居民对通货膨胀引起的商品房涨价的公平感研究

为在行业水平上研究直接受通货膨胀作用的价格上涨对居民价格公平感、消极情绪的影响,以实验情景模拟的方法,采用2×2×2的被试间设计,运用问卷调查了723名被试。结果表明:(1)被试认为通货膨胀引起的房价上涨都是不公平的;(2)控制点和涨幅对公平感和消极情绪的作用显著,参照系对公平感的作用显著;(3)控制点、涨幅和参照系之间的交互作用显著;(4)平均主义的价值观对消极情绪作用显著;(5)在预测未来十年后价格时,被试出现了认知偏差。     

Upper‐Body Strength and Political Egalitarianism: Twelve Conceptual Replications

Animal models of conflict behavior predict that an organism's behavior in a conflict situation is influenced by physical characteristics related to abilities to impose costs on adversaries. Stronger and larger organisms should be more motivated to seek larger shares of resources and higher places in hierarchies. Previous studies of human males have suggested that measures of upper‐body strength are associated with measures of support for inequality including Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), a measure of individual differences in support for group‐based hierarchies. However, other studies have failed to replicate this association. In this article, we reexamine the link between upper‐body strength and support for inequality using 12 different samples from multiple countries in which relevant measures were available. These samples include student and locally representative samples with direct measures of physical strength and nationally representative samples with self‐reported measures related to muscularity. While the predicted correlation does not replicate for every single available measure of support for inequality, the overall data pattern strongly suggests that for males, but not females, upper‐body strength correlates positively with support for inequality.     

Do egalitarians always help the disadvantaged more than the advantaged? Testing a value‐norm conflict hypothesis in Malaysia

Do egalitarians always express greater compassion toward the disadvantaged than toward the advantaged? A closer look at existing scholarship on the topic suggests that they likely do. Here, we investigated whether such tendency is also apparent within interdependent, high power distance cultures where the high‐status privilege prevails. Given the emphasis on harmony in social relations in interdependent cultures, we reasoned that egalitarians might experience a dissonance between their private equity values and a societal norm prescribing high‐status privilege, which we refer to as the value‐norm conflict. We therefore proposed and found evidence in Malaysia (N = 273) that egalitarians succumbed to the normative high‐status privilege in their culture: They displayed greater compassion towards higher than lower status victims, but only when the political cost of doing so was low. Interestingly, anti‐egalitarians displayed equitable levels of compassion for high‐ and low‐status victims, but only when the political cost for taking such action also was low. Hence, we show that even egalitarians can, at times, favor the privileged and that anti‐egalitarians can act equitably, so long as the political cost of doing so is trivial for them.     

Egalitarian nonconsequentialism and the levelling down objection

Telic egalitarianism is famously threatened by the levelling down objection. In its canonical form, the objection purports to show that it is not, in itself, an improvement if inequality is reduced. In a variant that is less often discussed, the objection is that telic egalitarians are committed to believing that sometimes one ought to reduce inequality, even when doing so makes no one better off. The standard egalitarian response to this ‘all things considered’ variant of the levelling down objection is to embed egalitarianism in a pluralist consequentialist moral theory. In section 1, I briefly recapitulate this familiar strategy. In section 2, I argue that this standard pluralist consequentialist response is inadequate. The inadequacy of the standard response, I argue, stems from the fact that the following are jointly inconsistent: (1) a commitment to levelling down's impermissibility; (2) standard pluralist egalitarian consequentialism; (3) inequality being of non‐trivial importance; and (4) the most plausible measures of inequality's badness. In section 3, I show that egalitarians can better respond to the all‐things‐considered levelling down objection by embedding egalitarianism in a nonconsequentialist moral theory.     

Rethinking Compassion: Toward a Political Account of the Partisan Gender Gap in the United States

Scholarship on the political gender gap in the United States has attributed women's political views to their greater compassion, yet individual‐level measures of compassion have almost never been used to directly examine such claims. We address this issue using the only nationally representative survey to include psychometrically validated measures of compassion alongside appropriate political variables. We show that even though women are more compassionate in the aggregate than men in some respects, this added compassion does not explain the gender gap in partisanship. Female respondents report having more tender feelings towards the less fortunate, but these empathetic feelings are not associated with partisan identity. Women also show a slightly greater commitment to a principle of care, but this principle accounts for little of the partisan gap between men and women and has no significant relationship with partisanship after accounting for gender differences in egalitarian political values.     

Egalitarians,sufficientarians, and mathematicians: a critical notice of Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality

This critical notice provides an overview of Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality and assesses whether Frankfurt is right to argue that equality is merely formal and empty. I counter-argue that egalitarianism, properly tweaked and circumscribed, can be defended against Frankfurt’s repudiation. After surveying the main arguments in Frankfurt’s book, I argue that whatever plausibility the ‘doctrine of sufficiency’ defended by Frankfurt may have, it does not strike a fatal blow against egalitarianism. There is nothing in egalitarianism that forbids acceptance of the moral platitude expressed in sufficientarianism's positive thesis, (viz., it is morally important that everyone have enough). Nor is there anything in egalitarianism as such that makes it impossible to recognize the banal truth that there are many important things besides equality, and that many dimensions of human affairs are improperly appraised from a relational or comparative point of view. The fact that a relational or comparative point of view is sometimes out of place, however, surely does not mean that it always is. I conclude with the suggestion that egalitarianism is most compelling when it is understood as a normative conception of social relations (rather than, as Frankfurt seems to assume throughout his book, a thesis about the equal distribution of something) and thus presides over precisely those aspects of human affairs for which that relational or comparative point of view is germane.     

Indigenous reconciliation in Australia: do values,identity and collective guilt matter?

This paper reports an investigation of the impact of shared values and identities on Australian attitudes towards Indigenous reconciliation across two studies. In Study 1, University students were assigned to one of two conditions in which they completed a questionnaire that measured their value priorities and reconciliation attitudes; either as an individual or as an Australian. As expected, the value of egalitarianism was the strongest predictor of reconciliation attitudes, especially under the Australian condition. In Study 2, participants from the general community were assigned into conditions that manipulated identity (personal vs. Australian) and views of how Indigenous Australians have been treated by Europeans in the past (favourable vs. unfavourable). Under these conditions, participants were asked to report their level of collective guilt and reconciliation views. The results showed that collective guilt was stronger under the unfavourable than the favourable history condition but only when personal identity was salient. The findings also showed some support for the proposition that reconciliation views would be most positive under the unfavourable history condition when Australian identity was salient. The implications of the findings for advancing the progress of indigenous reconciliation in Australia are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Equality: A Continuing Dialogue

We reply to discussions of Equality: From Theory to Action by Harry Brighouse, Joanne Conaghan, Cillian McBride and Stuart White. We find many of their points helpful and treat them as a useful contribution to a continuing dialogue on egalitarianism.     

Too Few Tensions, But Not Enough Utopia? Comments on Equality: From Theory to Action

This welcomes Equality: From Theory to Action as an important contribution both to linking egalitarian political philosophy to public policy and as a book which helps communicate a wealth of philosophical ideas in an accessible way to a wide public. On the critical side, it argues that the authors understate some tensions between egalitarianism and pluralism, and that the book’s discussion of egalitarian economic institutions is quite narrow in scope. As a complement and development of this latter discussion, the paper discusses some policy proposals to address inequality of wealth.