One of the fundamental components of the concept of economic rationality is that preference orderings are “complete,” i.e., that all alternative actions an economic agent can take are comparable. The idea that all actions can be ranked may be called the single utility assumption. The attractiveness of this assumption is considerable. It would be hard to fathom what choice among alternatives means if the available alternatives cannot be ranked by the chooser in some way. In addition, the efficiency criterion makes (...) sense only if one can infer that an individual's choice reflects the best, in expected welfare terms, among all choices that individual could have made. The possibility that a rearrangement of resources could make someone “better off” without making others “worse off” can be understood only if the post-rearrangement world is comparable with the pre-rearrange-ment world. (shrink)

Instrumentalists about need believe that all needs are instrumental, i.e., ontologically dependent upon ends, goals or purposes. Absolutists view some needs as non-instrumental. The aims of this article are: clearly to characterize the instrumentalism/absolutism debate that is of concern (mainly §1); to establish that both positions have recent and current adherents (mainly §1); to bring what is, in comparison with prior literature, a relatively high level of precision to the debate, employing some hitherto neglected, but important, insights (passim); to show, (...) on grounds not previously to the fore in the literature, that insofar as instrumentalism’s advocates have provided arguments for the position, these are unsound (§2); to argue against instrumentalism using a new dilemma concerning whether ‘end’, ‘goal’ and ‘purpose’ are interpreted in a mentalistic manner (§3); to elucidate the implications of the needs/need-satisfiers and preconditions/means distinctions for the debate (§4). (shrink)

Rawls’ primary legacy is not that he standardised a particular view of justice, but rather that he standardised a particular method of arguing about it: justification via reflective equilibrium. Yet this method, despite such standardisation, is often misunderstood in at least four ways. First, we miss its continuity across his various works. Second, we miss the way in which it unifies other justificatory ideas, such as the ‘original position’ and an ‘overlapping consensus’. Third, we miss its fundamentally empirical character, given (...) that it turns facts about the thoughts in our head into principles for the regulation of our political existence. Fourth, we miss some of the implications of that empiricism, including its tension with moral realism, relativism, and conservatism. (shrink)

In refutation of hedonism, Nozick offered a hypothetical thought experiment, known as the Experience Machine. This paper maintains that end-of-life-suffering of the kind that is resistant to state-of-the-art palliation provides a conceptually equal experiment which validates Nozick’s observations and conclusions. The observation that very many terminal patients who suffer terribly do no wish for euthanasia or terminal sedation is incompatible with motivational hedonism. Although irreversible vegetative state and death are equivalently pain-free, very many people loath the former even at the (...) price of the latter. This attitude cannot be accounted for by hedonism. Following these observations, the goals of palliative care are sketched along four circles. The first is mere removal or mitigation of noxious symptoms and suffering. The second targets sufferings that stymie patients’ life-plans and do not allow them to be happy, the third targets sufferings that interfere with their pursuance of other goods (palliation as a primary good). The fourth is the control of sufferings that do not allow the person to benefit from any human good whatsoever (“total pain” or critical suffering). Only in the fourth circle are people hedonists. (shrink)

Most environmental philosophers have had little use for 'conventional' philosophical and political thought. This is unfortunate, because these traditions can greatly contribute to environmental ethics and policy discussions. One mainstream concept of potential value for environmental philosophy is the notion of the public interest. Yet even though the public interest is widely acknowledged to be a powerful ethical standard in public affairs and public policy, there has been little agreement on its descriptive meaning. A particularly intriguing account of the concept (...) in the literature, however, may be found in the work of the American pragmatist John Dewey. Dewey argued that the public interest was to be continuously constructed through the process of free, cooperative inquiry into the shared good of the democratic community. This Deweyan model of the public interest has much to offer environmental philosophers who are interested in making connections between normative arguments and environmental policy discourse, and it holds great promise for enhancing environmental philosophy's role and impact in public life. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically review the game-theoretic discussion of Hobbes and to develop a game-theoretic interpretation that gives due attention both to Hobbes's distinction between “moderates” and “dominators” and to what actually initiates conflict in the state of nature, namely, the competition for vital goods. As can be shown, Hobbes's state of nature contains differently structured situations of choice, the game-theoretic representation of which requires the prisoner's dilemma and the assurance game and the so-called assurance dilemma. (...) However, the “state of war” ultimately emerges from situations that cannot be described by any of these games because they represent zero-sum games in which the outcome of mutual cooperation does not exist. (shrink)

Is it possible to reconcile a classical liberal approach to economics with a concern for the environment? The contributors to Economics and the Environment: A Reconciliation contend that it is. But they fail to distinguish properly between classical liberalism and a widespread orthodoxy in environmental policy communities in Europe and North America to the effect that economic instruments for environmental policy need more serious attention than they have hitherto received. Once this orthodoxy is distinguished from classical liberalism, the latter is (...) seen to be implausible. In particular, the classical liberal approach fails to deal with the practical and administrative problems involved in enforcing private property rights solutions to problems of environmental protection, wrongly generalizes from the failures of U.S. environmental policy to the failure of public regulation as such, and fails to take into account the claim that nature should be accorded intrinsic value. (shrink)

The deliberative model of democracy, as presented by Jürgen Habermas and others, claims to reconstruct the normative content of the idea of democracy. However, since it overemphasises the epistemic facet of decision‐making, the model is unable to take into account other valuable aspects of democracy. This is shown in reference to two concrete phenomena from political reality: majority voting and the problem of the dissenter. In each case, the deliberative model inevitably fails to account for several normatively desirable features of (...) democracy, such as formal political equality and proper respect for the judgement of each citizen. (shrink)

“Fair and equitable benefit-sharing” is one of the objectives of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In essence, benefit-sharing holds that countries, farmers, and indigenous communities that grant access to their plant genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge should share in the benefits that users derive from these resources. But what exactly is understood by “fair” and “equitable” in this context? Neither term is defined in the international treaties. (...) A complicating factor, furthermore, is that different motivations and perspectives exist with respect to the notion of benefit-sharing itself. This paper looks at six different approaches to benefit-sharing that can be extracted from the current debates on “Access and Benefit-Sharing.” These approaches form the basis of a philosophical reflection in which the different connotations of “fair and equitable” are considered, by analyzing the main principles of justice involved. Finally, the various principles are brought together in order to draw some conclusions as to how a fair and equitable benefit-sharing mechanism might best be realized. This results in several recommendations for policymakers. (shrink)

Appeals to the public interest in law are commonplace, but typically made without clarifying what the public interest is and how it can be determined. In law, this has led to ad hoc applications of the public interest and, consequently, to “judicial idiosyncrasy,” posing a threat to legal certainty. This paper aims to remedy these problems by providing much‐needed conceptual clarification. It proposes that something is in the public interest if it increases the opportunities of the members of the public (...) to pursue and realize the (permissible) ends they all share qua equal members of the public. (shrink)

The two books offer a contextual reinterpretation of Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian liberalism. Nelson’s main thesis is that debates in liberal political theory re-enact theological debates about theodicy going back to the Pelagian controversy. This claim is criticized for its historical inaccuracy. Nelson’s invocation of theodicy as a refutation of luck egalitarianism and the Rawlsian rejection of desert rest on a claim of possibility that is too weak to uphold a plausible refutation. Forrester locates Rawls’s rejection of desert in the thinking (...) of his contemporaries. She not only shows the development of Rawls’s thought but also details its broad influence. However, her thesis that the role of economic planning in a theory of justice remained undeveloped by Rawls ignores the intrinsic difficulties of designing a system of economic planning. The persistent antinomies of grace and free will in metaphysics, and of planning and the price mechanism in economics, show the continuing relevance of meaning beyond context. (shrink)

The rise of liberal market economies, propagated by neoliberal free market thought, has created a vacant responsibility for public interests in the market order of society. This development has been critiqued by Catholic social teaching (CST), forcefully arguing that governments and businesses should be directed to the common good. In this debate, no attention has yet been given to the Reformational tradition and its principle of sphere sovereignty, which provides guidelines on the responsibilities of governments and companies for the public (...) interest of society. This article analyzes the differences and similarities between CST and the Reformational philosophy in their critiques of the neoliberal free market perspective of Hayek. We apply the three perspectives to the case of orphan drugs in the pharmaceutical industry and show that CST and the Reformational philosophy offer valuable insights in correction to Hayek’s views on the responsibilities of governments and companies for public health interests. (shrink)

The article investigates what happens when philosophy meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic literature in game theory and network science. Then, we investigate the structure of the two corpora thus identified by bibliographic coupling and divide them into clusters of related papers by automatic (...) community detection. Lastly, we construct by the same bibliometric techniques a reference map of philosophy, on which we overlay our corpora to map the diffusion of game theory and network science in the various sub-areas of recent philosophy. Three main results derive from this study. Philosophers are interested not only in using and investigating game theory as a formal method belonging to applied mathematics and sharing many relevant features with social choice theory, but also in considering its applications in more empirically oriented disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive science, or biology. Philosophers focus on networks in two research contexts and in two different ways: in the debate on causality and scientific explanation, they consider the results of network science; in social epistemology, they employ network science as a formal tool. In the reference map, logic—whose use in philosophy dates back to a much earlier period—is distributed in a more uniform way than recently encountered disciplines such as game theory and network science. We conclude by discussing some methodological limitations of our bibliometric approach, especially with reference to the problem of field delineation. (shrink)

From the day on which humans are born they need things. Some of these needs seem “basic,” such as our needs for food, water or shelter. Everybody has these needs. We cannot escape them. We also cannot escape the serious harm that arises when these needs remain unsatisfied. It is thus no wonder that in thinking about what we ought to do some researchers have suggested to first and foremost focus on people's basic needs. Such need‐based theories must answer three (...) main questions: What are basic needs? What are their implications for normative questions? And how can these needs and their satisfaction be measured? Proponents must also defend these theories against objections, such as against the objections that the theories are paternalistic, materialistic, and passivity‐promoting. Depending on their goals and contexts (distributive justice, sustainable development, human rights, etc.), appeals to basic needs may take various different forms. (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)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

Hobbes’s state of nature is often analyzed in two-person two-action non-cooperative games. By definition, this literature only focuses on duels. Yet, if we consider general games, i.e., with more than two agents, analyzing Hobbes’s state of nature in terms of duel is not completely satisfactory, since it is a very specific interpretation of the war of all against all. Therefore, we propose a definition of the state of nature for games with an arbitrary number of players. We show that this (...) definition coincides with the strategy profile considered as the state of nature in two-person games. Furthermore, we study what we call rational states of nature. We show that in rational states of nature, the utility level of any agent is equal to his maximin payoff. We also show that rational states of nature always exist in inessential games. Finally, we prove the existence of states of nature in a class of symmetric games. (shrink)

For the majority of scholars concerned with the ethics of living organ donation, inflicting moderate harms on competent volunteers in order to save the lives or increase the life chances of others is held to be justifiable provided certain conditions are met. These conditions tend to include one, or more commonly, some combination of the following: The living donor provides valid consent to donation. Living donation produces an overall positive balance of harm–benefit for donors and recipients which cannot be obtained (...) in a less harmful manner. Donation is not liable to cause significant and long-term morbidity to, or the death of, the donor. This paper critically examines the suggestion that these criteria are not sufficient to offer a general account of justified living organ donation in the context of competent volunteers and that key to justified living organ donation is that donors receive sufficient benefits from their donation that these outweigh the harms they suffer. However, although this view—termed here ‘The Donor Benefit Standard’—directs welcome attention to the many and complex motives which may underlie living organ donation, this paper ultimately concludes that given the threats this position poses to individual autonomy and the lives of those in need of organ transplants ‘The Donor Benefit Standard’ should ultimately be rejected. (shrink)

“Fair and equitable benefit-sharing” is one of the objectives of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In essence, benefit-sharing holds that countries, farmers, and indigenous communities that grant access to their plant genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge should share in the benefits that users derive from these resources. But what exactly is understood by “fair” and “equitable” in this context? Neither term is defined in the international treaties. (...) A complicating factor, furthermore, is that different motivations and perspectives exist with respect to the notion of benefit-sharing itself. This paper looks at six different approaches to benefit-sharing that can be extracted from the current debates on “Access and Benefit-Sharing.” These approaches form the basis of a philosophical reflection in which the different connotations of “fair and equitable” are considered, by analyzing the main principles of justice involved. Finally, the various principles are brought together in order to draw some conclusions as to how a fair and equitable benefit-sharing mechanism might best be realized. This results in several recommendations for policymakers. (shrink)

Need and Desire have obvious affinities. In this lecture I shall consider how they are to be distinguished, and how they may be confused: distinguished, that is, within philosophy, and confused in life itself. I shall then consider, very briefly, how this possibility of confusion bears upon morality and moral assessment.

This article argues for a realist conception of human needs. By ‘realist’ we mean that certain fundamental needs are categorically distinct from consumer wants, holding independently of people's subjective beliefs as objective life requirements. These basic needs, we contend, are baseline measures of social justice in the sense that no society that does not prioritise their satisfaction can be legitimate. The paper concludes with a comprehensive response to seven core objections to our position.

As mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, many of the papers collected here began life as part of a symposium inspired by Brian Barry’s work. Brian attended the meeting, and contributed in h...

An epistemic theory of democracy, I assume, is meant to provide on answer to the question of why democracy is desirable. It does so by trying to show how the democratic process can have epistemic value. I begin by describing a couple of examples of epistemic theories in the literature and bringing out what they presuppose. I then examine a particular type of theory, worked out most thoroughly by Joshua Cohen, which seems to imply that democracy has epistemic value. The (...) key idea in this theory is that its conception of political right is itself a democratic conception – roughly, what is right is constituted by a consensus among ideal democratic agents. If democratic procedures are modeled on this conception of right, the theory proposes, the fact that we follow these procedures in decision-making will give us reason to believe that the outcomes are themselves right. I do not reject the democratic conception of the right, but I argue that the theory breaks down when we try to extend its conclusions to real-world democratic procedures. While it invites interesting speculation about possible reforms, it gives us little reason to accept the outcomes of actual democratic politics. (shrink)

The word “privilege” has become a part of our everyday conversations. However, it is not evident whether the various interlocutors in discussions on privilege are using it in the same sense. While different instances of privilege like white, male, or caste privilege have been discussed in contemporary academic discourses, we believe there is a lack of clarity regarding the notion of privilege. We critically analyse existing accounts of privilege to show that they leave some room for improvement. We offer an (...) alternative account of privilege as “entitlements that fail to track deserts” that circumvents prevalent definitional ambiguities and emphasises the inherent undeserving nature of privilege. The hitherto underexplored links between privileges, deserts, entitlements, and rights can help us formulate a more accurate grasp of privilege. (shrink)

If bioethical questions cannot be resolved in a widely acceptable manner by rational argument, and if they can be regulated only on the basis of political decision-making, then bioethics belongs to the political sphere. The particular kind of politics practiced in any given society matters greatly: it will determine the kind of bioethical regulation, legislation, and public policy generated there. I propose approaching bioethical questions politically in terms of decisions that cannot be “correct” but that can be “procedurally legitimate.” Two (...) procedures in particular can deliver legitimate bioethical decisions, once combined: expert bioethics committees and deliberative democracy. Bioethics so understood can exceed bioethics as a moral project or as a set of administrative principles to regulate medical practice; it can now aspire to a democratic project that involves ordinary citizens as far as reasonably possible. I advance this argument in four steps: (1) using the example of human germline gene editing, (2) I propose a general understanding of proceduralism, and (3) then combine two types and (4) conclude with a defense of majoritarian proceduralism. I develop this argument in terms of one example: germline gene editing. (shrink)

I consider whether Mill intends for us to see the arguments that constitute his defense of the “Liberty of Thought and Discussion” in chapter 2 ofOn Libertyas a part of his larger case for the “harm” or “liberty” principle (LP). Several commentators depict this chapter as a digression that interrupts the flow between his introduction of this principle in the first chapter and his exposition and defense of it in the final three. I will argue instead for a reading ofOn (...) Libertyon which chapter 2 is well integrated with the rest of the essay and is in fact where Mill starts constructing his case for LP. (shrink)

The two books offer a contextual reinterpretation of Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian liberalism. Nelson’s main thesis is that debates in liberal political theory re-enact theological debates about theodicy going back to the Pelagian controversy. This claim is criticized for its historical inaccuracy. Nelson’s invocation of theodicy as a refutation of luck egalitarianism and the Rawlsian rejection of desert rest on a claim of possibility that is too weak to uphold a plausible refutation. Forrester locates Rawls’s rejection of desert in the thinking (...) of his contemporaries. She not only shows the development of Rawls’s thought but also details its broad influence. However, her thesis that the role of economic planning in a theory of justice remained undeveloped by Rawls ignores the intrinsic difficulties of designing a system of economic planning. The persistent antinomies of grace and free will in metaphysics, and of planning and the price mechanism in economics, show the continuing relevance of meaning beyond context. (shrink)

With a book as wide ranging and insightful as Barry'sJustice as Impartiality, it is perhaps a little churlish to criticize it for paying insufficient attention to one's own particular interests. That said, in what follows I am going to do just that and claim that in an important sense Barry does not take utilitarianism seriously. Utilitarianism does receive some discussion in Barry's book, and in an important section which I will discuss he even appears to concede that utilitarianism provides a (...) rival though ultimately inadequate theory of justice. Nevertheless, utilitarianism is not considered a rival to ‘justice as impartiality’ in the way that ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as reciprocity’ are. One response, and perhaps the only adequate response, would be to construct a rival utilitarian theory. I cannot provide such a theory in this paper, and I certainly would be very cautious about claiming that I could provide such a theory elsewhere. What I want to suggest is that utilitarianismisa genuine third theory to contrast with ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as impartiality’ – ‘justice as reciprocity’ being merely a hybrid of ‘justice as mutual advantage’, at least as Barry presents it (pp. 46–51). I also want to argue that it poses a more significant challenge to a contractualist theory such as Barry's than his discussion of utilitarianism reveals. (shrink)

The question of whether desert depends on institutions or institutions on desert continues to divide politicians and political theorists, particularly in disputes over the justification of the welfare state. Even though it is a significant question with direct relevance for issues of economic justice, little has been done so far to evaluate the various positions in dispute and to make explicit the concepts involved. In this paper, I first present the main senses in which the concepts of desert, dependence and (...) institution are used by different desert theorists and I argue that conflicting claims concerning desert's pre/institutional nature may turn out to be compatible and similar claims, inconsistent, when the senses of these concepts are made explicit. Secondly, I identify the senses of 'desert', 'dependence' and 'institution' which are most appropriate for the debate. Thirdly, I argue that, from the perspective of this conceptual framework, it is not possible to decide whether or not desert depends on institutions, unless the framework is supplemented by a more precise specification of the concept of institution. (shrink)

(2013). On Justice and Other Values: G.A. Cohen's Political Philosophy and the Problem of Trade-offs. Philosophical Papers: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 1-24. doi: 10.1080/05568641.2013.774721.

The article argues that the most important trends in the recent metamorphosis of higher education, especially of university teaching and research, cannot be understood without placing them in the context of general developments in political life. Both processes reveal alarming features and there is a link between them. In recent decades a religion has established its dominance in the public policy field. Its dogmas are called “liberalization”, “economic man”, “individual preference”, “the free market”, “competition” and “efficiency”. The consequences of the (...) progressive imposition of this doctrine on the universities—including on the relation between teaching and research—are well documented but not always well understood. It is argued that the “commercialization” of higher education and research means in reality their hyper-bureaucratization, via the imposition of so-called evaluation, assessment and accreditation schemes, the latest avatars of the managerialist ideology. Might the final result be the disintegration of the university as an institution? (shrink)

ABSTRACT In its attempt to prove that voters, politicians, and bureaucrats are motivated by the public interest, Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics overlooks a great deal of public-choice research, to which much has been added during the two decades since it was published. The importance of self-interest at both the micro and macro levels of politics becomes clear once one looks not simply at the ?inputs? of a democracy but at its ?outputs? as well. The prevalence of interest (...) groups, the dysfunction of the United States tax code, the lobbying by unions for their members? self-interest, the earmarks in the Patriot Act, the numerous cases of corruption in Western democracies, and the dissatisfaction of citizens with their governments? failings all point to the importance of self-interest in politics. (shrink)

Need-claims are ubiquitous within moral and political theory. However, need-based theories are often criticized for being too narrow in scope and too focused on the material preconditions for leading a decent life for grounding a substantial theory of social justice. The aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it will investigate the nature and scope of needs by analysing existing conceptualizations of the idea of needs. In so doing, we will get a better understanding of needs, which will help us (...) to carve out the importance and singularity of basic need claims. Secondly, on the basis of the analysis of needs, it will argue for the concept of a fundamental interest in free social agency, which is much better suited than the idea of basic needs actually to ground a theory of social justice, as it highlights the social and institutional conditions for free agency. Thirdly, using the distinction between basic needs and fundamental interests, it will clarify their respective role in and importance for grounding moral principles. Overall, the paper offers a friendly critique of need-based theories, while arguing for a shift of focus to the idea of fundamental interests. (shrink)

Hume is rightly credited with giving a brilliant, and perhaps the best, account of justice as convention. Hume's importance as a forerunner of modern economics has also long been recognized. However, most of Hume's readers have not fully appreciated how closely Hume's analysis of convention foreshadows a particular branch of economic theory, namely, game theory. Starting with the work of Barry, Runciman and Sen and Lewis, there has been a flowering of literature on the informal game-theoretic insights to be found (...) in classics of political philosophy such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau. A number of authors in this tradition, including Lewis, Gauthier, Mackie, and Postema, have identified passages in Hume which they interpret as giving informal examples of specific games. Yet, unlike his predecessors, Hobbes and Locke, Hume does much more than present examples which have a game-theoretic structure. In his account of convention, Hume gives general conditions which characterize the resolution of social interaction problems, and in the examples he uses to illustrate this account, Hume outlines several different methods by which agents can arrive at such a resolution. Hume's general account of convention and his explanations of the origins of particular conventions together constitute a theory of strategic interaction, which is precisely what game theory aspires to be. (shrink)