Affirmative action continues to divide. My aim in this paper is to present participants in the debate with a new distinction, namely one between negative and positive affirmative action. Whereas positive affirmative action has to do with certain goods, such as a place at a prestigious university or a job at a prestigious company, negative affirmative action has to do with certain bads, such as a firing or a sentence. I then argue that some of the most prominent arguments in (...) favor of affirmative action speak at least as much in favor of negative as positive affirmative action. At the same time, at least one of the most prominent arguments put forward against affirmative action speak less against negative affirmative action. Thus, the paper should redraw the battle lines in the affirmative action debate. (shrink)

This dissertation identifies and responds to a problem for liberal relational egalitarians. There is a prima facie worry about the compatibility of liberalism and relational egalitarianism, concerning the requirements of equality in informal social life. Liberalism at least involves a commitment to leaving individuals substantial discretion to pursue their own conceptions of the good. Relational equality is best understood as a kind of deliberative practice about social institutions and practices. Patterns of otherwise innocuous social choices (e.g., where to live, whom (...) to befriend or marry) can create emergent, severe differentials in power, status, and influence, and when they do they can threaten relational equality. If relational equality required individuals to subordinate personal choices to egalitarian considerations, it would run into conflict with liberal commitments. In response, I defend the value of accepting an imperfect realization of relational equality. What I call fair relational equality demands that members of society treat some informal social norms and practices as part of the basic structure of society, in need of justification. Three practices are required to meet that demand. First, the relational-egalitarian society must develop institutional strategies to preempt or mitigate tendencies toward emergent inequality as they are identified. Second, members of society must engage in broad social deliberation about the norms and expectations of informal social interaction. Third, they must be willing to reform social practices where doing so does not impinge on important personal projects and values. (shrink)

While there exist extensive literatures on both distributive justice and senior executive pay, and a number of authors (notably the French economist Thomas Piketty) have addressed the implications of high pay for distributive justice, the existing literature fails to address what senior executives themselves think about distributive justice and whether they consider high income inequalities to be morally acceptable. We address this gap by analysing a unique dataset comprising the views of over 1000 senior executives from across the world, which (...) was constructed using a survey instrument designed by the authors based on a thought experiment resembling John Rawls’s original position. We report four main findings. First, executives conceptualise distributive justice in a pluralistic manner, endorsing different and sometimes apparently conflicting philosophical principles: to explain how this plurality can be accounted for we propose a novel field-theory framework for conceptualising beliefs about distributive justice. Second, executives support similar philosophical approaches at both society and company levels of analysis, thus countering the idea that companies should leave matters of distributive justice exclusively for governments to deal with via the tax system. Third, executives believe that they live in societies and work for companies that fall short of desirable distributive justice outcomes. Fourth, the distributive justice views of the executives in our sample fall into four distinct clusters that are correlated with certain socio-demographic markers. Finally, we note the distinction between distributive justice beliefs and behaviours, from which we derive a number of managerial and public policy implications. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of the field of business ethics.

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...) By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. (shrink)

Tässä artikkelissa käsittelen Descartesin ikuisten totuuksien välttämättömyyteen liittyvää ongelmaa. Teoksessa Mietiskelyjä ensimmäisestä filosofiasta (1641–1642) Descartes nostaa esiin käsitteen ikuisista totuuksista, käyttäen esimerkkinään kolmiota. Kolmion muuttumattomaan ja ikuiseen luontoon kuuluu esimerkiksi, että sen kolme kulmaa ovat yhteenlaskettuna 180°. Se on totta kolmiosta, vaikka yhtään yksittäistä kolmiota ei olisi koskaan ollutkaan olemassa. Eräät ajattelemieni asioiden piirteet ovat siis Descartesin mukaan ajattelustani riippumattomia. Ikuisia totuuksia ovat ainakin matemaattiset ja geometriset tosiseikat sekä ristiriidan laki. Samoin Descartesin kuuluisa lause “ajattelen, siis olen” lukeutuu ikuisten totuuksien (...) joukkoon. Descartesin ikuiset totuudet olisivatkin siis loogisesti välttämättömiä. Niillä on kyseinen olemus riippumatta ulkoisten kohteiden olemassaolosta tai siitä, ajattelenko niitä lainkaan. Kuitenkin kirjeenvaihdossaan Descartes pitää itsepintaisesti kiinni käsityksestään, että ikuiset totuudet ovat Jumalan vapaasti luomia ja Jumala olisi voinut luoda ne erilailla. Näin ollen luodut ikuiset totuudet eivät tarkkaan ottaen olisikaan välttämättömiä vaan kontingentteja. Ne voisivat olla myös toisella tavalla. Artikkelin alkuun esittelen Descartesin modaalista metafysiikkaa sekä luotujen ikuisten totuuksien kontingenttiudesta seuraavia tulkinnallisia vaikeuksia. Tämän jälkeen pureudun kolmeen erilaiseen ratkaisuyritykseen kommentaarikirjallisuudessa (Frankfurt 1977; Curley 1984 & Bennett 1994) ja osoitan, miksi ne eivät riitä vastaamaan ongelmaan. Lopussa vedän johtopäätöksiä ja luonnostelen mahdollisen ratkaisun. (shrink)

People’s health is hugely affected by where they live, their occupational status and their socio-economic position. It has been widely argued that the presence of such social determinants in health provides good reasons to reject luck egalitarianism as a theory of distributive justice in health. The literature provides different reasons why this responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice should not be applied to health. The critiques submit that the social circumstances undermine or remove people’s responsibility for their health; responsibility sensitive health (...) policies would adversely affect those who are worst off and; the luck egalitarian approach to health distracts from the important task of rectifying socio-economic influences on people's health and provides individualistic solutions to collective problems. But for each of these variants of the critique luck egalitarianism provides suitable answers. The literature on social determinants is no detriment to the project of applying luck egalitarianism to health. (shrink)

This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism (...) cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that aim to counteract the distributive effects of luck. This article explains luck egalitarianism's main ideas, and the debates that have accompanied its rise to prominence. There are two main parts to the discussion. The first part sets out three key moves in the influential early statements of Dworkin, Arneson, and Cohen: the brute luck/option luck distinction, the specification of brute luck in everyday or theoretical terms and the specification (...) of advantage as resources, welfare, or some combination of these. The second part covers three later developments: the democratic egalitarian critique of luck egalitarianism, the luck egalitarian acceptance of pluralism, and luck egalitarian doubts about the significance of the brute luck/option luck distinction. (shrink)

Notwithstanding an ongoing concern about the low representation of certain groups in higher education, there is reluctance on the part of politicians and policy makers to adopt positive discrimination as an appropriate means of widening participation. This article offers an account of the different objections to positive discrimination and, thereafter, clarifies and criticises the view that universities ought to select those applicants who are expected to be most successful as students. It distinguishes arguments from meritocracy, desert, respect, and productivity and (...) shows how these arguments are compatible with the use of positive discrimination in higher education. (shrink)

Employers sometimes use personality tests in hiring or specifically look for candidates with certain personality traits such as being social, outgoing, active, and extraverted. Therefore, they hire based on personality, specifically extraversion in part at least. The question arises whether this practice is morally permissible. We argue that, in a range of cases, it is not. The common belief is that, generally, it is not permissible to hire based on sex or race, and the wrongness of such hiring practices is (...) based on two widely accepted principles: the Relevance Principle and the Fairness Principle. The Relevance Principle states that hiring should be based on what is relevant to job performance, while the Fairness Principle states that hiring should be based on features that individuals can control. Since hiring based on sex or race violates these principles, it is wrong. However, we argue that, in a range of cases, hiring based on extraversion also violates these principles, and assuming the validity of the Relevance and the Fairness Principles, it follows that personality discrimination is morally wrong in those cases. (shrink)

Proceedings of the 2016 "one word" colloquium of the The Philosophical Society of Finland. The word was "Possibility".

Employers’ access to and use of criminal records as a selection mechanism in the labor market makes it far more difficult for ex-offenders to find jobs, especially regular, well-paid jobs, than those without criminal convictions. The paper asks whether there is anything morally problematic about this practice. The aims of the paper are twofold. First, arguments based on premises of wrongful discrimination against the current, commonest use of criminal records are critically discussed. It is argued that employers do not necessarily (...) engage in morally wrongful discrimination against job applicants when they use criminal records in recruitment screening. But it is also argued that ex-offenders who apply for jobs are subject to what can be called “structural and morally wrongful discrimination” when laws allow employers to request (or directly access) a job applicant’s full criminal record. Second, preliminary proposals on how criminal records can be used by employers in a way that avoids wrongful structural discrimination of ex-offenders will be presented and critically assessed. I suggest that it should be lawful for an employer to access an applicant’s criminal records only where there is a relevant and special match or link between the crime on the records and the job being applied for and the crime is serious. This proposal is defended against two objections, one based on concerns about crime prevention and the other based on the employer’s interest in knowing whom not to hire. (shrink)

The paper offers to substantiate a claim about the so-called Meritocratic Conception of how educational opportunities ought to be distributed. Such a conception holds an individual’s prospects for educational achievement may be a function of that individual’s talent or effort levels but should not be influenced by their social class background. The paper highlights the internal tension in the Meritocratic Conception between on the one hand a prohibition on the influence of social class on educational opportunities and on the other (...) a permission to allow unequal educational opportunities on the basis of talent and effort. This tension obtains because individuals’ talent and effort are themselves subject to influence by social class. The paper makes a positive case for an interpretation of the Meritocratic Conception that resolves this tension in favour of an egalitarian version, such that social class represents an objectionable determinant of unequal educational prospects even when its influence is mediated through the cultivation of talent and effort. This argument is further supported through an explanation that the character of social class as a systemic social source of the structure of individuals’ opportunities makes it an objectionable influence on educational opportunities. (shrink)

Fairness in sport is not just about assigning the top prizes to the worthiest competitors. It is also about the way the prize structure itself is organised. For many sporting competitions, although it may be acceptable for winners to receive more than losers, it can seem unfair for winners to take everything and for losers to get nothing. Yet this insight leaves unanswered some difficult questions about what stakes fairness requires and which principles of stakes fairness are appropriate for particular (...) competitions. In this article I specify a range of different principles of stakes fairness that could regulate sporting competitions. I also put forward a theoretical method for pairing up appropriate principles of stakes fairness with given sporting competitions. Specifically, I argue that the underlying rationales for holding sporting competitions can provide useful guides for identifying appropriate principles of stakes fairness. I then seek to clarify and work through some of the implications of this method for a sample of real world controversies over sporting prize structures. I also attempt to refine the method in response to two possible objections from indeterminacy and relativism. Finally, I compare and contrast my conclusions with more general philosophical debates about justice. (shrink)

The article argues that discrimination is bad as such when and because it undermines equality of opportunity. It shows, first, that other accounts, such as those concerning intent, efficiency, false representation, prejudice, respect and desert cannot account for the badness of discrimination as such. The inequality of opportunity account, in contrast, captures everything that is bad about discrimination. The article then addresses some counter-examples of practices that are discriminatory without arguably entailing inequality of opportunity, where the notable case is that (...) of segregation. It is further demonstrated that the account successfully handles some of the tricky aspects associated with discrimination, such as those concerning the confinement of discrimination to salient groups, discriminatees by means of financial compensation, in the selection of life partners, and the duties of employers. (shrink)

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)

According to relational egalitarians, equality is not primarily about the distribution of some good but about people relating to one another as equals. However, compared with other theorists in political philosophy – including other egalitarians – relational egalitarians have said relatively little on what role personal responsibility should play in their theories. For example, is equality compatible with responsibility? Should economic distributions be responsibility-sensitive? This article fills this gap. I develop a relational egalitarian framework for personal responsibility and show that (...) relational equality commits us to responsibility. I develop two sets of arguments. First, I draw on relational theories of moral responsibility – particularly Strawsonian views – to show that valuable egalitarian relationships require responsibility. Second, I show why relational equality sometimes requires that economic distributions be sensitive to responsibility and choice. I also defend a seemingly paradoxical result: being committed to responsibility, relational egalitarianism not only justifies some distributive inequalities but some relational inequalities too. Overall, relational egalitarianism gives a nuanced and coherent answer as to why and how responsibility matters from within egalitarianism. That it does should be an important argument in its favour. (shrink)

A recent movement within political philosophy called luck egalitarianism has attempted to synthesize the right’s regard for responsibility with the left’s concern for equality. The original motivation for subscribing to luck egalitarianism stems from the belief that one’s success in life ought to reflect one’s own choices and not brute luck. Luck egalitarian theorists differ in the decision procedures that they propose, but they share in common the general approach that we ought to equalize individuals with respect to brute luck (...) so that differences in distribution are only a consequence of the responsible choices that individuals make. I intend to show that through the application of its own distributive procedures, the interpersonal luck egalitarian approach actually undermines its original motivation by making the lives of individuals subject to brute luck. I propose two alternative methods that the luck egalitarian could use to prevent the problems suffered by the interpersonal luck egalitarian standard. (shrink)

How should policymakers respond to the risk of technological unemployment that automation brings? First, I develop a procedure for answering this question that consults, rather than usurps, individuals’ own attitudes and ambitions towards that risk. I call this the insurance argument. A distinctive virtue of this view is that it dispenses with the need to appeal to a class of controversial reasons about the value of employment, and so is consistent with the demands of liberal political morality. Second, I appeal (...) to the insurance argument to show that governments ought not simply to provide those who are displaced by machines with unemployment benefits. Instead, it must offer re-training programmes, as well as enact more general macroeconomic policies that create new opportunities for employment. My contribution is important not only because it helps us to resolve a series of urgent policy disputes—disputes that have been discussed extensively by labour market economists and policymakers, but less so by political philosophers—but also because my analysis sheds light on more general philosophical controversies relating to risk. (shrink)

Das von Cass Sunstein und Richard Thaler ausgearbeitete Projekt eines Libertären Paternalismus stellt fraglos einen der zurzeit meistdiskutierten neopaternalistischen Theorieentwürfe dar. Als hybride Mischung zwischen Theorieprogramm, politischer Bewegung und praxis- und anwendungsorientiertem Policy-Manual, das zuweilen Züge eines populären philosophischen Lebensratgebers trägt, hat Libertärer Paternalismus viel Zuspruch, aber auch heftige Kritik auf sich gezogen, die in diesem Aufsatz auf ihre Plausibilität geprüft werden. Zu diesem Zweck geben die Autoren zunächst einen kurzen Überblick über Ausgangspunkte, Leitorientierungen und Problemvorgaben des Theorie- und Politikprogramms (...) des Libertären Paternalismus. In einem zweiten Schritt werden zentrale Konzepte und Unterscheidungen des libertär paternalistischen Rationales vorgestellt und problematisiert. Daran anschließend werden drei der prominentesten Kritikpunkte an Libertärem Paternalismus auf den Prüfstand gestellt. Hierzu gehören der Manipulationseinwand, Kritiken, die sich auf grundlegende Rechtfertigungsprobleme des Libertären Paternalismus beziehen, und Einwände, die auf langfristige negative Folgen des Nudging verweisen. (shrink)

Some moral theorists defend a holistic account of practical reasons and deny that the possibility of moral thought depends upon the existence of moral principles. This article explores the implications of this position for theorising about justice, which has often aspired to provide us with an ordered list of principles to govern our institutions and practices.

John Tomasi argues that aggressively pro-market, capitalist regimes can secure fair equality of opportunity—a level playing field—even as they honor people's thick economic liberties. The trick is to rely on markets to spread prosperity and high-quality healthcare and education to all. That done, each person will have fair opportunity. Or will she? In truth, Tomasi's “market-democratic” plan cannot bring genuinely fair opportunity to all, even at the level of ideal theory. Nor can it plausibly promise to increase the “quality” of (...) opportunity: the supply, that is, of intrinsically desirable work. (shrink)

One of the central elements of John Rawls’ argument in support of his two principles of justice is the intuitive normative ideal of citizens as free and equal. But taken in isolation, the claim that citizens are to be treated as free and equal is extremely indeterminate, and has virtually no clear implications for policy. In order to remedy this, the two principles of justice, together with the stipulation that citizens have basic interests in developing their moral capacities and pursuing (...) their conceptions of the good life, are meant to provide a more precise interpretation of what is involved in treating citizens as free and equal. Rawls’ critics, however, have argued that satisfying the two principles of justice is not the most appropriate or plausible way to respect the status of citizens as free and equal. In relation to this debate, the present paper has two aims. The first is to examine Rawls’ account of the type of freedom that a just society must guarantee equally to its citizens. I will argue that those who think of Rawls as a theorist of freedom as non-interference are mistaken, because his notion of liberty resembles in important respects the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. Second, I will consider the extent to which Rawls’ principles of justice successfully protect the freedom as non-domination of all citizens so as to effectively treat them as free and equal. (shrink)

Current debates regarding justice in university admissions most often approach the question of access to university from a technical, policy-focussed perspective. Despite the attention that access to university receives in the press and policy literature, ethical discussion tends to focus on technical matters such as who should pay for university or which schemes of selection are allowable, not the question of who should go to university in the first place. We address the question of university admissions—the question of who should (...) go to university—from an ethical perspective. We find that most discussions draw on a generic conception of what the university is good for that is too thin to provide deliberative guidance and hold that a full account of the ethics of admissions needs to take into account the distinctive good that the university provides—knowledge and understanding. This view, we hold, does not imply that measures should not be taken to widen access to university; however, the basis for such measures should be grounded in that distinctive good in the first instance. (shrink)

In ‘Justice and Nature’, Thomas Nagel claims that social institutions are not responsible for inequalities caused primarily by nature, as opposed to socially caused inequalities. I evaluate this claim. To do so, I distinguish causal responsibility from substantive responsibility. I argue that Nagel rightly identifies conditions in virtue of which social institutions are not substantively responsible for an inequality, but the causal responsibility of nature is irrelevant for that assessment. The natural/social distinction is, I hold, misleading, and I offer two (...) pragmatic reasons to stop using it. Besides, past criticisms to the natural/social distinction have questioned whether identifying the causal responsability of nature for an inequality is descriptively meaningful, epistemically possible, and morally relevant. My reconstruction of Nagel’s view avoids these criticisms, I explain, by depriving the causal responsibility of nature of any role to identify an inequality as naturally caused. Moreover, I show that my reconstruction of Nagel’s view, purged of the natural/social distinction, helps to justify the asymmetrical treatment of class-based inequalities and inequalities among people with different native endowments in the Rawlsian principle of fair equality of opportunity. (shrink)

This paper discusses Rawls’s thesis that the social basis of self-respect is one of the primarysocial goods. While the central element of the social basis consists in the attitudes of others(e.g. respect or esteem) the social basis may include also possession of various goods. Further,one may distinguish, following Honneth, universalistic basic respect from differential esteem andfrom loving care. This paper focuses on esteem, and further distinguishes three importantvarieties thereof (anti-stigmatization; contributions to societal goods, projects of self-realization),which all differ from recognition (...) of cultural identity. The normative implications will differ in these different contexts. (shrink)