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

This paper examines the link between political liberties and social equality, and contends that the former are constitutive of, i.e. necessary to secure, the latter. Although this constitutive link is often assumed in the literature on political liberties, the reasons why it holds true remain largely unexplored. Three such reasons are examined here. First, political liberties are constitutive of social equality because they bestow political power on their holders, leaving disenfranchised individuals excluded from decisions that are particularly pervasive, coercively enforced, (...) hard to avoid, monopolistic, and final. Second, they are constitutive of social equality due to their positional value, such that those who are denied such liberties are socially downgraded because and to the extent that others enjoy them. Third, they are constitutive of social equality due to their expressive value, in the sense that, by disenfranchising some individuals, the state publicly fails to recognize their equal moral agency. While unpacking these reasons, we address some criticisms of this constitutive link recently raised by Steven Wall and Jason Brennan. (shrink)

Despite renewed interest in work, philosophers have largely ignored self-employment. This neglect is surprising, not just because self-employment was central to classic philosophizing about work, but also given that half of the global workforce today, including one in seven workers in OECD countries, are self-employed. We start off by offering a definition of self-employment, one that accounts for its various forms while avoiding misclassifying dependent self-employed workers as independent contractors, and by mapping the barriers to becoming and remaining self-employed (section (...) 2). We then examine five arguments why governments ought to promote self-employment, despite the forgone opportunities to promote employee work instead that this often entails (sections 3-7): the argument from job creation, the argument from job satisfaction, the argument from independence, the argument from occupational freedom, and the argument from subsistence under non-ideal circumstances. Some of these are unconvincing, we argue, but others are not. Although the strength of the latter arguments hangs on various context-dependent conditions, such that they need to be carefully weighed against considerations of efficiency and equality, they nonetheless offer compelling pro tanto reasons to promote, and not just to protect, self-employment. (shrink)

¿Qué formas de gobierno son legítimas? ¿Qué principios deben regir la asistencia sanitaria y los impuestos? ¿Qué obligaciones tenemos con las generaciones futuras, así como con la naturaleza y los animales? ¿Qué protección merecen la libertad de expresión y las rentas mínimas? ¿Cuándo es permisible recurrir a la desobediencia civil, la secesión o la guerra? -/- Este libro es una introducción a las respuestas que la filosofía reciente, junto a las ciencias sociales, ha ofrecido a estos y otros asuntos políticos. (...) Escritos por destacados especialistas, los ensayos aquí reunidos abordan las grandes cuestiones que preocupan hoy a los filósofos, desde corrientes como el marxismo, el liberalismo y el republicanismo hasta temas como el feminismo, el nacionalismo, la justicia distributiva, la autoridad política y el Estado de derecho, pasando por el medio ambiente, las migraciones, la religión y los derechos humanos, entre otros. -/- Con un estilo claro y ameno, así como un enfoque analítico, esta obra recorre el pensamiento político actual centrándose no sólo en los principales argumentos y problemas que conforman la filosofía política contemporánea, sino también en los retos más urgentes a los que nos enfrentamos como sociedad. (shrink)

Equipped with the ultimate query answering system, computers would finally be in a position to address all our information needs in a natural way. In this paper, we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is working towards the ultimate Question Answering (QA) System for healthcare workers. L&C’s company strategy in this area is to design in a step-by-step fashion the essential components of such a system, each component (...) being designed to solve some one part of the total problem and at the same time reflect well-defined needs on the prat of our customers. We compare our strategy with the research roadmap proposed by the Question Answering Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), paying special attention to the role of ontology. (shrink)