Many social welfare measures will sometimes rank a large population of very well-faring people below a very large population of barely well-faring people. Thus, they entail the repugnant conclusion. If such rankings are indeed repugnant, there must be some mistake behind measures that imply them. This paper discusses what that mistake might be. After rejecting other proposals, I suggest that the mistaken assumption is that welfare values that are insignificant for individuals, due to being small, could have significant impact on social welfare. To avoid this mistake, two new measures are introduced that aggregate significant and insignificant welfare values differently.
Abstract I argue against John, Millum and Wasserman’s position that telic prioritarianism justifies morally acceptable discrimination against persons with disabilities. I propose alternative considerations that explain why disability discrimination in the lifesaving cases JMW discuss is morally problematic.
I argue that evaluative uncertainty gives rational agents instrumental reasons to abstract from some of their salient preferences when bargaining about social institutions. Because agents cannot assume stability in their future evaluative outlook, it is rational to favour rules that preserve options that may become salient. Building on Kreps (1979), I show how flexibility-driven abstraction expands the bargaining set, enabling convergence on rules while preserving motivational continuity. Since options are endogenous, bargainers also have reason to deliberate about option-generating and option-filtering meta-rules that structure the emergence, appraisal and revision of options over time.
Standard game theory struggles to explain cooperation and coordination in collective action problems where rational strategies often fail to yield mutually beneficial outcomes. One response to this is team reasoning, which introduces group agency. Another is Kantian optimization, which retains individual agency but assumes universalization-based optimization. Some have proposed that Kantian optimization is best understood as a subtype of team reasoning, a member of the same theoretical family. This paper disputes that. By demonstrating that Kantian-style team reasoning does not necessarily lead to Kantian equilibrium, the paper concludes that Kantian universalization does not fit within the group agency framework.
This paper develops and defends a non-utilitarian interpretation of John Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem and sum of vNM utilities approach. On this interpretation, vNM utilities transform an independently available cardinal measure of fully comparable individual well-being. The resulting proposal for ranking well-being distributions - the Risk-Priority View - is not welfare-anonymous and can favour a smaller increase in well-being for one individual rather than a larger increase in well-being for another, equally well-off individual. I argue here that such counterintuitive implications can be defended, and that impartiality can still be secured through the imposition of an alternative, interprofile anonymity axiom.
Many theorists tie social norms to attitudes, such as expectations towards others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we instead ground social norms in a social norming process, an often non-verbal social communication process that 'makes' the norm through mutual expressions of support. We present the process-based account of social norms and social normativity, and distinguish social norms from social pressures, social practices and Lewisian conventions. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by tying them to 'expressive acts', just as laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes.
While Rawls's theory has often been used to critique inherited wealth inequalities, this paper explores an underexamined possibility: a Rawlsian justification of inheritance. I argue that the right to bequeath can be justified when regulated by the Difference Principle. According to this principle, bequests can be permissible if they function as an incentive that maximally benefits the least advantaged. To meet this condition, I propose a specific inheritance tax design - sensitive to the disincentive effects of receiving large inheritances and the incentive scope of bequeathing - with progressive rates based both on the amount received and the number of transfers.
Drawing on Joseph Carens's social membership theory, originally developed in immigration ethics, I transpose this temporal logic to organizational spheres. I argue that as employees accrue tenure, they "sink roots", integrating into the firm's cooperative structure and subjecting themselves to its governance. This sustained integration generates increasingly strong moral entitlements to participate in decision-making, analogous to how long-term residents acquire claims to citizenship. I use this temporal framework to address the boundary problem in workplace democracy, defend a graduated workplace franchise that prioritizes long-term employees over transient stakeholders, and criticize fissured employment structures that block such membership over time.
We examine the "problem of social change", focusing on whether efforts should be oriented toward long-term ideals or piecemeal improvements. We analyse the trade-off between these approaches: pursuing ideals may require short-term sacrifices, while incremental changes may hinder realizing an ideal. We introduce an analytical framework for structuring thought experiments that can provide traction on these issues, and present two implementations that provide baseline insights and motivate further research. We conclude with suggestions for extending our framework in ways that can yield insights that can guide our choice of orientation.
This paper engages with recent work on formalization in economics to develop a new perspective on mathematization. Boylan and O'Gorman draw on foundations of mathematics to argue that classical mathematics is inappropriate for economics; intuitionistic foundations and constructive mathematics should be used instead. The use of real analysis would be blocked and equilibrium results undermined. I argue that their line of thought faces several challenges; however, I then draw on their analyses and the philosophy of applied mathematics to propose a novel approach in which questions about mathematization are properly understood as questions about the contextual aptness of relevant idealizations.
It is often thought that compulsory retirement funding gains support from paternalistic considerations. This paper examines this claim. I argue that compulsory retirement funding is more coherent when understood as an attempt at temporal smoothing than counterfactual insurance. An implication is that any paternalistic case for retirement funding faces problems that are more severe than they would be if compulsory retirement funding were insurance. I label these the problems of 'inverted bias' and of the 'arbitrariness of income from labour'. The paper then makes some suggestions about how these points about paternalism bear on the problem of justice in retirement funding.
Buchak's risk-weighted expected utility considers not just the probability of an outcome, but also the probability of getting a strictly better outcome, when weighting the contribution that outcome gives to the evaluation of a gamble. It uses a risk-weighting function $R$ sending probabilities in $\left[ {0,1} \right]$ to decision weights $\left[ {0,1} \right]$ . I adapt this to allow weights in any real interval. Finite intervals yield nothing new, but if the interval is infinite, then the resulting rule can incorporate maximin or maximax preferences (or both!) while still satisfying stochastic dominance. There are advantages to working with marginal risk-weighting, $R$ 's derivative, $r$ .
This paper concerns the difficulty of avoiding an additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. An impossibility theorem is provided which shows that we cannot avoid this version of the Repugnant Conclusion even if we deny the Mere Addition Principle and closely related principles which place limits on the badness of adding happy people, such as "Dominance Addition" and additive "Non-Sadism" conditions. I argue that the impossibility theorem shows that the additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion cannot reasonably be avoided by population-ethical means alone. One must instead either deny structural conditions such as acyclicity, adopt a radically unorthodox fixed-population axiology, or accept this version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion.
Responding to Konstantin Morozov’s article, which criticizes the Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership, I point out that the reality of the right to unconsciously interact with objects, on which he heavily relies, is dubious.
This article presents a critique of Sergei Sazonov’s entrepreneurial theory of ownership. The article first reconstructs Sazonov’s response to the private duty imposition objection. It then demonstrates that Sazonov’s theory cannot overcome this objection because it is based on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘use’. The entrepreneurial theory of ownership understands ‘use’ in a rather narrow and contradictory sense, which differs from the meaning in which this concept appears in objections to theories of original appropriation.
Chung (2023) purports to derive conditions under which a Utilitarian society, which maximizes total welfare, Pareto dominates a Rawlsian society, which maximizes the income of the least advantaged members of society. We show that Chung’s analysis is doubly flawed. First, his analysis assumes that a Rawlsian government chooses an inefficient tax rate when it could do otherwise. Second, his analysis violates his assumption that citizens must choose a non-negative amount of labour. We show that Chung’s headline result does not hold once we enforce this assumption.
In this paper, I investigate how parents should talk to their children about injustice. In doing so, I use the non-ideal theory debate in political philosophy to show how the questions traditionally asked there can give substantive guidance to parents. I also contribute to that debate by showing how attention to injustice conversations (a) leads us to ask new questions and develop new modelling tools; (b) can help us to resolve the questions traditionally asked in the debate in a more direct way; and (c) can serve as a model for bringing together substantive and methodological questions in non-ideal theory.
Non-compete clauses (NCCs) are widely used and discussed, but often too narrowly. While conventional accounts focus on the benefits of NCCs to employers, Harrison Frye has proposed that they can also serve employees by acting as a clear, costly signal. I argue that both views rely on an overly narrow analysis. A wider view shows that NCCs cause market failures, undermining their utility as protective or signalling devices. Because of these negative effects, I extend Frye's account to argue that NCCs should be used only as targeted interventions under exceptional conditions, if they are used at all.
This article defends a new type of preferential hiring. Rather than compensating groups for past or present employment-related discrimination, it seeks to ensure that groups with disproportionate unemployment rates that are due significantly – but not necessarily wholly – to their members having relatively narrow competencies, such as autistic individuals and people with hearing loss, ADHD and lower education levels, are prioritized for jobs that match their abilities. After defending such competency-based preferential hiring based on its benefits for persons with narrower competencies and for societies more broadly, I address several criticisms, including concerns that this approach may be stigmatizing.
Ideal Contractualism views principles of justice as corresponding to what rational, mutually disinterested persons would collectively choose behind a veil of ignorance. It is well-known that Ideal Contractualism faces profound challenges in accounting for justice between generations. We present a unified solution to these problems that involves rejecting the assumption that the parties conceive of their choices as causally efficacious and assumes instead that the parties choose in light of the news value of their decision. And we explore what concrete principles would be chosen by the parties as governing intergenerational justice against the backdrop of this assumption.
