This paper argues that reductivism, the dominant form of contemporary just war theory, cannot justify violent climate protest, despite Andreas Malm's suggestion that just war theory might help confront the challenge of the climate crisis. The argument has three stages. It begins by showing both the relevance of Malm's attacks on the climate movement's strategic pacifism to questions about the appropriateness of violence in climate activism in political philosophy and the dominance of reductivism in contemporary philosophical discussions of violence. It then shows that reductivism's individualism will make it difficult to establish liability for climate harms substantial enough to be met with defensive force. Finally, it argues that violent climate protest is unlikely to be necessary to protect individuals, since it will not effectively reduce individual vulnerability to climate change. The collective character of the threat of climate change is in tension with reductivism's commitment to justifying all violence in terms of individual defensive rights.
Are markets coercive? Contemporary debate is dominated by two answers. The first, longstanding among defenders of free markets, holds that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition: coercion enters the picture only when rights are violated. The second, revived from Robert Hale's 1923 essay and embraced today by progressive legal scholars and post-liberal conservatives alike, holds that markets are pervasively coercive because property rights backed by state power constitute a system of mutual coercion. Both answers fail, but the Halean answer fails in the more interesting way. The libertarian answer moralizes coercion, stripping it of evaluative force; the Halean answer de-moralizes coercion, stripping it of discriminating power. If coercion is everywhere, it cannot pick out the arrangements worth criticizing. Drawing on a convergence across the philosophical literature on coercion, the paper develops a third option: identify coercion non-moralistically-as a factual matter of options restricted by another's institutionally backed power-but evaluate its significance in graduated terms, by attention to the significance of the options curtailed, the availability of alternatives, and the directness of compulsion involved. The result is a framework that can distinguish cases of genuinely worrisome market coercion from cases where the concept does no moral work.
Institutions and public policies are increasingly evaluated by their effects on self-reported happiness or life satisfaction. Yet if institutions shape not only outcomes but also the aspirations against which outcomes are judged, reported well-being can be a misleading welfare metric. This paper develops a simple dynamic framework that makes this problem precise by bringing together two ideas. From Arthur Schopenhauer, it takes the insight that aspirations adapt endogenously, so that hedonic gains from improvements tend to dissipate as standards adjust. From Frank Knight, it takes the claim that welfare depends partly on cultivating "higher wants": developing capacities, projects, and evaluative sophistication, not merely satisfying given preferences. Individuals in the model invest in "taste capital," which is treated as intrinsically valuable in the welfare criterion but which also raises the aspiration benchmark. Any positive weight on taste cultivation shifts the welfare optimum toward sustained investment and higher long-run aspirations, which can widen aspiration gaps and lower experienced well-being even as overall welfare rises under the criterion. The analysis formalizes a mechanism through which aspiration-raising institutions, such as education systems and meritocratic norms, can be welfare-improving while appearing welfare-reducing in happiness data. It also clarifies the normative commitments embedded in treating subjective well-being as a sufficient statistic for policy evaluation and the supplementary evidence required when institutions shape aspirations.
There is a growing sense that representative democracy is in crisis, leading to renewed interest in alternative institutional designs. One popular proposal-what I call legislative sortition-says we should replace elected legislators with randomly selected citizens. While legislative sortition has drawn both numerous supporters and critics, one objection has received little attention: that ordinary citizens' lower cognitive abilities, relative to elected officials, will diminish the quality of governance. This paper articulates and evaluates this concern, distinguishing between several versions of it. I argue that some forms of the objection are implausibly strong, but that a suitably qualified version can be defended. Although this does not provide a decisive reason to reject legislative sortition, it meaningfully shapes how we should assess its promise.
Measuring corporate contributions to climate change is often crucial for investors, policymakers and legal frameworks. Current methods use attributional carbon footprint metrics, which quantify emissions linked to a company's activities. Despite its widespread use, this approach faces challenges like 'brown spinning' and fails to account for substitution effects. In response, some advocate for consequential metrics, which consider alternative scenarios and counterfactuals to measure the impact of corporate actions on global emissions. This paper critically examines both approaches, arguing that while attributional metrics are flawed, consequential metrics often require infeasible levels of predictive precision and counterfactual analysis. We propose that different contexts and purposes warrant different approaches. For some purposes and contexts, like carbon taxation, a restricted attributional method that focuses exclusively on Scope 1 is suitable. For other purposes, like setting Environmental, Social, and Governance ratings, we suggest an elaborated attributional framework that also accounts for indirect causal contributions not captured by standard Scopes 1-3 emissions. In yet other cases, standard or elaborated forms of consequential metrics may be more suitable.
This article targets the problems of endogenous preferences for welfare assessment in the context of large-scale interventions that, for instance, concern us in environmental economics. Prominent economists have argued that the problem of endogenous preferences is particularly pressing in these cases. However, I argue that while there are promising solutions to deal with this problem when it comes to small-scale interventions (e.g. nudging), those do not work for large-scale interventions. Based on this, I offer a framework that allows us to preserve the central role of preferences for welfare assessment also in cases of large-scale interventions.
The article engages in the well-known debate about the need to ground macroeconomics in a program of microfoundations. In this debate, new classical and new Keynesian macroeconomists argue for an eliminative program of microfoundations (which reduces macroeconomics completely to general equilibrium theory), agent-based macroeconomists for a program of "genuine" microfoundations (which models the macroeconomy as a complex system), and macroeconometricians for the possibility of conducting causal inference independently of any program of microfoundations. The article argues for a program of empirical microfoundations: for a program that has only recently begun to gather momentum and uses surveys to study the formation of individual expectations (their type-level causes, the degree to which these causes are relevant, and the potentially changing rules that govern their relevance). The article argues, more specifically, that the macroeconomy is a complex system, that the ultimate purpose of the study of macroeconomics is causal inference (or policy analysis), and that in the face of a complex macroeconomy, causal inference won't be successful unless it is underpinned by the program of empirical microfoundations. The article also argues that this program should replace the eliminative program of neoclassical and neo-Keynesian macroeconomists, supplement the program of "genuine" microfoundations of agent-based macroeconomists and support causal inference in macroeconometrics.
Labour migration from low- to high-income states displays striking patterns of occupational segregation. Occupational segregation in labour migration generates what I call the distributive-relational dilemma: on the one hand, labour migration can promote global distributive equality; on the other hand, labour migration can create or exacerbate relational inequalities within the receiving society. This conflict between distributive and relational equality can be attenuated to some degree, but it is difficult to eliminate entirely. Faced with the distributive-relational dilemma, relational egalitarians might conclude that they should support immigration restrictions to reduce domestic relational inequalities. In this paper, I argue that relational egalitarians should resist this conclusion. First, I argue that restricting immigration to protect domestic relational equality fails as a justification for exclusion, because it involves members of receiving societies treating their own hostility towards immigrant workers as a reason for their exclusion. Second, I argue that excluding would-be immigrants in order to maintain domestic relational equality reproduces inegalitarian social hierarchies at the global level, because it reinforces a global regime of migration governance that expresses racialised inequalities in social status. These arguments suggest that relational egalitarians have the theoretical resources that they need to resist the conclusion that they should support restrictive immigration policies in response to the distributive-relational dilemma.
Rights to petition occupy an unusual position in political theory. Legally speaking, few political rights are as long-established or ubiquitous. Yet, philosophers have rarely, if ever, engaged in a sustained analysis of their contents or justification. On the rare occasions when such rights have been discussed, they are also often treated with a degree of quietism, if not outright scepticism. If there is a right to petition, so the thinking goes, then it must be a relatively minimal right, which is to say, one that secures for its holder no more than that to which they are already entitled under, say, their right to free speech. In this article, I reject this view. Instead, I argue that, unlike rights to free speech, citizens’ rights to petition secure a duty on public officials to engage in a certain decision-making process with regards to petitioners’ petitions. In short: they have a duty to listen. In this way, I claim citizens enjoy a far more ‘robust’ right to petition than many polities currently recognise.
Can economics reflect climate justice? Although the scenario forecasts of climate economists are key inputs to IPCC assessments, their ethical assumptions fail to reflect important considerations of justice. This is clearest regarding sufficientarian justice, which requires that no person falls below a minimum level of well-being. This view is reflected in an important strand of climate diplomacy and activism that highlights the plight of those most vulnerable to climate harms. However, I show that sufficientarian justice is largely incompatible with predominant approaches to climate economic modelling. I then examine the prospects for a sufficientarian climate economics, considering dual discounting approaches, well-being ‘guardrails’ approaches and basic needs modelling. I find that the latter two are closest to sufficientarianism, although they reflect different interpretations of its core claims. Finally, I consider whether climate sufficientarianism requires economic ‘degrowth’, as some have claimed. I argue that sufficientarianism is compatible with periods of economic growth, but is likely to be incompatible with the indefinite pursuit of growth due to the ecological impacts this would entail. Since growth is a standard assumption in climate economics, this reiterates the need for new economic approaches in the pursuit of a just and sustainable future.
We apply widely accepted arguments regarding the inferential properties of scientific experiments to analyse markets and consumer decision-making. Market competition is depicted as a means of generating counterfactual data regarding product characteristics resembling experiments’ use of treatment and control conditions to facilitate causal inference. Much like scientific experimentation, competition creates counterfactual data that allows consumers to make causal inferences regarding rival products’ treatment effects upon their welfare. Absent the multiplicity of differentiated goods that competitive markets produce, consumers cannot engage in causal inference and demand curves may become inaccurate specifications of marginal social benefit. This application of the potential outcomes framework to microeconomics offers an account of market competition that has implications for understanding welfare problems created by uncompetitive and monopolistic markets, industrial organisation, and the underlying justifications for anti-trust policy.
Homeschooling is on the rise. It appeals to very different perspectives and ideologies that tend not to have common ground, from classical conservative to radical progressive. But the justifications for the practice are weak. In this paper, we build a case against the “home school” as a political practice using the existing commitments of liberal, conservative, and democratic theories of education. Whether education should aim at the cultivation of children's autonomy, their formation as members of cultural communities, or their training as democratic citizens, there are reasons to doubt that the practice of homeschooling can fulfill our educational goals. As such, we argue that liberals, conservatives, and democrats each have their own motivations to oppose homeschooling as an institutional alternative to traditional schools. Through our critiques, we also advance a metatheoretical argument in favor of centering the aims of education in our philosophical and political debates.
It is widely held that entities have moral status if they possess a status-conferring property to a sufficient degree. However, this means that for at least one degree to which an entity can possess the status-conferring property and that grounds moral status, there is some incrementally lower degree of possessing the property that does not ground moral status. Critics maintain that this renders any threshold for moral status arbitrary. In this paper, we reject common responses to this arbitrariness objection, such as that moral status thresholds are not arbitrary but merely vague. Instead, we defend the moderate discontinuity view. This view holds that thresholds denote moderate rather than radical shifts in moral status and that significant shifts in the moral status of entities on opposite sides of the threshold are a function of their distance from the threshold rather than of the threshold itself. Crucially, it follows from this that there is no principled way to reconcile the commitment to the moral equality of persons with the commitment to the moral superiority of persons over nonhuman animals.
Could private markets in shares in people's future earnings be morally permissible, or even desirable? While markets for personal debt are widespread, markets for shares in the future earnings of individuals are not. In this article, we argue that from a normative point of view, these markets are worth taking seriously. We begin by surveying their potential upsides and set out a baseline model of such a market that is moderately regulated, but has a plausible claim to being economically viable. We then critically examine its moral permissibility by identifying what (i) moral limits to markets and what (ii) distributive and (iii) relational egalitarian concerns it could give rise to. We advance two claims. First, that in sufficiently idealised circumstances, markets in shares in people's future earnings are not only morally permissible but are desirable and in several ways superior to markets in personal debt. Second, that in non-ideal circumstances, these markets can give rise to serious distributive and relational concerns that make them morally objectionable, but this does not imply that they should always be prohibited. We conclude that markets in shares in people's future earnings have potential as a complement to existing markets and modes of public provisioning.
There are several sectors of the economy in which cooperatives have flourished, competing successfully against standard business corporations. The best explanation for their success is that they provide superior benefits to their members. The question addressed by this paper is whether cooperatives also provide important benefits to society, such that non-members should prefer a cooperative economy to one dominated by business corporations. It has often been suggested that cooperatives are more virtuous because they are more democratic, less hierarchical, less anti-social and less apt to produce economic inequality. This paper evaluates these claims. The central challenge stems from the observation that cooperatives are not nearly as different from corporations as is commonly assumed.
The thesis of a capitalist road to communism asserts that Marx's realm of freedom can be reached from within welfare capitalism, skipping socialism, by using a tax-financed unconditional basic income until it is close to disposable income per head and the very distinction between paid work and free time is cancelled as a result. We update this thesis for two reasons: the recent prospect of a post-labor world following the automation revolution in technology, and that welfare capitalism has become more inegalitarian and less hospitable to basic income. We use a model with a production function in which automation capital is fully substitutable with labor, and both factors are complementary to fixed capital. A baseline simulation shows the economic feasibility of a capitalist transition to communism. Two versions of a scenario incorporating interplay of labor-saving technical change and egalitarian institutional reforms are set out which can make the transition politically viable to some extent, depending on the social distribution of power over technology. The one in which the productivity coefficients of labor and automation capital grow at similar rates best approximates the ideal of communism.
Some think the moral structure of policing is closely analogous to defensive harm: it is permissible to impose proportionate harm on others when necessary to defend against threatened unjust harm. Many think that whether a policing strategy is justified depends primarily on whether it efficiently reduces the crime rate without directly violating any stringent rights. This paper rejects both of these views. It presents policing as a project in social risk management, in which we accept some risk of suffering rights-trespass by police activity in order to greatly reduce our exposure to risk of rights-trespass by private agents. It then evaluates the use of location-based algorithmic prediction tools to guide arrests or police deployments. This paper advances two core claims, one normative and one empirical. The normative claim is that decisions about how to police (and what tools to use) must be justified by broad principles for the fair distribution of risk, never only by the net effect on the observed crime rate. The empirical claim is that predictive algorithmic tools likely can't clear this bar in a context like the present-day United States.
John Rawls and those sympathetic to his views defend a moral principle called the criterion of reciprocity. Some argue that the moral reasons for complying with the criterion of reciprocity are derived from civic friendship, a valuable relationship of collective agency that one can sustain with one's fellow citizens. In this article, I pose what I call the knowledge problem for civic friendship. I argue that citizens have only limited information about whether others are complying with the criterion of reciprocity. Furthermore, I argue that this fact means that citizens only have weak moral reasons to comply with the criterion of reciprocity.
According to some theories, a rule counts as a social norm within a community only if the members of the community generally accept the rule. This is a conceptual claim: proponents of these theories do not deny that a rule can structure people's interactions and relationships even though few people accept it; they simply deny that such a rule should count as a social norm. I argue that this approach draws arbitrary boundaries that cut through explanatorily significant categories with no theoretical payoff. We typically invoke social norms either to explain empirical phenomena (e.g. what people do ) or moral phenomena (e.g. what people should do). In both domains, “acceptance theories” of social norms do not define a category of rules that warrants distinctive attention. On an alternative approach, a rule counts as a social norm as long as people cooperate with expressive practices representing the rule as valid, whether they accept the rule or not. I argue that “practice theories” of social norms are more fruitful, and so we should abandon “acceptance theories.”
Discussions of parental justice typically start from the thought that when people become parents through voluntary choices, they are presumptively responsible for the costs of raising their children. This responsibility-based argument is often presented as innocuous. I argue that it actually denotes a highly contentious view of how voluntary choices relate to the demands of justice, and that this view is particularly problematic regarding the kind of choices at stake in parental justice. In light of these concerns, I contend that the literature on parental justice would benefit from a Rawlsian turn. To negotiate this turn, we must acknowledge that the significance of the choice to have children depends on the justice of the institutional background against which it is made—not the other way around. The first question of parental justice is therefore not what responsibility parents should bear for their choices, but rather how a just institutional order would define the rights, duties, and responsibilities associated with the social position parent . I outline how a Rawlsian theory of parental justice might tackle this question.
