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Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Impact factor: 0.351 Print ISSN: 1470-594X Publisher: Sage Publications

Subjects: Ethics, Political Science

Most recent papers:

  • Poverty, partiality, and the purchase of expensive education.
    Freiman, C.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. November 29, 2016

    Prioritarianism doesn’t value equality as such – any reason to equalize is due to the benefits for the worse off. But some argue that prioritarianism and egalitarianism coincide in their implications for the distribution of education: Equalizing educational opportunities improves the socioeconomic opportunities of the worse off. More specifically, a system that prohibits parents from making differential private educational expenditures would result in greater gains to the worse off than a system that permits these expenditures, all else equal. This article argues that prioritarianism opposes a cap on educational expenditures. The argument, in brief, is that an equalized provision of schooling does a worse job of channeling the partiality of rich families in ways that produce positive spillover for poorer children. My challenge to the prioritarian case for educational equality is an internal one: the very concerns about parental partiality that underlie prioritarian objections to uncapped educational expenditures apply with even greater force to a system that caps educational expenditures.

    November 29, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16672952   open full text
  • When bad things happen to good people: luck egalitarianism and costly rescues.
    Thaysen, J. D., Albertsen, A.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. September 20, 2016

    According to luck egalitarianism, it is not unfair when people are disadvantaged by choices they are responsible for. This implies that those who are disadvantaged by choices that prevent disadvantage to others are not eligible for compensation. This is counterintuitive. We argue that the problem such cases pose for luck egalitarianism reveals an important distinction between responsibility for creating disadvantage and responsibility for distributing disadvantage which has hitherto been overlooked. We develop and defend a version of luck egalitarianism which only holds people responsible for creating disadvantage. This revision enables luck egalitarianism to offer compensation to those who are disadvantaged by preventing disadvantage to others, like dependent caretakers, without compromising the responsibility–sensitivity at the heart of luck egalitarianism.

    September 20, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16666017   open full text
  • The influence of patents on science.
    Trerise, J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. September 19, 2016

    This paper is a critique of the current US patent system along general consequentialist lines. I present a pro tanto case against it because of its effects on scientific inquiry. The patent system is often thought to be justified (or necessary) because it provides incentives to innovate. I challenge this concern. Economists and legal scholars have spent a good portion of time analyzing particular aspects of the patent system. I here synthesize their work, showing how it amounts to a pro tanto moral case against patents. This is the case even though patents are said to incentivize innovation, its disclosure, and its transfer to interested parties. I explore all of these possibilities, finding them to only weakly (at best) support the institution of patent rights. Juxtaposing this weak case for patents along with various problems that patents cause for science, we find a pro tanto case against our current patent system. To my knowledge, no one has tried to synthesize the various concerns I raise, with particular attention to not only the patent’s system purported ability to incentivize innovation, but also to disclose and transfer technology.

    September 19, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16666022   open full text
  • Intending to benefit from wrongdoing.
    Goodin, R. E., Pasternak, A.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 22, 2016

    Some believe that the mere beneficiaries of wrongdoing of others ought to disgorge their tainted benefits. Others deny that claim. Both sides of this debate concentrate on unavoidable beneficiaries of the wrongdoing of others, who are presumed themselves to be innocent by virtue of the fact they have neither contributed to the wrong nor could they have avoided receiving the benefit. But as we show, this presumption is mistaken for unavoidable beneficiaries who intend in certain ways to benefit from wrongdoing, and who have therefore done something wrong in forming and acting on such an intention.

    June 22, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16653624   open full text
  • The right to personal property.
    Wells, K.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 21, 2016

    The subject of this article is the Rawlsian right to personal property. Adequate discussion of this right has long been absent from the literature, and the recent rise in interest in other areas of Rawlsian thought on property makes the issue particularly pertinent. The right to personal property as proposed by orthodox Rawlsians – in this article, the position is represented by Rawls himself – is best understood, I claim, either as a right to be able to privately own housing and personal items or as a right to actually own these things. I argue, however, that the resources of a Rawlsian theory cannot justify a basic right to property which is as extensive as this. Instead, what can be justified is a more limited set of rights, comparable with the rights we have over objects that we rent. Rawlsian justice, then, has a more radical implications in terms of basic property rights than has previously been thought.

    June 21, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16653859   open full text
  • Making sense of age-group justice: A time for relational equality?
    Bidadanure, J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 16, 2016

    This article brings together two debates in contemporary political philosophy: on the one hand, the dispute between the distributive and relational approaches to equality and, on the other hand, the field of intergenerational equality. I offer an original contribution to the second domain and by doing so, I inform the first. The aim of this article is thus twofold: (1) shedding some light on an under-researched and yet crucial question – ‘which inequalities between generations matter?’ and (2) contributing to a far-reaching debate that touches upon the nature of egalitarianism. After showing that there are two key problems that fall within the scope of intergenerational equality – questions of justice between age groups and questions of equality between birth cohorts – I argue that, contrary to what the default distributive view (complete lives egalitarianism) states, some inequalities between age groups matter independently of their diachronic impact, and so partly for relational reasons. I argue that, even if we are distributive egalitarians, we must endorse the relational egalitarian conception to successfully make sense of some inequalities between age groups. I infer from this both that the putative view that the ‘relational’ conception of equality can be redescribed as distributive must be rejected and that the distributive view requires supplementation (but not necessarily displacement) by the relational view.

    June 16, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16650542   open full text
  • Central banking and inequalities: Taking off the blinders.
    Fontan, C., Claveau, F., Dietsch, P.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 14, 2016

    What is the relation between monetary policy and inequalities in income and wealth? This question has received insufficient attention, especially in light of the unconventional policies introduced since the 2008 financial crisis. The article analyzes three ways in which the concern central banks show for inequalities in their official statements remains incomplete and underdeveloped. First, central banks tend to care about inequality for instrumental reasons only. When they do assign intrinsic value to containing inequalities, they shy away from trade-offs with the standard objectives of monetary policy that such a position entails. Second, central banks play down the causal impact monetary policy has on inequalities. When they do acknowledge it, they defend their actions by claiming that it is an unintended side effect, that it is temporary, and/or that any alternative policy would fare even worse. The article appeals to the doctrine of double effect to criticize these arguments. Third, even if one accepts that inequalities should be contained and that today’s monetary policies exacerbate them, is it both desirable and feasible to make containing inequalities part of the mandate of central banks? The article analyzes and rejects three attempts on the part of central banks to answer this question negatively.

    June 14, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16651056   open full text
  • Benevolent absolutisms, incentives and Rawls The Law of Peoples.
    Maffettone, P.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 14, 2016

    Rawls’ The Law of Peoples does not offer a clear principled account of the way in which liberal and decent peoples should deal with benevolent absolutisms. Within the Rawlsian framework, benevolent absolutisms are a type of society that respects basic human rights and is not externally aggressive. Rawls rules out the use of coercion to engage with benevolent absolutisms but does not provide an alternative strategy. The article develops one, namely, it argues that liberal and decent peoples should use positive incentives to induce benevolent absolutisms to make their transition to the status of well-ordered peoples. In so doing, it offers a principled way to expand Rawls’ international nonideal theory and, in the process, provides a more nuanced approach to the promotion of political participation in international society. The article draws on the literature on economic statecraft and political theory and constructs an incentive model with seven distinct parameters attached to its definition of incentives. Finally, the article provides a real-world example, of how to concretely implement the incentive mechanism.

    June 14, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16650540   open full text
  • Freedom, money and justice as fairness.
    Neufeld, B.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 09, 2016

    The first principle of Rawls’s conception of justice secures a set of ‘basic liberties’ equally for all citizens within the constitutional structure of society. The ‘worth’ of citizens’ liberties, however, may vary depending upon their wealth. Against Rawls, Cohen contends that an absence of money often can directly constrain citizens’ freedom and not simply its worth. This is because money often can remove legally enforced constraints on what citizens can do. Cohen’s argument – if modified to apply to citizens’ ‘moral powers’ rather than ‘negative liberty’ – threatens a core feature of Rawls’s conception of justice, as it is unclear why the parties within the ‘original position’ would endorse the lexical priority of the first principle over the ‘difference principle’ (which concerns the distribution of wealth) if both principles similarly shape citizens’ freedom. I concede Cohen’s point regarding the relation between freedom and money but argue that it is not fatal to Rawls’s conception of justice if the ‘basic needs principle’ is understood to enjoy lexical priority over the first principle and is modified to include a right to adequate discretionary time. Nonetheless, Cohen’s argument helpfully highlights the infelicitous nature of Rawls’s terminology with respect to liberty: the basic needs principle, the first principle and the difference principle all should be understood as shaping citizens’ freedom to exercise their moral powers.

    June 09, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16651058   open full text
  • Conditional coercion versus rights diagnostics: Two approaches to human rights protection.
    Wisor, S.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. May 23, 2016

    Scholars in philosophy, political science, and the policy community have recently advocated for a ‘sticks and carrots’, or conditional-coercion, approach to human rights violations. On this model, rights violators (usually states) are conceived of as rational agents who should be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior by other states seeking to improve human rights abroad. External states concerned about human rights abroad should impose punishments against foreign rights violators, and these punitive measures should not be lifted until rights violations in target countries cease. Against these scholars, I argue that the conditional-coercion model is mistaken. In this article, I explicate the ‘sticks and carrots’ approach to human rights, criticize it on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and suggest an alternative approach that I term rights diagnostics. The model I propose is sensitive to the internal political struggles in rights violating states and the incentive structures faced by rights violators. This model takes account of relevant empirical evidence on the role of external coercion and inducements in producing institutional change. I conclude by sketching an institutional design that would potentially implement ‘rights diagnostics’ policy.1

    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X16650541   open full text
  • Fairness and family background.
    Almas, I., Cappelen, A. W., Salvanes, K. G., Sorensen, E. O., Tungodden, B.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. January 12, 2016

    Fairness preferences fundamentally affect individual behavior and play an important role in shaping social and political institutions. However, people differ both with respect to what they view as fair and with respect to how much weight they attach to fairness considerations. In this article, we study the role of family background in explaining these heterogeneities in fairness preferences. In particular, we examine how socioeconomic background relates to fairness views and to how people make trade-offs between fairness and self-interest. To study this, we conducted an economic experiment with a representative sample of 14- to 15-year-old and matched the experimental data to administrative data on parental income and education. The participants made two distributive choices in the experiment. The first choice was to distribute money between themselves and another participant in a situation where there was no difference in merit. The second choice was to distribute money between two other participants with unequal merits. Our main finding is that there is a systematic difference in fairness view between children from low-socioceconomic status (SES) families and the rest of the participants; more than 50 percent of the participants from low-SES families are egalitarians, whereas only about 20 percent in the rest of the sample hold this fairness view. In contrast, we find no significant difference in the weight attached to fairness between children from different socioeconomic groups.

    January 12, 2016   doi: 10.1177/1470594X15618966   open full text
  • Numbers scepticism, equal chances and pluralism: Taurek revisited.
    Lang, G., Lawlor, R.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. December 30, 2015

    The ‘standard interpretation’ of John Taurek’s argument in ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ imputes two theses to him: first, ‘numbers scepticism’, or scepticism about the moral force of an appeal to the mere number of individuals saved in conflict cases; and second, the ‘equal greatest chances’ principle of rescue, which requires that every individual has an equal chance of being rescued. The standard interpretation is criticized here on a number of grounds. First, whilst Taurek clearly believes that equal chances are all-important, he actually argues for a position weaker than the equal greatest chances principle. Second, the argument Taurek gives for the importance of equal chances ought to commit him to being more hospitable to the significance of numbers than he seems to be. Third, and as a result, Taurek should not have dismissed the significance of numbers but embraced a form of pluralism instead. Fourth, this result should be welcomed, because pluralism is more plausible than either the equal greatest chances principle or the saving the greater number principle.

    December 30, 2015   doi: 10.1177/1470594X15618967   open full text
  • Political theory and public opinion: Against democratic restraint.
    Baderin, A.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. December 21, 2015

    How should political theorists go about their work if they are democrats? Given their democratic commitments, should they develop theories that are responsive to the views and concerns of their fellow citizens at large? Is there a balance to be struck, within political theory, between truth seeking and democratic responsiveness? The article addresses this question about the relationship between political theory, public opinion and democracy. I criticize the way in which some political theorists have appealed to the value of democratic legitimacy in an attempt to justify a more opinion-sensitive approach to their work. Specifically, I identify a problematic model in the existing literature, which I term ‘democratic restraint’: an approach on which the theorist moderates her normative principles in response to evidence about public attitudes in order to enhance the legitimacy of her account. This model renders the discipline newly vulnerable to an otherwise misguided objection that political theory seeks to pre-empt democratic politics. I trace the problem with the democratic restraint model to its flawed underlying conception of democratic legitimacy. The article then outlines a more appealing ‘democratic underlabourer’ view of the status of political theory and draws out the implications of this alternative account for the role of public opinion.

    December 21, 2015   doi: 10.1177/1470594X15621044   open full text
  • Risk imposition and freedom.
    Ferretti, M. P.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. October 06, 2015

    Various authors hold that what is wrong with risk imposition is that being at risk diminishes the opportunities available to an agent. Arguably, even when risk does not result in material or psychological damages, it still represents a setback in terms of some legitimate interests. However, it remains to be specified what those interests are. This article argues that risk imposition represents a diminishment of overall freedom. Freedom will be characterized in empirical terms, as the range of unimpeded actions available to an agent. After briefly outlining the main characteristics of overall freedom as defended by Hillel Steiner and Ian Carter, the article shows that this notion is able to capture many of our intuitions about when and how risk imposition disadvantages an agent, without reference to welfare indicators. The article argues that if this non-welfarist perspective can be defended, then it would be easier to approach a number of applied questions about risk, including the questions of when risk imposition is permissible or legitimate, in which ways risk can be an object of distributive justice and how one can be compensated for being subject to a risk.

    October 06, 2015   doi: 10.1177/1470594X15605437   open full text
  • Citizenship, reciprocity, and the gendered division of labor: A stability argument for gender egalitarian political interventions.
    Schouten, G.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. September 04, 2015

    Despite women’s increased labor force participation, household divisions of labor remain highly unequal. Properly implemented, gender egalitarian political interventions such as work time regulation, dependent care provisions, and family leave initiatives can induce families to share work more equally than they currently do. But do these interventions constitute legitimate uses of political power? In this article, I defend the political legitimacy of these interventions. Using the conception of citizenship at the heart of political liberalism, I argue that citizens would accept political interventions aimed at protecting the ‘genuinely available option’ to enact gender egalitarian lifestyles. More strongly still, I argue that under certain circumstances, citizens would insist on the enactment of political interventions to protect this option. According to political liberalism’s constraints on legitimacy, this insistence renders these interventions not only legitimate but positively mandatory. It is legitimate for a state to exercise power to preserve the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle, and under certain circumstances, it is illegitimate for a state to fail to do so.

    September 04, 2015   doi: 10.1177/1470594X15600830   open full text
  • Fair care: Elder care and distributive justice.
    Brake, E.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. August 30, 2015

    Caring relationships and material caregiving are politically significant goods that should be distributed according to principles of justice. I argue that, within Rawlsian liberalism, care should be considered a primary good and propose a third principle of justice requiring access to the social and legal supports of caring relationships. I examine what social and legal institutions supporting care might require, with particular attention to allowing the infirm elderly and persons with disabilities access to caring relationships. I propose the formation of a Care Corps, providing access to caring relationships for elderly and housebound citizens. If universally required and compensated, the Care Corps could address two other injustices related to care: the unjust distribution of caring labor between men and women and the relatively low status of caring work.

    August 30, 2015   doi: 10.1177/1470594X15600831   open full text
  • Justice and Gini coefficients.
    Everett, T. J., Everett, B. M.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. April 21, 2014

    Gini coefficients, which measure gross inequalities rather than their unfair components, are often used as proxy measures of absolute or relative distributive injustice in Western societies. This presupposes that the fair inequalities in these societies are small and stable enough to be ignored. This article presents a model for a series of ideal, perfectly just societies, where comfortable lives are equally available to everyone, and calculates the Gini coefficients for each. According to this model, inequalities produced by age and other demographic factors, together with reasonable choices under equal opportunity, can raise the Gini coefficients for perfectly just societies to levels at least as high as those of any current Western country, and can as easily account for differences in Gini coefficients between such societies or within one such society over time. If Gini coefficients at these levels are possible for ideal societies without distributive injustice, then they should not be used as proxy measures of distributive injustice in real societies.

    April 21, 2014   doi: 10.1177/1470594X14528653   open full text
  • Principles of stakes fairness in sport.
    Brown, A.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. April 15, 2014

    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 (ten in total) 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.

    April 15, 2014   doi: 10.1177/1470594X14523525   open full text
  • Against "permanent sovereignty" over natural resources.
    Armstrong, C.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. March 20, 2014

    The doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources is a hugely consequential one in the contemporary world, appearing to grant nation-states both jurisdiction-type rights and rights of ownership over the resources to be found in their territories. But the normative justification for that doctrine is far from clear. This article elucidates the best arguments that might be made for permanent sovereignty, including claims from national improvement of or attachment to resources, as well as functionalist claims linking resource rights to key state functions. But it also shows that these defences are insufficient to justify permanent sovereignty and that in many cases they actually count against it as a practice. They turn out to be compatible, furthermore, with the dispersal of resource rights away from the nation-state which global justice appears to demand.

    March 20, 2014   doi: 10.1177/1470594X14523080   open full text
  • Should the beneficiaries pay?
    Huseby, R.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. October 23, 2013

    Many theorists claim that if an agent benefits from an action that harms others, that agent has a moral duty to compensate those who are harmed, even if the agent did not cause the harm herself. In the debate on climate justice, this idea is commonly referred to as the beneficiary-pays principle (BPP). This paper argues that the BPP is implausible, both in the context of climate change and as a normative principle more generally. It should therefore be rejected.

    October 23, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13506366   open full text
  • Efficiency, responsibility and disability: Philosophical lessons from the savings argument for pre-natal diagnosis.
    John, S.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. October 17, 2013

    Pre-natal-diagnosis technologies allow parents to discover whether their child is likely to suffer from serious disability. One argument for state funding of access to such technologies is that doing so would be "cost-effective", in the sense that the expected financial costs of such a programme would be outweighed by expected "benefits", stemming from the births of fewer children with serious disabilities. This argument is extremely controversial. This paper argues that the argument may not be as unacceptable as is often assumed. In doing so, it sets out a more general framework for assessing the relevance of efficiency calculations to policy-making. The final section also investigates the relationship between the paper’s arguments and claims about parental responsibility for child-bearing and rearing, with reference to Scanlon’s work on "substantive responsibility".

    October 17, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13505412   open full text
  • Public goods and government action.
    Anomaly, J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. October 10, 2013

    It is widely agreed that one of the core functions of government is to supply public goods that markets either fail to provide or cannot provide efficiently. I will suggest that arguments for government provision of public goods require fundamental moral judgments in addition to the usual economic considerations about the relative efficacy of markets and governments in supplying them. While philosophers and policymakers owe a debt of gratitude to economists for developing the theory of public goods, the link between public goods and public policy cannot be forged without moral reflection on the proper function and scope of government power.

    October 10, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13505414   open full text
  • From Rawlsian autonomy to sufficient opportunity in education.
    Shields, L.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. October 10, 2013

    Equality of Opportunity is widely thought of as the normative ideal most relevant to the design of educational institutions. One widely discussed interpretation of this ideal is Rawls' principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I argue that theories, like Rawls , that give priority to the achievement of individual autonomy, are committed to giving that same priority to a principle of sufficient opportunity. Thus, the Rawlsian's primary focus when designing educational institutions should be on sufficiency and not equality. The paper then argues this commitment has at least three attractive implications. Firstly, it enables defenders of Fair Equality of Opportunity to overcome Richard Arneson's powerful objections. Secondly, it suggests a revised version of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity that is more plausible. Thirdly, it has attractive practical implications for educational provision.

    October 10, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13505413   open full text
  • Self-ownership and non-culpable proviso violations.
    Werner, P. J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. August 28, 2013

    Left and right libertarians alike are attracted to the thesis of self-ownership (SO) because, as Eric Mack says, they ‘believe that it best captures our common perception of the moral inviolability of persons’. Further, most libertarians, left and right, accept that some version of the Lockean Proviso (LP) restricts agents’ ability to acquire worldly resources. The inviolability of SO purports to make libertarianism more appealing than its (non-libertarian) egalitarian counterparts, since traditional egalitarian theories cannot straightforwardly explain why, e.g. forced organ donation and forced labor are serious wrongs even when they generate more equitable outcomes or benefit the greater good. I argue that, when SO is coupled with LP, this appeal is unfounded. SO, as usually construed, allows for the possibility of justified incursions of non-culpable agents up to and including forced organ donation. I conclude by considering a few possible responses on behalf of the libertarian, assessing each one’s plausibility.

    August 28, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496754   open full text
  • In a democracy, what should a healthcare system do? A dilemma for public policymakers.
    Oswald, M.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. August 28, 2013

    In modern representative democracies, much healthcare is publicly funded or provided and so the question of what healthcare systems should do is a matter of public policy. Given that public resources are inevitably limited, what should be done and who should benefit from healthcare? It is a dilemma for policymakers and a subject of debate within several disciplines, but rarely across disciplines. In this paper, I draw on thinking from several disciplines and especially philosophy, economics, and systems theory. I conclude that economist and philosopher John Broome’s writing provides the framework for an answer: a healthcare system in a democracy should do as much good as possible, although sometimes we should sacrifice some overall good for the sake of fairness. This leaves open some detailed questions about what in practice we consider to be good and fair, and about when some good should be traded off in order to be fair. The answers to these questions depend on our values, or as explained by systems theory, our weltanschauung. How policy decisions should be made when citizens’ values differ is a subject of extensive academic debate. However, it is a separate question. Representative democracies have mechanisms for resolving such debates.

    August 28, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13497670   open full text
  • Liberalism, neutrality and exploitation.
    Steiner, H.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. August 01, 2013

    This essay argues that a liberalism that avoids legal moralism – that is neutral between rival conceptions of the good – cannot embrace intervention in commercial transactions, but is thereby precluded neither from identifying some such transactions as exploitative nor from redressing them by other means.

    August 01, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496065   open full text
  • Natural resources and government responsiveness.
    Wiens, D.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. August 01, 2013

    Pogge (2008) and Wenar (2008) have recently argued that we are responsible for the persistence of the so-called ‘resource curse’. But their analyses are limited in important ways. I trace these limitations to their undue focus on the ways in which the international rules governing resource transactions undermine government accountability. To overcome the shortcomings of Pogge’s and Wenar’s analyses, I propose a normative framework organized around the social value of government responsiveness and discuss the implications of adopting this framework for future normative assessment of the resource curse and our relationships to it.

    August 01, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496755   open full text
  • The grammar of political obligation.
    Fossen, T.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. July 30, 2013

    This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert Brandom. From this perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament.

    July 30, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496072   open full text
  • Exploitation and demeaning choices.
    Snyder, J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. July 26, 2013

    Scholarship aiming to describe the wrongness of exploitation, especially when it is voluntary and mutually beneficial, has increased greatly in recent years. In this paper, I expand the scope of this discussion by highlighting a set of additional ethical concerns associated with many cases of mutually voluntary and beneficial exploitation. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of persons desperately seeking out and gratefully accepting exploitative interactions raises special moral concerns. The element of voluntariness is key to understanding how and why some exploitative interactions are degrading to exploitees. When an exploitative offer does not allow the exploitee sufficient progress toward a decent minimum of human functioning, these offers can create what I call a 'demeaning choice', where the exploitee may either accept the status quo or accept an offer that improves the exploitee's insufficiently. In these cases, the exploitee's participation in the interaction contributes to its demeaning quality, creating a form of `surface endorsement' of the treatment that she receives.

    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496067   open full text
  • Coercion and public justification.
    Bird, C.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. July 26, 2013

    According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state.

    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496073   open full text
  • Equality, opportunity, ambiguity.
    Sreenivasan, G.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. July 22, 2013

    I distinguish four different interpretations of ‘equality of opportunity.’ We get four interpretations because a neglected ambiguity in ‘opportunity’ intersects a well-known ambiguity in ‘equality.’ The neglected ambiguity holds between substantive and non-substantive conceptions of ‘opportunity’ and the well-known ambiguity holds between comparative and non-comparative conceptions of ‘equality.’ Among other things, distinguishing these four interpretations reveals how misleading ‘equal opportunity for advantage’ formulations of luck egalitarianism can be. These formulations are misleading in so far as they obscure the difference between two separate claims about which inequalities are consistent with true equality. Luck egalitarianism claims that inequalities that have been chosen in some suitable sense are consistent with true equality, while the traditional ideal of equality of opportunity only claims that inevitable inequalities that have been determined through fair competitions are consistent with true equality. Obscuring the difference between these two claims therefore serves both to arrogate the rhetorical advantages of the traditional ideal to luck egalitarianism and to cover over a limitation to luck egalitarianism’s ambition to provide a comprehensive principle of distributive justice.

    July 22, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13496071   open full text
  • Capitalization in the St. Petersburg game: Why statistical distributions matter.
    Thalos, M., Richardson, O.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. June 13, 2013

    In spite of its infinite expectation value, the St. Petersburg game is not only a gamble without supply in the real world, but also one without demand at apparently very reasonable asking prices. We offer a rationalizing explanation of why the St. Petersburg bargain is unattractive on both sides (to both house and player) in the mid-range of prices (finite but upwards of about $4). Our analysis – featuring (1) the already-established fact that the average of finite ensembles of the St. Petersburg game grows with ensemble size but is unbounded, and (2) our own simulation data showing that the debt-to-entry fee ratio rises exponentially – explains why both house and player are quite rational in abstaining from the St. Petersburg game. The house will be unavoidably (and intentionally) exposed to very large ensembles (with very high averages, and so very costly to them), while contrariwise even the well-heeled player is not sufficiently capitalized (as our simulation data reveals) to be able to capture the potential gains from large-ensemble play. (Smaller ensembles, meanwhile, enjoy low means, as others have shown, and so are not worth paying more than $4 to play, even if a merchant were to offer them at such low prices per trial.) Both sides are consequently rational in abstaining from entry into the St. Petersburg market in the mid-range of asking prices. We utilize the concept of capitalization vis-à-vis a gamble to make this case. Classical analyses of this question have paid insufficient attention to the question of the propriety of using expected values to assess the St. Petersburg gamble. And extant analyses have not noted the average-maximum-debt-before-breaking-even figures, and so are incomplete.

    June 13, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13491792   open full text
  • Incommensurability and moral value.
    Reiff, M.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. May 31, 2013

    Some theorists believe that there is a plurality of values, and that in many circumstances these values are incommensurable, or at least incomparable. Others believe that all values are reducible to a single super-value, or that even if there is a plurality of irreducible values these values are commensurable. But I will argue that both sides have got it wrong. Values are neither commensurable nor incommensurable, at least not in the way most people think. We are free to believe in incommensurability or not, depending on what particular conception of morality we want to embrace. Incommensurability is accordingly not a theory about value. It is a presupposition that provides a necessary background condition for a certain kind of value to exist. It is therefore not the kind of view that can be morally true or false. As a presupposition, it can only be accepted or rejected on grounds that do not presuppose that morality already exists. Incommensurability is, like the rejection of hard determinism, one of the presuppositions on which morality as we know it happens to be based.

    May 31, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13483481   open full text
  • Status of child citizens.
    Fowler, T.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. May 31, 2013

    This paper considers the place of children within liberal-democratic society and its related political morality. The genesis of the paper is two considerations which are in tension with one another. First, that there must be some point at which children are divided from adults, with children denied the rights which go along with full membership of the liberal community. The justification for the difference in the statue between these two groups must be rooted in some notion of capacities, since these are the only relevant differences between adults and children. Second, that linking an individual's capacities to her status undermines the central liberal commitment of political equality. This dilemma explains what I term the threshold view, which holds that children become adult citizens upon reaching an age of competence and that above this level differences in abilities cease to matter to an individual's status. While this view has attractions, this paper argues that this view must eventually be rejected because of its inability to deal with the actual process of human development. In its place, the paper proposes a modification to this view which sees the threshold constrained by moral demands and applied indirectly to age groups rather than individuals. These constraints preserve the commitment to equality in a way consistent with a plausible view of children's place in society.

    May 31, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13483482   open full text
  • Political deliberation and the challenge of bounded rationality.
    Smith, A. F.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. May 22, 2013

    Many proponents of deliberative democracy expect reasonable citizens to engage in rational argumentation. However, this expectation runs up against findings by behavioral economists and social psychologists revealing the extent to which normal cognitive functions are influenced by bounded rationality. Individuals regularly utilize an array of biases in the process of making decisions, which inhibits our argumentative capacities by adversely affecting our ability and willingness to be self-critical and to give due consideration to others’ interests. Although these biases cannot be overcome, I draw on scientifically corroborated insights offered by Adam Smith to show that they can be kept in check if certain affective and cognitive capacities are cultivated. Smith provides a compelling account of how to foster sympathetic, impartial, and projective role-taking in the process of interacting with others, which can greatly enhance our capacity and willingness to critically assess our own interests and fairly consider those of others.

    May 22, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13488355   open full text
  • On the emergence of descriptive norms.
    Muldoon, R., Lisciandra, C., Bicchieri, C., Hartmann, S., Sprenger, J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. May 07, 2013

    A descriptive norm is a behavioral rule that individuals follow when their empirical expectations of others following the same rule are met. We aim to provide an account of the emergence of descriptive norms by first looking at a simple case, that of the standing ovation. We examine the structure of a standing ovation, and show it can be generalized to describe the emergence of a wide range of descriptive norms.

    May 07, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X12447791   open full text
  • Secession of the rich: A qualified defense.
    Dietrich, F.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. May 07, 2013

    The secession of prosperous regions may negatively affect the redistributive scheme of an established state. As a consequence, the capacity of its welfare system to support the inhabitants of poorer regions may be significantly reduced. Some authors assert that affluent groups who opt for full political independence violate duties of solidarity. This objection to the secession of prosperous regions can be based on different views of distributive justice. Here, following a distinction that has been introduced by Allen Buchanan, ‘subject centred’ and ‘justice as reciprocity’ theories are explored. It is argued that both theories fail to support the case against the secession of wealthy groups. ‘Subject centred’ theories cannot explain special duties toward compatriots, whereas ‘justice as reciprocity’ theories cannot justify restrictions on exit rights. However, this does not mean that separatists have no moral duties vis-à-vis their (former) fellow citizens. They are obliged to dissolve the political union in a fair way, e.g., by accepting responsibility for some share of the public debts.

    May 07, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13483480   open full text
  • Are economic liberties basic rights?
    von Platz, J.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. April 15, 2013

    In this essay I discuss a powerful challenge to high-liberalism: the challenge presented by neoclassical liberals that the high-liberal assumptions and values imply that the full range of economic liberties are basic rights. If the claim is true, then the high-liberal road from ideals of democracy and democratic citizenship to left-liberal institutions is blocked. Indeed, in that case the high-liberal is committed to an institutional scheme more along the lines of laissez-faire capitalism than property-owning democracy. To present and discuss this challenge, I let John Rawls represent the high-liberal argument that only a narrow range of economic liberties are basic rights and John Tomasi represent the neoclassical liberal argument that the full range of economic liberties are basic rights. I show that Rawls’s argument is inadequate, but also that Tomasi’s argument fails. I thus conclude that high-liberalism is in a precarious situation, but is not yet undone by the neoclassical liberal challenge.

    April 15, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13483466   open full text
  • Equality-tempered prioritarianism.
    Dorsey, D.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. April 02, 2013

    In this paper, I present and explore an alternative to a standard prioritarian axiology. Equality-tempered prioritarianism holds that the value of welfare increases should be balanced against the value of equality. However, given that, under prioritarianism, the value of marginal welfare benefits decreases as the welfare of beneficiaries increases, equality-tempered prioritarianism holds that the intrinsic value of equality will be sufficient to alter a prioritarian verdict only in cases in which welfare benefits are granted to the very well-off. I argue that this view, suitably refined, solves a persistent problem for prioritarianism, and is superior to alternatives.

    April 02, 2013   doi: 10.1177/1470594X13483479   open full text
  • The enfranchisement lottery.
    Lopez-Guerra, C.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics. October 26, 2010

    This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose.

    October 26, 2010   doi: 10.1177/1470594X10372206   open full text