Despite being increasingly available to us all, retirement pensions remain unequally distributed: between rich and poor, young and old, men and women, and possibly different generations. As this topic receives little attention in moral and political philosophy, the articles in this thesis aim to deliver an original account of justice in retirement pensions along liberal egalitarian lines. The first part defends retirement pensions as a distribution of free time. It shows that including free time in the list of goods that (...) liberal egalitarians prioritise is plausible and avoids problems that would otherwise arise with other candidates, most notably leisure. Retirement as free time is an essential feature of liberal egalitarian societies by (re)distributing the means to pursue any life project, and especially valuable for the poor who work and contribute the longest. The second part makes a case for 'libertirement', a proposal to increase the freedom to enjoy free time across life, as a matter of justice between those who live long and those who die early. Specifically, I propose adding reverse pensions and sabbaticals on top of old-age retirement. Besides showing the importance of longevity for age-group justice, I also draw implications for distributing unconditional basic income and income taxes across life, which I suggest may offer alternative paths to libertirement. Finally, the third part discusses the cases of pension inequality between genders and generations, pushing us to refine our account further. I conclude that there is often a mismatch between liberal egalitarian justice and the design of retirement schemes. The solution is often but not always to reform these systems. Sometimes, we have reasons to revise our very own principles of justice. (shrink)

In this essay we argue against preventing people from amassing extreme wealth via increased taxation. The first argument in favor of such a proposal, recently advanced by Ingrid Robeyns (2018), states that billionaires’ resources would be better spent addressing morally important goals such as meeting disadvantaged people’s needs and solving collective action problems. In response to this claim, we argue that billionaires are typically in a better position to benefit the poor and to solve collective action problems than public officials. (...) The second argument in favor of preventing extreme wealth accumulation, advanced by Robeyns and Robert Reich (2018), states that billionaires have an inappropriate amount of influence in public life, which undermines political equality. We argue that corporate leaders tend to be more accountable to their fellow citizens than public officials. We then consider and criticize the objection that billionaires’ success is typically a result of public investment, which entitles public officials to enforce taxes that demand a return on the public investment. (shrink)

This paper discusses limitarianism in light of three popular objections to the redistribution of extreme wealth: (i) that such redistribution legitimizes envy, which is a morally objectionable attitude; (ii) that it disincentivizes the wealthy to invest and work, leading to a diminished social product, and, thereby, making everyone worse-off; and (iii) that it undercuts the pursuit and achievement of human excellence by depriving successful people of resources through which they may otherwise excel. We argue that these objections fail to undermine (...) limitarianism. An elaborated defence against them, rather, reveals how the Standard Defence of limitarianism may be expanded and strengthened by relying explicitly on the importance of preventing a society of envy, avoiding harm to non-rich citizens, and ensuring that humans are given the opportunities to excel in ways that go beyond those that allow for the amassment of wealth. (shrink)

Many college teachers believe that teaching can promote justice. Meanwhile, many in the broader American public disparage college classrooms as spaces of left-wing partisanship. This paper engages with that charge of partisanship. Section 1 introduces the charge. Then, in Sect. 2, I consider what teaching for justice should aim to do. I argue that selective institutions of higher education impose positional costs on members of a generation who do not attend them, and that those positional costs accrue not only in (...) terms of distributive equality but also in terms of civic equality. Teaching for justice, I argue, should be understood as an attempt to lessen those costs. But the civic equality costs that selective higher education imposes can be meaningfully lessened only by a radical version of teaching for justice: educational consciousness raising for institutional reform. This sets up a high hurdle for any defense against the partisanship charge, because the kind of teaching for justice we have most justice-related reason to engage in seems especially susceptible to that charge. Section 3 gives a public reasons case in favor of teaching for justice so understood. Because civic equality is a commitment we all ought to share as free and equal citizens, teaching for justice aimed at restoring civic equality enjoys a public reasons justification. Still, an all-things-considered assessment of our permissions or obligations to engage in this teaching project awaits a careful thinking through of the case against it. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 305-317, April 2022.

I argue that fitting envy plays a special role in safeguarding our happiness and flourishing. After presenting my theory of envy and its fittingness conditions, I contrast Kant’s view that envy is always unfitting with D’Arms and Jacobson’s defense of fitting envy as an evolutionarily-shaped response to a deep and wide human concern, that is, relative positioning. However, D’Arms and Jacobson don’t go far enough. First, I expand on their analysis of positional goodness, distinguishing between an epistemic claim, according to (...) which we use implicit or explicit comparison to know what position we occupy in a continuum of goodness, and thus to form judgments of goodness, and a metaphysical one, according to which much human goodness depends on implicit or explicit rankings and positionality. Second, I argue that fitting envy is not only intrinsically valuable qua fitting response to authentic goodness, but can be epistemically, morally and prudentially valuable. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with the widespread claim that positional competitions are zero-sum games. It shows how the notions of ‘positional good’ and ‘positional competition’ have changed in meaning and how this has resulted in conceptual confusion in discussions amongst economists and philosophers. I argue that the Zero-Sum Claim is hardly ever true when it comes to the novel understanding of positionality that currently dominates the philosophical literature. I propose dropping the Zero-Sum Claim and construing positional competitions as win-lose. This (...) is conceptually clearer and deepens our understanding and ethical evaluation of these important competitions in contemporary societies. (shrink)

A considerable literature has emerged around the idea of using ‘personal responsibility’ as an allocation criterion in healthcare distribution, where a person's being suitably responsible for their health needs may justify additional conditions on receiving healthcare, and perhaps even limiting access entirely, sometimes known as ‘responsibilisation’. This discussion focuses most prominently, but not exclusively, on ‘luck egalitarianism’, the view that deviations from equality are justified only by suitably free choices. A superficially separate issue in distributive justice concerns the two–way relationship (...) between health and other social goods: deficits in health typically undermine one's abilities to secure advantage in other areas, which in turn often have further negative effects on health. This paper outlines the degree to which this latter relationship between health and other social goods exacerbates an existing problem for proponents of responsibilisation (the ‘harshness objection’) in ways that standard responses to this objection cannot address. Placing significant conditions on healthcare access because of a person's prior responsibility risks trapping them in, or worsening, negative cycles where poor health and associated lack of opportunity reinforce one another, making further poor yet ultimately responsible choices more likely. It ends by considering three possible solutions to this problem. (shrink)

The article argues that the possibility of an unlimited gap in income and wealth between the top and bottom segments of society is incompatible with a democratic commitment to political equality. T...

Populists in the EU often call for restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights. These calls are often demagogic and parochial. This paper aims to show what exactly is both distinct and problematic with these populist calls from a normative point of view while not necessarily reducible to demagogy and parochialism. The overall aim of the paper is not to argue that all populists call for such restrictions nor to claim that all calls for such restrictions are populist. The (...) purpose of the paper is rather humble. It only aims to show that populist calls for restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights are characterised by two normatively problematic arguments that target two different subsets of the citizenry: what I dub for the purpose of this paper the moralists and the immoralists. It is the way populists address these two subsets of the citizenry, as well as the fact that they could simultaneously appeal to the concerns of both groups, that makes populist approaches to welfare rights both conceptually distinct to other approaches as well as potentially politically appealing to a more diverse population of voters. (shrink)

Here, we provide an ethical analysis of discrimination in private insurance to guide the application of non-discriminatory algorithms for risk prediction in the insurance context. This addresses the need for ethical guidance of data-science experts, business managers, and regulators, proposing a framework of moral reasoning behind the choice of fairness goals for prediction-based decisions in the insurance domain. The reference to private insurance as a business practice is essential in our approach, because the consequences of discrimination and predictive inaccuracy in (...) underwriting are different from those of using predictive algorithms in other sectors. Here we focus on the trade-off in the extent to which one can pursue indirect non-discrimination versus predictive accuracy. The moral assessment of this trade-off is related to the context of application—to the consequences of inaccurate risk predictions in the insurance domain. (shrink)

Economic disparities often translate into disparities in political influence, rendering political liberties less worthy to poor citizens than to wealthier ones. Concerned with this, Rawls advocated that a guarantee of the fair value of political liberties be included in the first principle of justice as fairness, with significant regulatory and distributive implications. He nonetheless supplied little examination of the content and grounding of such guarantee, which we here offer. After examining three uncompelling arguments in its favor, we complete a more (...) promising yet less explored argument that builds on the value of self-respect. We first inspect the conditions and duties that securing self-respect entails. We then look into how uneven allocations of the value of political liberties bear, expressively and due to the power imbalances they yield, on such conditions and duties. (shrink)

The adversarial legal system is traditionally praised for its normative appeal: it protects individual rights; ensures an equal, impartial, and consistent application of the law; and, most importantly, its competitive structure facilitates the discovery of truth – both in terms of the facts, and in terms of the correct interpretation of the law. At the same time, legal representation is allocated as a commodity, bought and sold in the market: the more one pays, the better legal representation one gets. In (...) this article, I argue that the integration of a market in legal representation with the adversarial system undercuts the very normative justifications on which the system is based. Furthermore, I argue that there are two implicit conditions, which are currently unmet, but are required for the standard justifications to hold: that there is (equal opportunity for) equality of legal representation between parties, and that each party has (equal opportunity for) a sufficient level of legal representation. I, therefore, outline an ideal proposal for reform that would satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Over the last few decades, there have been intense debates concerning the effects of markets on the morality of individuals’ behaviour. On the one hand, several authors argue that markets’ ongoing expansion tends to undermine individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit and virtuous character traits and actions. On the other hand, leading economists and philosophers characterize markets as a domain of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit that promotes many of the character traits and actions that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as (...) virtuous. In this paper, I join this debate and argue for three claims of general interest to philosophers, economists and policy makers. First, market transactions do not reliably promote individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit, and often select against such intentions. Second, the set of so-called market virtues lacks a substantial overlap with the set of character traits that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as virtuous. And third, many seemingly virtuous actions observed in market contexts are merely actions in accordance with virtue rather than genuine actions from virtue. These three claims do not license opposition to markets, but challenge the main empirical and theoretical presuppositions of leading virtue ethics defences of markets. (shrink)

This essay discusses two contributions of the principle of sufficient autonomy to educational justice. In Just Enough, Liam Shields criticizes instrumental accounts of autonomy. According to these accounts, autonomy is valuable insofar as it contributes to well-being. Shields argues that instrumental arguments fail to support mandatory autonomy education in all cases, while his non-instrumental principle of sufficient autonomy does support this. This essay develops a version of the instrumental argument and argues this version can do the work of supporting mandatory (...) autonomy education. Another contribution of the principle of sufficient autonomy is the requirement of talents discovery. According to Shields, the requirement of talents discovery renders Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity more plausible, since one’s chances of accessing a given economic position depend on one’s opportunities to discover one’s innate talents. This essay argues that Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity does not have the same implications as the principle of sufficient autonomy as to which types of talents should be discovered and to what extent. (shrink)

Recalling the landmark US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the advancement of educational equality is often associated with the reduction of stigmatizing differences in status or “sense of inferiority” engendered by separately and differentially educated citizens. This essay takes up the obverse concern, the sense of superiority sustained by educational inequality, with particular focus on the inequality signaled by higher education status. I contend that the presence of aggrandized HES in a democratic society provides reasons to object (...) to educational inequality for which institutions of higher education ought to be held responsible. Aggrandized HES not only demands a questionable deference from citizens in a democratic society; it also weakens HES’s signaling of epistemic authority and equality of educational opportunity, which harms the public’s motivation to learn by distorting beliefs about education. To address this problem, I argue that the best policy solution for curbing aggrandized uses of HES is to transform the positional aspect of higher education using an admissions policy originally suggested by Elizabeth Anderson, which I term the elite culture strategy. Beyond admissions policies, this essay addresses the larger concern of educating citizens to perceive and assess educational status according to democratic norms and not solely in terms of self-interested gain. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask whether there is a defensible philosophical view according to which everybody is beautiful. I review two purely aesthetical versions of this claim. The No Standards View claims that everybody is maximally and equally beautiful. The Multiple Standards View encourages us to widen our standards of beauty. I argue that both approaches are problematic. The former fails to be aspirational and empowering, while the latter fails to be sufficiently inclusive. I conclude by presenting a hybrid ethical–aesthetical (...) view according to which everybody is beautiful in the sense that everybody can be perceived through a loving gaze. I show that this view is inclusive, aspirational and empowering, and authentically aesthetical. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers tend to agree that intentional parental genetic shaping and intentional parental environmental shaping for the same feature are, normatively, on a par. I challenge this view by advancing a novel argument, grounded in the value of fair relationships between parents and children: Parental genetic shaping is morally objectionable because it unjustifiably exacerbates the asymmetry between parent and child with respect to the voluntariness of their entrance into the parent–child relationship. Parental genetic shaping is, for this reason, different from (...) and more objectionable than parental environmental shaping. I introduce a distinction between procreative decisions one makes qua mere procreator—that is, without the intention to rear the resulting child—and procreative decisions one makes qua procreator-and-future childrearer. Genetic shaping is objectionable when undertaken in the latter capacity: Both selection and enhancement are objectionable because they introduce an unnecessary and avoidable inequality in the parent–child relationship; in the case of enhancement, this also results in harm to the future child. (shrink)

The family disrupts equality while also, think many, providing goods of unique value. In Family Values, Brighouse and Swift tackle both of these tendencies, offering a refined and distinctive liberal egalitarian account both of the value of family life, and the limits of what may be done in its name. It builds up from an account of children's specific interests to a defence of ‘familial relationship goods’ as providing the best way of satisfying those interests. Thus though parenthood carries goods (...) of its own, parental prerogatives are delimited by what is good for children. The position which emerges plays out in nuanced, sometimes surprising ways. I raise three main lines of potential criticism, concerning, respectively, the distribution of family relationship goods, their value in relation to fair equality of opportunity, and the viability of distinguishing between family-located and other contributions to the realisation of a child's interests. (shrink)

In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve argue that prioritarianism fails to account for the shift in moral significance in gains to individuals in interpersonal as compared to intrapersonal cases. In this article, I show that the priority view escapes this objection but in a way that deprives it of (some of) its anti-egalitarian stance. Despite Otsuka and Voorhoeve, prioritarianism, rightly understood, provides consistent and attractive recommendations in both single- and multi-person cases. Yet prioritarians, the article goes on (...) to show, cannot do so while availing themselves of the leveling down objection (LDO) to egalitarianism. They may not do so because similarly to egalitarianism, prioritarianism also must reject the principle of personal good. That is, egalitarians and prioritarians may sometime recommend certain actions and outcomes even when these are better for no one. Prioritarians may survive the Otsuka–Voorhoeve critique, but to do so they must abandon their anti-egalitarian stance (or at the very least, the LDO). (shrink)

Positional goods are goods whose relative amount determines their absolute value. Many goods appear to have positional aspects. For example, one’s relative standing in the distribution of education and wealth may determine one’s absolute condition with respect to goods like employment opportunities, self-respect, and social inclusion. Positional goods feature in recent arguments from T.M. Scanlon, Brian Barry, and Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift that assert that we should favor egalitarian distributions of positional goods even if we reject equality as a (...) fundamental principle of distributive justice. With respect to positional goods, worsening the better off is required to better the worse off. Thus, we have reason to “level down” goods such as education and wealth in order to benefit those worse off with respect to the value of those goods. I argue that the allegedly positional aspects of the goods in question are not actually positional. Moreover, leveling down these goods risks self-defeat: it may produce a net decrease in the value of the shares of individuals with less of such goods. If so, leveling down measures would fail on their own terms. (shrink)

Consider the following argument for school choice, based on an appeal to the virtues of the market: allowing parents some measure of choice over their particular children's education ultimately serves the interests of all children, because creating a market mechanism in state education will produce improvements through the same pressures that lead to greater efficiency and quality when markets are deployed in more familiar contexts. The argument fails, because it is committed to a principle of equal concern, which implies that (...) a market in education is acceptable only if it is right to hold children disadvantaged by their parents' poor market choices substantively responsible for the fact. Since that claim is untenable, the market‐based argument for school choice not only fails, but also turns out to rely on principles which in fact condemn the very policy it was supposed to support. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of a Moment of Equal Opportunity (MEO): a point in an individual’s life at which equal opportunity must be applied and after which it need not. The concept of equal opportunity takes many forms, and not all employ an MEO. However, the more egalitarian a theory of equal opportunity is, the more likely it is to use an MEO. The article discusses various theories of equal opportunity and argues that those that employ an MEO are (...) problematic. Unjust inequalities, those that motivate the use of equal opportunity, occur throughout people’s lives and thus go unrectified after an MEO. However, it is not possible to abandon the MEO approach and apply more egalitarian versions of equal opportunity throughout a person’s life, since doing so entails problems of epistemology, efficiency, incentives, and counter-intuitive results. The article thus argues that liberal egalitarian theories of equality of opportunity are inconsistent if they support an MEO and unrealizable if they do not. (shrink)

Am Beispiel von Adipositas werden in diesem Beitrag die Konflikte diskutiert, die zwischen elterlichen Rechten und den aus Gerechtigkeitserwägungen erwachsenden Ansprüchen von Kindern entstehen können. Es wird angenommen, dass Kinder Anspruch auf Gesundheit haben, und dass Adipositas sie in ihrer Gesundheit gefährdet. Die Frage lautet, was zu tun ist, wenn das Handeln der Eltern die Entstehung von Adipositas begünstigt. Es werden drei verschiedene Konzeptionen elterlicher Rechte diskutiert. Nach der ersten Konzeption sind elterliche Rechte in den Interessen oder Freiheiten der Eltern (...) fundiert. Gemäß der zweiten Auffassung ergeben sich elterliche Rechte aus elterlichen Pflichten, während der dritte Ansatz die Bedeutung sogenannter Beziehungsgüter hervorhebt. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden zwei Thesen vertreten: Die erste lautet, dass Eltern nicht berechtigt sind, ihre Kinder in einer Weise aufzuziehen, die zu Adipositas führt. Die zweite These ist, dass es trotzdem gute Gründe für Zurückhaltung bei Eingriffen in die Familie gibt. (shrink)

Vertreter non-egalitaristischer Konzeptionen der Bildungsgerechtigkeit ersetzen das klassische egalitaristische Votum für Gleichheit als intrinsischen Wert durch die Begründung von Schwellenkonzeptionen, die über Adäquatheits- und Suffizienzbedingungen angeben sollen, was als Kriterium für die Identifikation illegitimer Bildungsungleichheiten zu gelten hat und was nicht. Alle Ungleichheiten oberhalb einer fixierten Schwelle sind aus non-egalitaristischer Sicht normativ nicht von Belang. Dieser Fokus auf Mindestbedingungen, die gegeben sein müssen, damit Akteure in liberal-demokratischen Gesellschaften politisch partizipieren und ein gedeihliches Leben führen können, steht nicht nur in einem (...) gewissen Passungsverhältnis zu aktuellen bildungspolitischen Entwicklungen, sondern scheint auch einige der Probleme angemessener lösen zu können, mit denen egalitaristische Konzeptionen der Bildungsgerechtigkeit üblicherweise konfrontiert werden. Die gerechtigkeitstheoretische Begründung von Schwellenkonzeptionen wird häufig durch demokratietheoretische Argumentationen flankiert, die davon ausgehen, dass die propagierten Mindeststandards zugleich die intergenerationale Tradierung der normativen Grundlagen liberaler Demokratien sicherstellen und die Voraussetzungen demokratischer Legitimität konstituieren, indem sie allgemeine Fähigkeiten und Tugenden fördern, auf die eine Zustimmung zu konsensfähigen Prinzipien der Gerechtigkeit und der fairen Kooperation angewiesen ist. In dem Beitrag werden zunächst die wichtigsten non-egalitaristischen Kritiken an egalitaristischen Konzeptionen der Bildungsgerechtigkeit vorgestellt. Daran anschließend werden einige der Schwachstellen und Fallstricke diskutiert, die mit suffizienzorientierten Verständnissen der Bildungsgerechtigkeit und ihren demokratietheoretischen Begründungen verbunden sind. Ziel des Beitrags ist es nicht eine ausformulierte egalitaristische Alternative zu non-egalitaristischen Konzeptionen der Bildungsgerechtigkeit vorzustellen, sondern nachzuweisen, dass Doktrinen der Suffizienz noch keine ausreichenden Kriterien liefern, um mit verbleibenden Bildungsungleichheiten angemessen umzugehen. (shrink)

Some of the barriers to the realisation of equality reflect the value of respecting prerogatives people have to favour themselves. Even G.A. Cohen, whose egalitarianism is especially pervasive and demanding, says that.

A good education provides useful ‘knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions’ (Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb, & Swift, 2016, p. 6).1 Educational justice cares about the distribution of these goods beca...

I offer a novel distinction between two concepts of competition. The first, parallel competition, is designed to create separate pathways for each competitor wherein they can maximize their performance. The second, friction competition, is designed to facilitate a clash between competitors. Each concept is utilized as an institutional mechanism to generate social benefits. In parallel competition, the social benefit is the result of the aggregation of the independent efforts of each competitor. In friction competition, it emerges from the clash between (...) competitors. I argue that this distinction carries significant normative implications concerning debates over equality, freedom, and democratic institutional design. (shrink)

The article deals with the question whether an unconditional basic income is part of an ideal liberal-egalitarian welfare regime. Analyzing UBI from an ideal-theoretical perspective requires a comparison of the justice performance of ideal welfare regimes instead of comparing isolated institutional designs. This holistic perspective allows for a more systematic consideration of issues like institutional complementarity. I compare three potential ideal welfare regimes from a liberal-egalitarian perspective of justice: An ideal social democratic regime, a mixed regime containing a moderate UBI (...) and a maximal UBI regime where UBI replaces most of the welfare state. These regimes are evaluated with respect to three aspects of justice performance: the scope and neutrality of opportunities provided, institutional complementarities with a dynamic, globalized economy and the policy feedback effects on the political stability of liberal-egalitarian political coalitions. I conclude that the overall performance of a mixed regime is superior to the other regimes. (shrink)

A good education provides useful ‘knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions’ (Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb, & Swift, 2016, p. 6).1 Educational justice cares about the distribution of these goods beca...

Philosophical discussions of positional goods typically focus on parties competing for shares of such goods and on the inequalities among them that both shape and arise from these competitions. Les...

Opponents of genetic enhancement technologies often argue that the pursuit of these technologies will lead to self-defeating collective outcomes, massive social inequalities, or other forms of collective harm. They assume that these harms will outweigh individual benefits. Defenders of genetic enhancement technologies counter that individual benefits will outweigh collective harms and there will be no conflict between individual and collective interests. The present contribution tries to advance the debate by providing a more detailed discussion of the conditions under which individual (...) and collective interests may conflict.It presents a simple model that clarifies the conditions in which the use of genetic enhancement technologies may lead to self-defeating collective outcomes and social inequalities. It argues that given current inequalities, these conditions might indeed obtain as new genetic knowledge leads to a transition in population health. If they do, then genetic enhancement will steepen the social gradient in health. Thus, regulating access to enhancement technologies should be a matter of social justice. (shrink)

Non è un caso che l’enhancement umano, cioè il potenziamento di capacità fisiche, cognitive ed emotive degli esseri umani con l’ausilio di tecnologie, sia diventato un tema centrale nei dibattiti etico-applicativi e nei tentativi contemporanei di arrivare a una comprensione più adeguata della natura umana. In esso si incontrano quesiti decisamente ricchi e complessi, sia dal punto di vista tecnoscientifico e medico sia da quello filosofico – e lo fanno in un modo che ci permette di vedere questi quesiti sotto (...) una nuova luce. Il numero raccoglie alcune voci italiane, tedesche, inglesi e statunitensi su diversi aspetti della problematica dell’enhancement umano. Tra le tematiche discusse troviamo il potenziamento genetico, le dimensioni etiche dell’enhancement, la relazione uomo-tecnologia, il cosiddetto enhancement morale, la relazione tra enhancement ed eugenetica, la distinzione tra potenziamento e terapia e la rilevanza delle neuroscienze per lo sviluppo futuro delle bio-tecnologie, della medicina e dell’etica. (shrink)

I argue that young patients should be able to access neuroenhancing drugs without a diagnosis of ADHD. The current framework of consent for pediatric patients can be adapted to accommodate neuroenhancement. After a brief overview of pediatric neuroenhancement, I develop three arguments in favor of greater acceptance of neuroenhancement for young patients. First, ADHD is not relevantly different from other disadvantages that could be treated with stimulant medication. Second, establishing a legitimate framework for pediatric neuroenhancement would mitigate the bad effects (...) of diversion and improve research on neuroenhancement and ADHD. Third, some pediatric patients have rights to access neuroenhancements. I then consider several objections to pediatric neuroenhancement. I address concerns about addiction, advertising, authentic development, the parent–child relationship and equal opportunity and conclude that these concerns may inform a framework for prescribing neuroenhancement but they do not justify limits on prescribing. (shrink)

This review essay looks at two important recent books on the empirical social science of inequality, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level and John Hills et al .'s Towards a More Equal Society? , situating these books against the important work of Michael Marmot on epidemiology and health inequalities. I argue that political philosophy can gain a great deal from careful engagement with empirical research on the nature and consequences of inequality, especially in regard to empirical work on (...) the relationship between socioeconomic inequality, status, self-respect, domination, autonomy, the quality of social relations, and societal health outcomes. The essay also raises some methodological questions about the approach taken by Wilkinson and Pickett, as well as questioning the ways in which their argument is (or is not) best understood as being fundamentally egalitarian in character. It concludes with some reflections, prompted by Hills et al ., on the lessons that should be learned by egalitarians from the experience of the Blair and Brown governments in the UK. (shrink)

The paper examines the relationship between the two parts of Rawls’ second principle of justice. More specifically, it explores the ways in which the Difference Principle (DP) may constrain the range of acceptable social arrangements in light of the stated lexical priority of the requirement of fair equality of opportunity (FEO) over the DP. The paper discusses two possibilities. First, it examines the role the DP may play within an institutional scheme that satisfies the requirement of FEO. Second, it discusses (...) the role the principle may play in selecting among different institutional schemes that satisfy FEO. The paper argues that the DP has an important role only if there is a range of institutional arrangements that are equivalent from the point of view of FEO but non-equivalent from the point of view of the DP. Next, it explores the possible sources of the variation among the different FEO-equivalent institutional schemes, and argues that on the most satisfactory reading of the requirement of FEO, there will not be much variation that is relevant from the point of view of the DP. The paper concludes that the role of the Difference Principle is at best very limited in constraining the range of social arrangements that are acceptable from the point of view of justice. (shrink)

Political egalitarians tend to defend equal distributions of voting power at specific times, as in ‘one election, one vote’. Appealing as it is, the principle seems incompatible with distributing power proportionally to the stakes voters have at different elections, as in ‘one stake, one vote’. This article argues that the tension above stems from the temporal scope ascribed to political equality, as at specific moments of democratic decision-making instead of over entire lives. More specifically, ascribing a lifetime view to political (...) equality renders equality compatible with proportionality at different elections. I first show that storable votes differ from standard votes in their distinctive commitment to lifetime political equality. I then argue that storable voting schemes are compatible with three key reasons to value political equality: equal consideration of interests, relational equality, and non-domination. Finally, storable votes are also consistent with proportionality at specific times. I conclude that the neglected idea of lifetime political equality can, through storable votes, deliver proportionality without inequality. (shrink)

This essay starts from the observation that the issue of talent, in relation to the problem of distributive justice, can be approached from two different angles. First, it is common to discuss the justificatory function of talent, that is, its role in the justification of educational or social inequalities. In addition, however, this essay proposes to look at practices of talent ascription and their causal role in the distribution of educational prospects. These practices tend to exacerbate educational inequalities due to (...) social background, especially when they are tied to selective educational settings. There is reason to avoid talent-based selection in education, in order to contain the negative effects of practices of talent ascription. (shrink)

A good education provides useful ‘knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions’ (Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb, & Swift, 2016, p. 6).1 Educational justice cares about the distribution of these goods beca...

Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for f...

The principle of fair equality of opportunity is regularly used to justify social policies, both in the philosophical literature and in public discourse. However, too often commentators fail to make explicit just what they take the principle to say. A principle of fair equality of opportunity does not say anything at all until certain variables are filled in. I want to draw attention to two variables, timing and currency. I argue that once we identify the few plausible ways we have (...) at our disposal for filling in those variables, it will become apparent that a reasonable version of the principle will be quite narrow. Its usefulness as a justificatory basis for social policies will be limited to those policies that target the distribution of competitive opportunities among people entering majority. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among philosophers and legal scholars that the distribution of educational resources in the US is unjust, but little agreement about why. An increasingly prominent view posits a sufficientarian standard based on the requirements of democratic citizenship. This view, which I refer to as democratic sufficientarianism, argues that inequalities in educational resources or opportunities above the threshold required for democratic citizenship are morally unobjectionable if and only if all children are provided with an education sufficient to meet (...) those demands. In the article, I argue that democratic sufficientarianism faces a democratic education dilemma. Either the philosopher specifies a precise and demanding threshold with antidemocratic implications, or she insists upon democratic equality irrespective of educational achievements, thereby undercutting the search for anything but a minimal educational threshold. As an alternative, I defend a new sufficientarian standard that is reflexive, education-specific, and democracy-compatible. This reflexive sufficientarian standard can act as a guide to democratic deliberation about education policy. The article also sketches possibilities for litigation on behalf of children who have received insufficient primary education. (shrink)