In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...) theory, I situate the good of meaningful work within a liberal perfectionist framework, from which standpoint I develop a normative justification for making meaningful work the object of political action. To understand the content of meaningful work, I make use of Susan Wolf’s distinct value of meaningfulness, in which she brings together the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity into the ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness (BVM) (Wolf, Meaning in life and why it matters, 2010). However, in order to be able to incorporate the BVM into our lives, we must become valuers, that is, co-creators of values and meanings. This demands that we acquire the relevant capabilities and status as co-authorities in the realm of value. I conclude that meaningful work is of first importance because it is a fundamental human need, and that society ought to be arranged to allow as many people as possible to experience their work as meaningful through the development of the relevant capabilities. (shrink)

Like American politics, the academic debate over justice is polarized, with almost all theories of justice falling within one of two traditions: egalitarianism and libertarianism. This book provides an alternative to the partisan standoff by focusing not on equality or liberty, but on the idea that we should give people the things that they deserve. Mulligan argues that a just society is a meritocracy, in which equal opportunity prevails and social goods are distributed strictly on the basis of merit. That (...) gives citizens their just deserts. In addition to its novel conceptual approach, meritocracy is distinctive from existing work in two ways. First, it is grounded in research on how people actually think about justice. Empirical research reveals that people don't think that social goods should be distributed equally. Nor do they dismiss the idea of social justice. Across ideological and cultural lines, people want rewards to reflect merit. Second, the book discusses hot-button political issues and makes concrete policy recommendations. These issues include anti-meritocratic bias against women and racial minorities and the United States’ widening economic inequality. Justice and the Meritocratic State offers a new theory of justice and provides solutions to our most vexing social and economic problems. It will be of keen interest to philosophers, economists, and political theorists. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism (...) is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory. (shrink)

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs—to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and (...) how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be. (shrink)

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a (...) strong effect of this kind: Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile. (shrink)

Principles of distributive justice are normative principles designed to guide the allocation of the benefits and burdens of economic activity.

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)

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)

There are many objections to statistical discrimination in general and racial profiling in particular. One objection appeals to the idea that people have a right to be treated as individuals. Statistical discrimination violates this right because, presumably, it involves treating people simply on the basis of statistical facts about groups to which they belong while ignoring non-statistical evidence about them. While there is something to this objection—there are objectionable ways of treating others that seem aptly described as failing to treat (...) them as individuals—it needs to be articulated carefully. First, most people accept that many forms of statistical discrimination are morally unproblematic, let alone morally justified all things considered. Second, even treating people on the basis of putative non-statistical evidence relies on generalizations. Once we construe treating someone as an individual in a way that respects this fact, it becomes apparent: (1) that statistical discrimination is compatible with treating people as individuals, and (2) that one may fail to treat people as individuals even without engaging in statistical discrimination. Finally, there are situations involving the expression of messages of inclusion where we think it is good, morally speaking, that we are not treated as individuals. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that one approach to normative political theory, namely contextualism, can benefit from a specific kind of historical inquiry, namely genealogy, because the latter provides a solution to a deep-seated problem for the former. This problem consists in a lack of critical distance and originates from the justificatory role that contextualist approaches attribute to contextual facts. I compare two approaches to genealogical reconstruction, namely the historiographical method pioneered by Foucault and the hybrid method of pragmatic genealogy (...) as practiced by Bernard Williams, arguing that they both ensure an increase in critical distance while preserving contextualism’s distinctiveness. I also show, however, that only the latter provides normative action-guidance and can thus assist the contextualist theorist in the crucial task of discerning how far certain contextual facts deserve their justificatory role. I prove this point by showing how a pragmatic genealogy of the practice of punishment can inform the contextualist’s reflection about the role this practice should play in a transitional scenario, i.e. in the set of circumstances societies go through in the aftermath of large-scale violence and human rights violations. (shrink)

Social contract theorists often take the ideal contract to be the agreement or bargain individuals would make in some privileged choice situation. Recently, experimental philosophers have explored this kind of decision-making in the lab. One rather robust finding is that the exact circumstances of choice significantly affect the kinds of social arrangements experimental subjects unanimously endorse. Yet prior work has largely ignored the question of which of the many competing descriptions of the original position subjects find most compelling. This paper (...) aims to address this gap, exploring how attractive experimental subjects find various characterizations of these circumstances of choice. We find evidence suggesting that no one choice situation can fulfill the role that social contract theorists have hoped it would play. We also find that, contrary to what some prominent social contract theorists have expected, there is no robust relationship between an individual’s ranking of distributive principles and their ranking of various descriptions of the original position. In conclusion, we discuss the broader implications of these results for political philosophy. (shrink)

It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...) resulting predictive model does not use race as an explicit predictor. However, if race is correlated with measured recidivism in the training data, the ML tool may ‘learn’ a perfect proxy for race. If such a proxy is found, the exclusion of race would do nothing to weaken the correlation between risk (mis)classifications and race. Is this a problem? We argue that, on some explanations of the wrongness of discrimination, it is. On these explanations, the use of an ML tool that perfectly proxies race would (likely) be more wrong than the use of a traditional tool that imperfectly proxies race. Indeed, on some views, use of a perfect proxy for race is plausibly as wrong as explicit racial profiling. We end by drawing out four implications of our arguments. (shrink)

Rather than answering the broad question, ‘What is a just income?’, in this essay I consider one component of income—economic rent—under one understanding of justice—as giving people what they deserve. As it turns out, the answer to this more focused question is ‘no’. People do not deserve their economic rents, and there is no bar of justice to their confiscation. After briefly covering the concept of desert and explaining what economic rents are, I analyze six types of rent and show (...) that each is unjustified from the point of view of desert. I conclude by drawing some political and economic lessons from the preceding analysis, and by describing how these considerations can create a more just and efficient economy. (shrink)

The dominant focus of thinking about economic justice is overwhelmingly distributive, that is, concerned with what people get in terms of resources and opportunities. It views work mainly negatively, as a burden or cost, or else is neutral about it, rather than seeing it as a source of meaning and fulfilment—a good in its own right. However, what we do in life has at least as much, if not more, influence on whom we become, as does what we get . (...) Thus we have good reason also to be concerned with what Paul Gomberg has termed contributive justice , that is, justice as regards what people are expected and able to contribute in terms of work. Complex, interesting work allows workers not only to develop and exercise their capacities, and gain the satisfaction from achieving the internal goods of a practice, but to gain the external goods of recognition and esteem. As Gomberg’s analysis of the concept of contributive justice in relation to equality of opportunity shows, as long as the more satisfying kinds of work are concentrated into a subset of jobs, rather than shared out among all jobs, then many workers will be denied the chance to have meaningful work and the recognition that goes with it. In this paper I examine the contributive justice argument, suggest how it can be further strengthened, arguing, inter alia, that ignoring contributive injustice tends to support legitimations of distributive inequality. (shrink)

Facts about need play some role in our causal understanding of the world. We understand, for example, that people have basic needs for food, water and shelter, and that people come to be harmed because those needs go unmet. But what are needs? How do explanations in terms of need fit into our broader causal understanding of the world? This paper provides an account of need attribution, their contribution to causal explanations, and their relation to disposition attribution.

In this article, we articulate and defend a contextual approach to political theory. According to what we shall call ‘iterative contextualism’, context has two important roles to play in determining what is required by justice. First, it is through the exploration and evaluation of multiple contexts that general principles are devised, revised and refined. Second, significant weight should be given to the norms to be found in specific contexts because the people affected by those norms strongly identify with them. Having (...) said this, the application of general principles to particular contexts may still result in recommendations which deviate to some degree from the prevailing norms. In this case, we shall argue that although justice requires something other than what local norms say, what is required is likely to be intimated by the relevant context. Thus, whilst considerations of identification act as significant constraints on iterative contextualists’ thinking, the idea of intimations provides them with an important resource. (shrink)

In World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge argues that the global rich have a duty to eradicate severe poverty in the world. The novelty of Pogges approach is to present this demand as stemming from basic commands which are negative rather than positive in nature: the global rich have an obligation to eradicate the radical poverty of the global poor not because of a norm of beneficence asking them to help those in need when they can at little cost (...) to themselves, but because of their having violated a principle of justice not to unduly harm others by imposing on them a coercive global order that makes their access to the objects of their human right to subsistence insecure. In this paper, I claim that although Pogge is right in arguing that negative duties are crucial in an account of global justice, he is wrong in saying that they are the only ones that are crucial. Harming the global poor by causing their poverty provides a sufficient but not a necessary condition for the global rich to have a duty of justice to assist them. After engaging in a critical analysis of Pogges argument, I conclude by suggesting the need for a robust conception of cosmopolitan solidarity that includes positive duties of assistance which are not mere duties of charity, but enforceable ones of justice. (shrink)

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

This paper investigates how social enterprises navigate through the ethical complexity of social change and extends the ethical quandaries faced by social enterprises beyond organisational boundaries. Building on the emerging literature on the ethics of SEs, I conceptualise ethics as an engagement with power relations. I develop theoretical arguments to understand the interaction between ethical predispositions of a SE and the normative structure of the social system in which it operates. I applied this conceptualisation in a hierarchical and heterogeneous rural (...) Indian context to provide insights into the moral ambiguity of ethical decision-making and suggest pathways for ethical actions. Taking a qualitative case study approach, I followed an exemplary SE’s implementation process in India. I observed ethical challenges in designing the implementation process, selecting the beneficiaries and sustaining the programme. I also identified three actions of the SE—the action of recognition, the action of reposition and the action of collaboration—and developed a transformative process model. I discuss the theoretical implications of this research for SEs and recommend a critical engagement with ethical theories to address systemic problems. (shrink)

There is an odd proximity between Hayek, hero of the libertarian right, and Rawls, theorist of social justice, because, at the level of principle, Hayek was in some important respects a Rawlsian. Although Hayek said that the idea of social justice was nonsense, he argued against only a particular principle of social justice, one that Rawls too rejected, namely distribution according to individual merit. Any attempt to make reward and merit coincide, Hayek argued, would undermine the market's price system, leaving (...) us all poorer and less free. Like Rawls, Hayek held that we should assess social institutions from behind a veil of ignorance, and he thought that doing so pushed us toward egalitarianism. Most of the distance between Hayek and Rawls at the level of policy stems from Hayek's optimism about the operation of markets, his equivocation about the meaning of central concepts, and his appeal to under-argued slippery slopes. Hayek wavered, however, between claiming that private property and markets benefit everyone, compared to the feasible alternatives, and the principle that they maximize the opportunities of a randomly selected member of society, i.e., aggregate opportunity. Contemporary Hayekians claim that capitalism raises the position of the worst off in the long run, in future generations, whereas Rawlsians insist that inequalities between social positions should benefit the worst off now. (shrink)

Garrett Cullity contends that fairness is appropriate impartiality (See Cullity (2004) Chapters 8 and 10 and Cullity (2008)). Cullity deploys his account of fairness as a means of limiting the extreme moral demand to make sacrifices in order to aid others that was posed by Peter Singer in his seminal article ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. My paper is founded upon the combination of (1) the observation that the idea that fairness consists in appropriate impartiality is very vague and (2) the (...) fact that psychological studies show the self-serving bias is especially likely to infect one’s judgements when the ideas involved are vague. I argue that Cullity’s solution to extreme moral demandingness is threatened by these findings. I then comment on whether some other theories of fairness are vulnerable to the same objection. (shrink)

Chief executive officers (CEOs) are typically paid great amounts of money in wages and bonuses by commercial companies. This is sometimes defended with an argument from peer comparison; roughly that “our” CEO has to be paid in accordance with what other CEOs at comparable companies get. At first glance this seems like a poor excuse for morally outrageous pay schemes and, consequently, the argument has been ignored in the previous philosophical literature. In contrast, however, this article provides a partial defence (...) of the argument from peer comparison. Moreover, it is demonstrated how a serious consideration of this argument sheds further light on both incentive- and desert-based theories of just pay. (shrink)

In attempts to compare different distributions with regards to need, so-called “measures of need-based distributive justice” have emerged in recent years. Each of the proposed measures relies on a single dimension of need that is taken into account. This is shown to be problematic since humans experience different kinds of need that appear to be incommensurable. A strategy to deal with this problem is introduced by using multidimensional measures.

Health equity is increasingly identified as a principal goal to be achieved through public health policies and activities. However, what is to be measured in the assessment of health equity and how inequities in health ought to be redressed are among the pressing questions that must be answered if health equity is to serve as a meaningful and consistent ethical guide for measurement and intervention in public health. In this article I argue that the concept of health equity, in the (...) form it is predominantly found in public health, suffers from normative indeterminacy and is therefore unlikely to provide actionable normative guidance to public health policy-makers, practitioners and researchers. I argue that the concept of health equity, as it is commonly defined in public health, ultimately rests upon assumptions of a more fundamental, yet tacit, conception of justice to do its normative work. In this vein, I expand upon a critique of Margaret Whitehead’s oft-cited definition of health equity made by James Wilson to raise additional reasons not explored by Wilson, or others, as to why Whitehead’s definition remains inadequate in providing normative guidance to policy-makers, practitioners and researchers in public health. (shrink)

This article outlines the structure of a Rawlsian theory of justice in the employment relationship. A focus on this theory is motivated by the role it plays in debates in business ethics. The Rawlsian theory answers three central questions about justice and the workplace. What is the relationship between social justice and justice at work? How should we conceive of the problem of justice in the economic sphere? And, what is justice in the workplace? To see fully what demands justice (...) makes on the workplace, we should first spell out the implications that domestic justice has for working conditions. When this is done, we can develop a conception of workplace justice and investigate what content such local justice should have. John Rawls’s political liberalism was constructed for the specific problem of a just basic structure; in order to apply it to another problem the key theoretical concepts must be revised. Reasons for a specific construction of a local original position are given and arguments are presented in support of a principle of local justice, which takes the form of a choice egalitarian local difference principle. (shrink)

This critical notice provides an overview of Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality and assesses whether Frankfurt is right to argue that equality is merely formal and empty. I counter-argue that egalitarianism, properly tweaked and circumscribed, can be defended against Frankfurt’s repudiation. After surveying the main arguments in Frankfurt’s book, I argue that whatever plausibility the ‘doctrine of sufficiency’ defended by Frankfurt may have, it does not strike a fatal blow against egalitarianism. There is nothing in egalitarianism that forbids acceptance of the (...) moral platitude expressed in sufficientarianism's positive thesis,. Nor is there anything in egalitarianism as such that makes it impossible to recognize the banal truth that there are many important things besides equality, and that many dimensions of human affairs are improperly appraised from a relational or comparative point of view. The fact that a relational or comparative point o... (shrink)

This paper explores the ethics of networking as a means of competition, specifically networking to improve one’s prospects of prevailing in formal competitive processes for jobs or university placements. There are broadly two ways that networking might be used to influence the outcome of some such process: through the “exchange of affect” between networker and selector, and through the demonstration of merit by networker to selector. Both raise ethical problems that have been overlooked but need to be addressed.

Contemporary accounts of medical ethics and professionalism emphasize the importance of social justice as an ideal for physicians. This ideal is often specified as a commitment to attaining the universal availability of some level of health care, if not of other elements of a “decent minimum” standard of living. I observe that physicians, in general, have not accepted the importance of social justice for professional ethics, and I further argue that social justice does not belong among professional norms. Social justice (...) is a norm of civic rather than professional life; professional groups may demand that their members conform to the requirements of citizenship but ought not to require civic virtues such as social justice. Nor should any such requirements foreclose reasonable disagreement as to the content of civic norms, as requiring adherence to common specifications of social justice would do. Demands for any given form of social justice among physicians are unlikely to bear fruit as medical education is powerless to produce this virtue. (shrink)

The question I want to answer is if and how the recognition approach, taken from the works of Axel Honneth, could be an adequate framework for addressing the problems of global justice and poverty. My thesis is that such a globalization of the recognition approach rests on the dialectic of relative and absolute elements of recognition. (1) First, I will discuss the relativism of the recognition approach, that it understands recognition as being relative to a certain society or a set (...) of institutions. The same is true for various forms of disrespect such as denigration or exclusion. The recognition approach is a form of internal reconstructive critique, which does not want to refer to absolute or ahistorical standards. (2) Second, I show that this relative understanding of recognition and disrespect rests on an absolute core of recognition, which transcends any given society. In short, this core is the possibility of undistorted self-realization, which is the main and universal element of a good life. Such an absolute core is necessary for distinguishing between justified and unjustified claims of relative recognition. It also serves as the normative benchmark for any society. (3) Finally, I will discuss the relation of these relative and absolute elements of recognition against the background of global justice. Claims of recognition can refer to this absolute core and demand that intersubjective conditions and social relations should change in order to make undistorted self-realization possible. This is the main point of reference for a recognition-based concept of global justice. (shrink)

This chapter describes how philosophical theorizing about justice can be connected with empirical research in the social sciences. We begin by drawing on some received distinctions between ideal and non-ideal approaches to theorizing justice along several different dimensions, showing how non-ideal approaches are needed to address normative aspects of real-world problems and to provide practical guidance. We argue that there are advantages to a transitional approach to justice focusing on manifest injustices, including the fact that it enables us to set (...) aside some reasonable disagreements about justice. The ‘bottom-up’ approach we advocate, for which we borrow Wolff’s term ‘real-world political philosophy’, is an empirically-informed normative analysis that attends to specific, identifiable injustices, and thus is partial, though not isolationist. We illustrate our approach by considering how different models of the nature of disability suggest different kinds of remedy for injustices faced by persons living with disabilities. We reflect on the nature and significance of vulnerabilities, and we assess the role of public opinion in normative theorizing, suggesting a particular significance for the opinions and experiences of marginalized groups. We finally reflect on the relevance of European legal and institutional frameworks for theorizing justice in Europe. (shrink)

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that (...) participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (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)

It is a distinctive feature of the global political order that democracy is no longer confined to nation-states, characterized by extensive and overlapping constituencies. It is important to think of the significance of these developments for individuals’ self-determination, which may be undermined in different ways. Here it is argued that democracy must serve to delegate power to complex units of decision making which favour self-determination. Contestability is part of this form of self-determination, allowing forms of politics to emerge based on (...) the democratic rights and powers of self-determining, non-dominated citizens. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the normative core of the recent European riots, when young rebels reacted to the disregard for their civic claims to equal treatment. Referring to the available data and facts, the essay uses the example of the two biggest riots in contemporary French and British history to show that prevailing analyses only grasp certain aspects of these events: these riots were primarily neither ‘race riots’, ‘issueless riots’ nor ‘riots of defective consumers’. Nourished in particular by experiences with the (...) police and the school system in the urban districts from which the rioters recruited, rage was directed against the symbols and embodiments of a state that has failed to live up to its promise of equality. It is the everyday undermining of the principle of their equality as citizens and the physically experienced violation of minimum constitutional standards that best explain the motivations of those participating in the riots. (shrink)

This article reconstructs and reflects on the 1989 debate between Jerry Cohen and myself on market socialism in the light of Cohen's ongoing defence of communitarian socialism. It presents Cohen's view of market socialism as ethically deficient but a modest improvement on capitalism, and outlines some market socialist proposals from the 1980s. Our debate centred on the issues of distributive justice and community. I had argued that a market economy might be justified by appeal to desert based on productive contribution, (...) but Cohen saw effort as the only relevant desert base, and claimed that only non-comparative judgements of economic desert were possible. Market-derived inequalities, therefore, could not be deserved. He also condemned markets for relying on the motives of greed and fear, and therefore as destructive of community. In reply, I asserted that markets also liberated people from fixed social roles, and that market competition could be viewed differently, as providing the most effective way for people to contribute to each other's welfare. In retrospect, this debate can be seen to raise questions about the nature of justice and the purpose of political philosophy that have come to the fore in recent exchanges between ‘realists’ and ‘idealists’. (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)

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)

Harry Brighouse discusses two conceptions of educational equality. The first is a type of equality of opportunity, heavily influenced by the work of John Rawls, which he calls the meritocratic conception. According to this conception, an individual’s educational prospects should not be influenced by factors such as their social class background. The other, radical conception, suggests a person’s natural talents should not influence their educational prospects either. Brighouse favors the meritocratic conception, but this article argues that it is flawed and (...) that the radical conception ought to be preferred. Although a superior conception of educational equality, the radical conception is still not quite right, so this article develops a luck egalitarian conception of educational equality. It is argued that this conception reflects much current thinking about equality and avoids some of the difficulties with Brighouse’s two conceptions. Finally, two objections to a luck egalitarian conception are considered. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized the existence of myriad widespread deep disagreements on values, justice, morality, and ethics. In order to come to terms with such deep disagreements, resistant to rational solution, this article asserts the need for developing an ethics of disagreement. The reality that theoretical disagreements often turn into practical conflicts is a major justification for why such an ethics is necessary. This paper outlines an ethics of deep disagreement that is primarily conceived of as a form of virtue (...) ethics. Such an ethics asks opposing parties in moral and intellectual conflicts to acknowledge that (a) deep disagreements exist, (b) opposing positions should be recognized as worthy of respect, and that (c) one should seek dialogue and mutual understanding. This ethical approach conceives of toleration as a moral and political virtue and presents an argument for toleration based on deep disagreements. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to deepen the concept of emerging urban mobility technology. Drawing on philosophical everyday and urban aesthetics, as well as the postphenomenological strand in the philosophy of technology, we explicate the relation between everyday aesthetic experience and urban mobility commoning. Thus, we shed light on the central role of aesthetics for providing depth to the important experiential and value-driven meaning of contemporary urban mobility. We use the example of self-driving vehicle (SDV), as potentially mundane, public, (...) dynamic, and social urban robots, for expanding the range of perspectives relevant for our relations to urban mobility technology. We present the range of existing SDV conceptualizations and contrast them with experiential and aesthetic understanding of urban mobility. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential undesired consequences from the depolitization of technological development, and potential new pathways for speculative thinking concerning urban mobility futures in responsible innovation processes. (shrink)

For many, the idea that people should be rewarded in proportion to what they deserve is the very essence of distributive justice. However, while the notion of moral desert is otherwise widely accepted, Rawls rejects it entirely in his A Theory of Justice. Many authors have argued that Rawls’s claims about desert have serious and unappealing consequences for his conception of justice as fairness, and also that they deny the possibility of autonomous choice to the very agents whose decisions are (...) supposed to underlie Rawls’s approach to justice. In this paper, I analyze the arguments of those who believe that Rawls can be interpreted in a way that doesn’t in fact deny either desert or the possibility of autonomous action. I conclude by allowing for the interpretation that Rawls does not necessarily deny autonomous action, but I contend that he nevertheless finds the idea of preinstitutional desert entirely off the mark. (shrink)