This article discusses prize-creation and prize-allocation. Such activities may seem morally neutral, or perhaps even beneficial. A central thesis of this article is that such practices have significant moral implications and should be brought under the remit of moral reasoning. I suggest that in many cases, the harmful effects of prizes are overlooked, and that they stand in need of scrutiny, revision, and possibly abolition. This conclusion is reached via an examination of the nature of prizes, their functions, benefits, and harms, which generates guidelines that prize-giving institutions should consider before instituting prizes and should use to periodically review them. This article advances philosophical theorising about prizes and has significant practical upshots.
Many existing states, including the US and the UK, promote a particular housing tenure, owner-occupation. Yet liberalism is commonly associated with commitment to a principle of state neutrality which holds that states ought to be neutral regarding different ideas of the good life. This raises important questions, and ones that have received little philosophical attention. Does a commitment to liberal state neutrality rule out the promotion of owner-occupation? More broadly, what follows from a commitment to the neutrality principle for state action around housing tenure? In this article, I argue that a weaker neutrality principle, neutrality of justification, allows states wide latitude to promote particular housing tenures, including owner-occupation. However, on a stronger and, I argue, more tenable reading of the neutrality principle, state promotion of owner-occupation is plausibly ruled out. What is not ruled out, however, is state promotion of a different tenure: renting. Before making these arguments, I defend the application of the neutrality principle to state action around housing tenure.
In popular discourse and in the philosophical literature there is almost no reflection on the morality of doing harm in the context of doing one's job. To the contrary, workers are valorised simply for having a job, and typically individual workers are spared from blame, even when they cause significant harm as part of their job. In this article we define and argue against a position, which we label permissivism, that renders more precise a popular yet inchoate attitude toward the domain of job-taking. Permissivists believe (by definition) that one does no wrong by taking a job, and thus committing to doing a certain kind of work, unless the work is cartoonishly evil. We distinguish between two versions of this view. According to situational permissivism, in almost every case of committing-to-doing-harm-by-taking-a-job, particular situational details (such as personal costs) provide a defeater of the wrongness of doing that harm. On structural permissivism, the institutional nature of the market economy substitutes for the moral agency of the job-taker. We consider multiple arguments for each version of Permissivism and show them all to be flawed.
Data companies such as Facebook use machine learning algorithms to analyze users' personal data, revealing fine-grained patterns about when individuals are most vulnerable. These practices, widely described as manipulative, have generated a growing literature on how data companies wrong users through their influence. In this article, I argue that existing accounts overlook a significant wrong. I show that these data companies engaged in a distinctive form of deception at the point of data collection: users were led to believe that recommendation systems existed to personalize their experience, when in fact the primary purpose was to discover their vulnerabilities. I consider several candidate accounts of what makes this deception wrong, including appeals to inauthenticity, informed consent, deception about commercial intent, and domination, and argue that none adequately captures the core wrong. I then argue that this deception constitutes a form of treachery: a deception whose purpose is to acquire power over the victim by co-opting their agency. Drawing on cases from other contexts, I show that treachery is a pro tanto wrong that is independent of whether the acquired power is ever exercised. The concept of treachery thus identifies a prior wrong that existing accounts had not previously identified.
