Priority and position

Positional goods are goods whose relative amount determines their absolute value. Many goods appear to have positional aspects. For example, one’s relative standing in the distribution of education and wealth may determine one’s absolute condition with respect to goods like employment opportunities, self-respect, and social inclusion. Positional goods feature in recent arguments from T.M. Scanlon, Brian Barry, and Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift that assert that we should favor egalitarian distributions of positional goods even if we reject equality as a fundamental principle of distributive justice. With respect to positional goods, worsening the better off is required to better the worse off. Thus, we have reason to “level down” goods such as education and wealth in order to benefit those worse off with respect to the value of those goods. I argue that the allegedly positional aspects of the goods in question are not actually positional. Moreover, leveling down these goods risks self-defeat: it may produce a net decrease in the value of the shares of individuals with less of such goods. If so, leveling down measures would fail on their own terms.     

Analogical Arguments for Egalitarianism

Egalitarians sometimes analogize socioeconomic opportunities to starting gates, playing fields, and the results of a lottery. A fair game is one in which all have an equal opportunity to succeed; egalitarians propose that the same is true of a fair society. A second type of argument for egalitarianism appeals to intuitions about the distribution of found resources. A just division of manna discovered on a strange planet seems to be an equal one. Both types of argument share a crucial feature: they concern the once‐off division of a fixed sum of goods. I argue that the most compelling reasons to depart from an equal division of goods derive from the economic activity involved in producing more of those goods, e.g., Pareto improvements due to efficiency gains that result from incentives that encourage production. We cannot conclude that game analogies and found resources cases arbitrate in favour of equality against non‐egalitarian principles because they exclude precisely those considerations that provide the strongest reasons to reject equality.     

Why Be Immoral?

Developing themes in the work of Thomas Hill, I argue that servility is an underappreciated but pervasive reason for moral transgression. Recognizing servility as a basic cause of immorality obliges us to reconsider questions about the rationality of morality. Traditional answers to the problem of the immoralist, which tend to be stated in terms of enlightened self-interest, fail to properly engage the problems posed by 'servile immorality.' In response to these problems, I develop a Humean version of a traditionally Kantian strategy for substantiating the rationality of morality: (i.e.) agents' conceptions of themselves commit them to accepting morality's authority. Servile behavior implies cognitive dissonance, which can restructure or dissolve those particular desires, beliefs, and projects that constitute agents' most highly valued contingent conceptions of themselves. I conclude that agents have reason to abstain from servility even on a parsimonious Humean account of practical reasons.     

From Semantic Games to Provability: The Case of Gödel Logic

Studia Logica - We present a semantic game for Gödel logic and its extensions, where the players’ interaction stepwise reduces arbitrary claims about the relative order of truth degrees...     

Moral philosophy's moral risk

Commonsense moral thinking holds that people have doxastic, contemplative, and expressive duties, that is, duties to or not to believe, seriously consider, and express certain ideas. This paper argues that moral and political philosophers face a high risk of violating any such duties, both because of the sensitivity and difficult of the subject matter, and because of various pernicious biases and influences philosophers face. We argue this leads to a dilemma, which we will not try to solve. Either philosophers should reduce their risk by avoiding sensitive issues where they are likely to violate such duties or, for one reason or another, philosophers are to some degree exempt from such duties when doing their work. Either horn of the dilemma, we argue, has unpalatable implications.     

Cosmopolitanism Within Borders: On Behalf of Charter Cities

Economist Paul Romer proposes the establishment of charter cities. Charter cities would resemble special economic zones; that is, small regions that experiment with economic rules that differ from those governing their larger ‘host’ countries. Yet unlike a special economic zone, a charter city would also experiment with its own legal and political rules. The rules, in turn, can be enforced by a third‐party coalition of representatives of foreign countries that enforce these rules at home. Host countries that face problems of economic stagnation or political instability can thus leverage the experience and credibility of ‘guarantor’ countries to gradually reform their own institutions. I defend charter cities as an instrument of cosmopolitan justice in nonideal global conditions. Contributing to efforts to establish charter cities is, in many cases, a more efficient use of a country's scarce resources than foreign aid or attempts to facilitate institutional change abroad. I argue that countries also have a moral reason to contribute to charter cities: they can serve as compensation for the coercive harms due to those countries' border closures. I conclude that cosmopolitans and nationalists can find common ground in their reasons to support the establishment of charter cities.