Political Philosophy

This is a book on welfare and its importance for distributive justice. Part I is concerned with prudence; more precisely, with what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for having a self‐interest in a particular benefit. It includes discussions of the extent to which self‐interest depends on preferences, personal identity, and what matters in survival. It also considers the issue of whether it can benefit (or harm) a person to come into existence and what the implications are for our theory of self‐interest. A ‘Prudential View’ is defended, according to which a person has a present self‐interest in a future benefit if and only if she stands in a relation of continuous physical realization of (appropriate) psychology to the beneficiary, where the strength of the self‐interest depends both on the size of the benefit and on the strength of this relation. Part II concerns distributive justice and so how to distribute welfare or self‐interest fulfilment over individuals. It includes discussions of welfarism, egalitarianism and prioritarianism, population ethics, the importance of personal identity and what matters for distributive justice, and the importance of all these issues for various topics in applied ethics, including the badness of death. Here, a version of prioritarianism is defended, according to which, roughly, the moral value of a benefit to an individual at one time depends on both the size of the benefit and on the individual's self‐interest, at that time, in the other benefits that accrue to her at this and other times.

This book argues that the most defensible version of a market socialist economic system would be unable to realize widely held socialist ideals and values. In particular, it would be responsible for widespread and systematic exploitation. The charge of exploitation, which is really a charge of injustice, has typically been made against capitalist systems by socialists. This book argues that it is market socialism—the only remaining viable form of socialism—that is systematically exploitative. Recent work on the economics of contracts and organizations is used to show that the characteristic organizations of a free enterprise system, the classical capitalist firm and the modern corporation, are structured in such a way that opportunities for exploitation among economic actors (e.g., managers, workers, providers of capital, customers) are minimized. By contrast, this book argues, in a market socialist regime of worker cooperatives, opportunities for exploitation would abound. The book locates its comparative analysis of market socialism and the free enterprise system in the larger context of the capitalism/socialism debate. In the account of this debate, the book offers a distinctive and compelling vision of the relationship between the social sciences and political philosophy.

Within democratic societies, a deep division exists over the nature of community and the grounds for political life. Should the political order be neutral between competing conceptions of the good life or should it be based on some such conception? This book addresses one crucial set of problems raised by this division: What bases should officials and citizens employ in reaching political decisions and justifying their positions? Should they feel free to rely on whatever grounds seem otherwise persuasive to them, like religious convictions, or should they restrict themselves to “public reasons,” reasons that are shared within the society or arise from the premises of liberal democracy? This book argues that fundamental premises of liberal democracy alone do not provide answers to these questions, that much depends on historical and cultural contexts. After examining past and current practices and attitudes in the United States, it offers concrete suggestions for appropriate principles relevant to American society today.

In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable “second nature.” For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. This book attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition that has been developed over the past two decades. Three political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of the book's main argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanting.

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards.

When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of “one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century” (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. This book discusses our responsibilities to address “structural” injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we are not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. The book argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which it calls the “social connection” model. The book develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live.

Clinical research requires that some people be used and possibly harmed for the benefit of others. What justifies such use of people? This book provides an in-depth philosophical analysis of several crucial issues in the ethics of clinical research. Much writing on the ethics of research with human subjects assumes that participation in research is a distinctive activity that requires distinctive moral principles. In most contexts, we allow people to choose the activities in which they engage. By contrast, people are permitted to participate in research only after IRBs determine that it is appropriate for them to do so. Although we assume that consent to participate in research must be preceded by an elaborate disclosure of information, we make no such assumption in many other areas of life. Although it is thought to be morally problematic to provide financial inducements to prospective subjects, we make no such assumptions when we hire people as loggers, fishermen, and fire fighters. Although we readily accept the “off-shoring” of manufacturing, many regard the off-shoring of medical research with great skepticism. This book seeks to widen the lens through which we consider such issues. When we do so, we will find that many standard principles of research ethics are difficult to defend.