qualifications are not the best overall and that this is inefficient or unjust or both. I argue that this concern is misguided, since there is no independent concern regarding qualifications with respect to the moral status of affirmative action. The only sense in which qualifications are not morally arbitrary—and the only sense in which there is a reason to select the most qualified candidate—is purely instrumental (...) to the promotion of moral values whose fundamental concern is not qualifications. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 530-545, June 2022.

In this paper, I want to scrutinise the value of utilising the concept of disease for a theory of distributive justice in health care. Although many people believe that the presence of a disease-related condition is a prerequisite of a justified claim on health care resources, the impact of the philosophical debate on the concept of disease is still relatively minor. This is surprising, because how we conceive of disease determines the amount of justified claims on health care resources. Therefore, (...) the severity of scarcity depends on our interpretation of the concept of disease. I want to defend a specific combination of a theory of disease with a theory of distributive justice. A naturalist account of disease, together with sufficientarianism, is able to perform a gate-keeping function regarding entitlements to medical treatment. Although this combination cannot solve all problems of justice in health care, it may inform rationing decisions as well. (shrink)

Fairness is a central, but under-theorized, notion in moral and political philosophy. This paper makes two contributions. Firstly, it criticizes Broome’s seminal account of fairness in Proc Aristotelian Soc 91:87–101, showing that there are problems with restricting fairness to a matter of relative satisfaction and holding that it does not itself require the satisfaction of the claims in question. Secondly, it considers the justification of lotteries to resolve cases of ties between competing claims, which Broome claims as support for his (...) theory, and contrasts random procedures to contests of skill, which may also be considered lotteries in a broader sense. I offer no alternative account of fairness of my own, but hope to point the way for future research on the nature of fairness. (shrink)

This paper claims that the intuitive and widespread legitimating power of majority rule (MR) arises from the link between majority rule and the principle of equality of political opportunity. The egalitarian character of MR is established by exploring “puzzles” in democratic theory, such as the insensitivity of democratic voting procedures to unequal intensity of citizens' preferences, and the relationship between the principle of unanimity (sometimes thought better to respect citizens' equality) and MR. Special attention is directed to the relationship between (...) political equality and equality in the outcomes of political decisions: The claim is made that the language of equal political opportunity captures well the idea of equal political influence, in the circumstance of disagreement about what is required to achieve equal treatment through the outcomes of political decisions. (shrink)

: The article first develops an account of autonomy, explaining individual autonomy by means of three normative components and then discussing two objections. The first objection claims that autonomy has to be thought of as essentially relational; this objection is refuted. The second objection, labeled the skeptical objection, claims that we simply do not live autonomously, nor could we ever. Reference is made to novels by Iris Murdoch to present a skeptical solution to this objection.

The article first develops an account of autonomy, explaining individual autonomy by means of three normative components and then discussing two objections. The first objection claims that autonomy has to be thought of as essentially relational; this objection is refuted. The second objection, labeled the skeptical objection, claims that we simply do not live autonomously, nor could we ever. Reference is made to novels by Iris Murdoch to present a skeptical solution to this objection.

In his recent book, National responsibility and global justice, David Miller conceptualizes and justifies a model of national responsibility. His conceptualization proceeds in two steps: he starts by developing two models of collective responsibility, the like?minded group model and the cooperative practice model. He then proceeds to discuss national responsibility, a species of collective responsibility, and argues that nations have features such that the two models of collective responsibility also apply to them. In this article I focus on the question (...) whether Miller?s like?minded group model and the cooperative practice model are plausible and convincing models of collective responsibility. I will argue that the like?minded model does not provide a plausible conceptualization of collective responsibility, while the collective practice model provides a good model for collective responsibility but is not particularly helpful in conceptualizing national responsibility. (shrink)

Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As a (...) result, the current literature is rife with conceptual ambiguity: a talent is referred to as all of a skill, potential, ability, capacity, endowment, and a natural gift. In response to this confusion, in this paper I develop an account of what a talent is, based on the debate concerning the metaphysics of ability and dispositions. I argue for a position that I call ‘talent dispositionalism’: S has a talent for skill A in circumstances C iff S has the general disposition to excellently develop and maintain A when, in circumstances C, she tries to excellently develop and maintain A. On this account, a talent is not the skill itself, but a general iterated ability for the excellent development and up-keep of a particular skill, constituted by an agent’s dispositional properties. I defend the account against four objections usually levelled against traditional dispositionalist theories of ability, and highlight some ways the account may influence debates in other areas of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Unequal treatment of human research subjects is a significant ethical concern, because justice in research involving human subjects requires equal protection of rights and equal protection from harm and exploitation. Disputes sometimes arise concerning the issue of unequal treatment of research subjects. Allegedly unequal treatment occurs when subjects are treated differently and there is a genuine dispute concerning the appropriateness of equal treatment. Patently unequal treatment occurs when subjects are treated differently and there is not a genuine dispute about the (...) appropriateness of equal treatment. Allegedly unequal treatment will probably always occur in research with human subjects due to disagreements about fundamental questions of justice. The best way to deal with allegedly unequal treatment is to promote honest and open discussions of the issues at stake. Research regulations can help to minimize patently unequal treatment by providing rules for investigators, ethical review boards, institutions, and sponsors to follow. However, patently unequal treatment may still occur because the regulations are subject to interpretation. Federal agencies have provided interpretive guidance that can help promote consistent review and oversight of human subjects research. Additional direction may be needed on topics that are not adequately covered by current guidance or regulations. International guidelines can help promote equal treatment of human subjects around the globe. While minor variations in the treatment of research subjects should be tolerated and even welcomed, major ones (i.e. those that significantly impact human rights or welfare) should be avoided or minimized. (shrink)

Conceptions of desert and responsibility have had a powerful influence in justifying economic inequality. Currently, they are being reaffirmed in policies advocated by the centre left in Britain. In contrast, luck egalitarianism, one of the dominant theoretical positions in contemporary political philosophy, puts equality at the top of the agenda and notoriously undermines traditional notions of desert and rejects the conception of personal responsibility on which traditional ideas rely. Although luck egalitarians are sceptical about desert and redefine responsibility to reduce (...) its role in arguments for just distribution, they nevertheless retain a commitment to holding people responsible for the distributive consequences of what they freely choose to do. They attempt to demonstrate that equality can be reconciled with responsibility. I will argue that luck egalitarians have not gone far enough in eliminating desert and responsibility from the armoury of social justice, and that their own arguments should have led them to do so. My aim in this article is to push the ideas implicit in luck egalitarian's arguments to their logical conclusion. I argue that for practical and conceptual reasons, they should have formulated their theories as though hard determinism is true, or nearly true, even if it is not. Denying the pertinence of judgements of desert and responsibility to questions of distributive justice removes an obstacle to egalitarian aims by suggesting a more egalitarian distribution than one that is hostage to voluntary choice. It could be accepted that luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the concept of personal responsibility without accepting the conclusion that considerations of responsibility should be abandoned. However, any plausible account of responsibility would demonstrate that existing inequalities are undeserved, and that these inequalities make a mockery of politicans current emphasis on personal responsibility. (shrink)

During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as “non-ideal theory.” My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of (...) pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. (shrink)

Bernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's political realism and its connection (...) to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy. (shrink)

This paper develops a full account of Rawls's notion of a well-ordered society and uses it to address two luck egalitarian objections to his principles of justice. The first is an internal criticism which claims that Rawls's account of justice is better captured by a responsibility-sensitive egalitarian account. The second is an external objection according to which, regardless of the alleged inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his account of justice, we should reject those principles in favour of a responsibility-sensitive criterion (...) because it better captures our moral intuitions about distributive justice. The argument presented answers both objections by defending the value of well-orderedness and showing the difficulties of responsibility-sensitive egalitarian conceptions in realizing this ideal. (shrink)

While libertarians affirm personal responsibility as a central moral and political value, libertarian theorists write relatively little about the theory and practice of this value. Focusing on the work of F. A. Hayek and David Schmidtz, this article identifies the core of a libertarian approach to personal responsibility and demonstrates the ways in which this approach entails a radical revision of the ethics and American politics of personal responsibility. Then, I highlight several central implications of this analysis in the American (...) political and economic status quo. First, this analysis makes a mockery of so-called libertarian/conservative ‘fusionism’, such that libertarian personal responsibility cannot partner with meritocratic conservative thought to provide a plural grounding for rejecting progressive or redistributive economic policy. Next, preferred libertarian policies threaten the status, esteem and social bases of self-respect of citizens who are worse-off through little or no fault of their own. Finally, these policies undermine the ethics of personal responsibility that Americans from across the ideological spectrum value and many conservatives and libertarians celebrate. In the American status quo, those who value personal responsibility must reserve a central place for policies that mitigate opportunity and distributive inequalities. (shrink)

In this article I review Jonathan Wolff and Avner de‐Shalit’s recent book Disadvantage (2007), highlighting its many contributions to egalitarian theory and practice. These contributions build to the authors’ central prescription: that policy‐makers work to create a society of equals by reducing the tendency for disadvantages to cluster around certain individuals or groups. From there, I discuss the idea of declustering disadvantage in an American context, and consider its implications for the politically salient ideal of equality of opportunity. The purpose (...) of this discussion is not to posit Wolff and de‐Shalit’s theory of disadvantage as a theory of justice as equal opportunity. Instead, I illustrate their approach by reference to an influential theory of justice, whose proponents include those taken to affirm the authors’ consensual starting point. (shrink)

Are there any prima facie reasons that democracies might have for disenfranchising older citizens? This question reflects increasingly salient, but often incompletely theorized complaints that members of democratic publics advance about older citizens’ electoral influence. Rather than rejecting these complaints out of hand, we explore whether, suitably reconstructed, they withstand democratic scrutiny. More specifically, we examine whether the account of political equality that seems to most fittingly capture the logic of these complaints – namely, equal opportunity of political influence over (...) electoral outcomes – can justify disenfranchising older citizens. We conclude that equal opportunity of influence cannot ground a blanket disenfranchisement of older people and that, taken in conjunction with other general considerations that apply to all sound electoral policies, partial disenfranchisement proposals (i.e. proposals for reducing the electoral influence of older citizens via age-weighted voting) are both quasi-inapplicable and practically unrobust across a relevant range of political contexts. (shrink)

This paper reinvestigates the question of liberal neutrality. We contend that current liberal discussions have been dominated—if not hijacked—by one particular interpretation of what neutrality could imply: namely, exclusive neutrality, aiming to exclude religious and cultural expressions from the public sphere. We will argue that this is merely one among several relevant interpretations. To substantiate our claim, we will first elaborate upon inclusive neutrality by formulating two supplementary interpretations: proportional neutrality and compensatory neutrality. Second, we will argue that inclusive proportional (...) neutrality is the most appropriate interpretation in many contexts. Our discussion highlights the fact that some political disputes should not be seen in terms of the antithesis between liberal neutrality and illiberal alternatives but, instead, as a clash between various valid but incompatible interpretations of what liberal neutrality may imply. (shrink)

In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi defends classical-liberal principles not because of real-world considerations but on ideal-theoretic grounds. However, what constitutes a sufficiently “ideal” ideal theory is debatable since, as Tomasi shows, regimes that range from laissez faire to heavily interventionist can all be classified as legitimate from the perspective of ideal theory. Conversely, if ideal theory can allow for realistic constraints, as Rawls does, then we should recognize that even under ideal-theoretic conditions, political actors face logistical, epistemic, and motivational (...) challenges that only intensify in the real world, where questions of feasibility become paramount. (shrink)

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. For this reason, (...) taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)