Abstract Sexual pressure can range from egregious to relatively mild. Here, I focus on relatively mild forms of sexual pressuring deployed among people who do not know one another well: attempts to obtain sex by pestering, wheedling, minor intimidation, minor deceits, threats of slightly adverse consequences, and emotional manipulation. Many prominent philosophical views condemn such sexual pressuring while others, also prominent, imply that it is innocuous. I will argue that neither of these sorts of views gets things quite right. On the view that I defend, such pressuring always imposes a risk to the individual being pressured that is morally problematic. And sometimes, this morally problematic element suffices to render relatively mild sexual pressuring on balance immoral. Acceptance of this view may have some important practical implications, and I close by discussing them.
Abstract In this paper, I consider Marxist arguments for, and against, race-based reparations. I contend that Marxists have moral and epistemic reasons to support race-based reparations. Nevertheless, I suggest that they also have reasons to be cautious of race-based reparations. I offer a framework with which to consider these arguments. This framework makes sense of two important features that are relevant for Marxist reparations: interpretive disagreements within Marxist scholarship and different empirical circumstances. I explain why these reasons for, and against, race-based reparations matter for Marxists, and I consider how they might be weighed against each other.
Abstract Economic change can bring many benefits, but it can also upset the economic positions and prospects of individuals and communities by dramatically curtailing access to decent employment. This paper explores the question of how a society ought to address those left behind by economic change. The paper's first goal is to defend the claim that the best way to frame the issue of access to decent employment is not just as an issue of economic policy but also as a public health issue, a framing that it justifies, in part, through the case study of “deaths of despair,” a phenomenon famously explored by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This framing clarifies the moral urgency of expanding access to decent employment. The paper's second goal is to discuss the values at stake in the problem and in the possible solutions. I argue that (1) the state should implement policies friendlier to private sector employment and (2) the state should serve as an employer of last resort, at least when the work created is productive and doesn't create out-of-control inflationary pressures.
Abstract I distinguish voluntary retirement (of those able to work) from involuntary retirement (of those unable to work). I discuss the former. I argue that the state's pensions policy should be neutral between life-plans, and this requires the following two changes. First, tax relief on private voluntary retirement pensions (PVRPs) should be abolished because it effectively transfers money to those saving for a long and/or prosperous voluntary retirement from those who would prefer to have more time and/or money while young and middle-aged in exchange for a shorter and/or less prosperous voluntary retirement. Tax relief would remain unchanged on private involuntary retirement pensions. Second, state pensions should be split into two components: a compulsory “state involuntary retirement pension” (SIRP) and an optional “state voluntary retirement pension” (SVRP). Citizens opting out of the SVRP—or paying less toward it—would correspondingly enjoy a higher income while young and middle-aged.
Abstract Use of the term “politicize” and its variants has surged in the American lexicon over the past half-century. Typically, the term “politicize” carries a tone of condemnation. Yet it is unclear if politicizing is always bad. In this article, I give an account of what it means to politicize by first describing paradigmatic cases of politicizing in popular media, then I survey various definitions of politicizing and explain the concept. Politicizing typically occurs when an agent instrumentalizes some activity or institution for the sake of their partisan political agenda. To politicize is to use a nonpartisan good as a means to a partisan end.
Abstract Police directives closely resemble coercive threats, yet for many, they are more than this. According to the police power-liability view, the exercise of legitimate police authority creates genuine changes in the normative situations of the addressees of power. This explains why, on the surface, police and the orders of a gunman are strikingly similar: Both primarily motivate us through the threat of coercive physical force. Police directives however, carry more normative weight. Here, police directives may affect our normative situations in ways that do not necessarily entail an obligation to obey them—they may create standing liability to them. This suggests that we need not presume the existence of a duty to obey police.
Abstract The persistent shortage of transplantable kidneys is a problem. Decades have shown that donation is not the solution. Perhaps payment is. Since donation is permitted, many objections to kidney sales rely on assumptions about the conditions of sales—especially the assumption that prices would be set to efficiently induce within the bounds of fairness. This article considers an alternative where payment—set at $250,000—is designed to confer substantial benefit, and exchange is governed by the same nonmarket norms as donation. Under such conditions, many of the leading objections—concerning exploitation, fairness, complicity in injustice, dignity, commodification, and diminished status—lose much of their force, if they are not refuted outright.
Abstract Assuming that people have moral rights, I argue in a new way that dogs (and, by extension, other animals) have them as well. Some treatments of dogs would be wrong despite having optimal consequences. The wrongness is most plausibly explicable, given the assumption of rights for people, by attributing a right to the animal, so such attribution is warranted. My argument is novel in presupposing neither any theory of rights nor the universal possession of rights by sentient human beings. It is also dialectically modest, aiming to convince only those having certain pre-theoretical intuitions and lacking certain prior theoretical commitments. It nevertheless reaches an important conclusion from widely held and reasonably believable assumptions.
Abstract Opposition to inequality is sometimes expressed in terms of desert: The poor deserve more than they get and/or the rich deserve less. This paper provides an analysis and defense of such claims. The central idea is that economic rewards in market economies are prizes, and as such, they are deserved to the extent that the complex message they send is fitting. Making good on this idea involves generating a general account of what prizes are: Prizes are public signals that praise a complex set of objects, including the victor's success, their skill, and the victor themselves. Next, I use this account to argue that economic goods gained through employment constitute prizes for winning a position in a competitive job market. And finally, I develop a general account of what deserving a prize consists in, which can be used to criticize economic rewards as being out of line with desert: Prizes are deserved if, and to the degree that, the signal they send is fitting. Along the way, I also show why arguments made by T. M. Scanlon, Michael Walzer, and David Miller do not suffice to undermine the central idea. Theoretically, the paper aspires to add to our understanding of prizes, their desert, and their relevance to distributive justice. More practically, this account can help explain—and partially validate—the indignation that is sometimes felt by those who have not fared well in economic competitions.
Some anti-commodification critics have suggested that putting a price on everything is automatically ruled out by value pluralism. I deny this and propose two ways this might be the case. Firstly, if the financial value expressed by prices is taken as fundamental, that fundamental value might be compossible with other fundamental values. Secondly, if the financial value expressed by prices is understood as a non-fundamental, reducible value, it might reduce to more than one fundamental value. In either case, value pluralism would then be compatible with a price for everything. These possibilities provide a way out of a dilemma for proponents of the Markets Without Limits thesis between financial value monism and a defective value pluralism.
One powerful objection to recent arguments for greater state control over digital expression rests on the assumption of behavioral symmetry (meaning, roughly, that we should not introduce stark differences in motivational profiles between private actors and state officials). In this paper, I argue that the adoption of behavioral symmetry severely constrains the space of feasible institutional solutions to the problem of excessive censorship, including such remedies as the introduction of constitutional protections for speech, as well as inter-jurisdictional and intra-jurisdictional competition—sometimes favored as effective restraints on the censorial state. Instead, I suggest that, once we grant behavioral symmetry, we are led toward the conclusion that an anti-censorship ethos—a complex of ideas that sustain the intellectual appeal of free expression—is a necessary condition for digital speech to be protected.
When people feel that their country has betrayed its core ideals, it is natural for them to consider whether they ought finally to give up on their country. Our interest is with those who sincerely love their countries, and yet who are inclined to abandon their country because they judge it to have betrayed its ideals. We consider different variants of patriotism before defending what we call critical patriotism, a stance involving a commitment to a nation's ideals without the attendant need to love one's country unconditionally. We further argue that even in the cases where one has good reasons to remain loyal to one's country, doing so will typically be supererogatory rather than obligatory. The issue before us is of crucial practical significance given the current trend of people feeling justified in abandoning their country in response to feeling that their political ideals have been betrayed.
Abstract It is often assumed that politics is just about the state and what it does. Here I argue for a much broader view, in which politics can include activity that has nothing to do with getting the state to behave differently, by suggesting several ways in which the seemingly apolitical activity of entrepreneurship can fall into three broad categories of political action. The first is in establishing institutions or practices that help guarantee some demand of justice. The second is mitigating and circumventing state injustice. The third is in building a foundation for future action. After that, I discuss two benefits to entrepreneurial politics over state-mediated alternatives, both of which relate to dealing with the constraints of prevailing ideology. The first is that entrepreneurship allows those who are alert to alternative political possibilities to act on that alertness without first overcoming ideological barriers. This argument draws on Israel Kirzner's account of entrepreneurship's equilibrating function. The second point builds upon Joseph Schumpeter's account of its disequilibrating function: successful entrepreneurial action can destroy existing ideological assumptions about what is possible.
An individual can be free—a condition connected to the principles of action someone adopts and the reasons for adopting those principles—only if they live in a condition where certain external factors obtain. This paper argues that one of those factors is the possibility of engaging in entrepreneurial activity.
Economic liberties, such as the freedom to engage in independent economic activity, to own productive property, to enter into market competition, and to profit from transactions, are often associated with the advantageous positions of tycoon, business visionaries, and successful entrepreneurs. This one-sided picture ignores the value of such liberties for the least advantaged, particularly in non-ideal contexts where job markets offer them less than adequate job opportunities. This paper inspects the significance of economic liberties for three disadvantaged groups, namely, poor and low-skilled workers, immigrant workers, and disabled workers. After doing that, the paper discusses how fostering entrepreneurship can meet the requirements of Rawlsian justice concerning the least advantaged.
Many people believe that individual actors should and can respond to social and environmental problems by making ethical or conscientious decisions in the marketplace. They encourage consumers to purchase fair trade coffee, buy locally grown produce, avoid shopping in stores with union-busting tactics, boycott exploitative soda manufacturers, and so on. In this paper, I argue against the idea that demand-side decisions on the part of individual consumers can adequately capture the complicated moral dimensions of any given product. I argue this position by pointing to two intermingled features of consumer choice: value incommensurability and market indeterminacy.
The present war in Ukraine has seen millions of women flee as refugees, while martial law forbids adult men under 60 from leaving the country. According to various reports, many and perhaps most women Ukrainian refugees are breaking romantic ties with the men they leave behind, building new lives with men in their countries of refuge, and/or planning never to return. I avoid any comment about the morality of these events and instead take up the general question of whether women war refugees have any obligations of “connubial loyalty” to their menfolk in circumstances where those men are discharging a moral obligation to fight in the war that precipitated their womenfolk's flight in the first place. I answer that they do.
Some publishers are commissioning sensitivity readers to edit works without the author's permission. While a set of high-profile cases have received public criticism, the publisher's ownership of the relevant material in each case has been thought to rule out any serious legal objection to the practice. This paper proposes that Immanuel Kant's distinctive legal framework supports the view that a publisher who commissions sensitivity readers without the author's permission thereby wrongs either the living author or the reading public.
Abstract Political philosophers old and new have defended the twin claims that (i) traditions embody wisdom, and (ii) transforming tradition based on aprioristic theory threatens to disregard that wisdom. This article argues that while a priori theorizing about justice is indeed epistemically valuable, a priori theories of justice usually tend to merit moderate to low credences. The article develops an account of what I call the “A Priori Theorizing Thesis,” which holds that such theses are likely to be false and dangerous when implemented, and the “Non-substitution Thesis,” which holds that theorists should generally be disinclined to substitute their judgment for the wisdom of social traditions and norms. Along the way, Burke's positive contributions are emphasized and his hyperbole ignored.
