Mark LeBar

Kant’s moral theory is sometimes thought to mandate public welfare provision on grounds of beneficence or Kant’s commitment to freedom. However, at no point does Kant argue for welfare in these ways. Instead, the rationale he offers is that public welfare provision is instrumentally necessary for the security and the stability of the state. I argue that this is no oversight on Kant’s part. I consider plausible alternative arguments for public welfare provision, and show why Kant does not espouse them. I conclude that the only viable Kantian justification for welfare is just the one Kant gives.

In “Two-Level Eudaimonism and Second-Personal Reasons,” Bradford Cokelet argues that we should reject one strategy—one I advanced earlier in this journal—for reconciling a virtue-ethical theoretical framework with that part of our moral experience that has been described as second-personal reasons. Cokelet frames a number of related objections to that strategy, and his concerns are worth taking up. Addressing them provides an opportunity both to revisit and develop the model bruited in my earlier article and to gain additional insight into second-personal reasons and associated relations of accountability

No Abs Richard Kraut’s What is Good and Why is a development and defense of devel-opmentalism. But Kraut’s approach renders problematic the relationship between good-for and reasons for action. One consequence is uncertainty as to how exactly anybody’s good becomes reason-giving for us, given that there is no immediate connection between anyone’s good and reasons for action. A further problem can be seen in trying to identify a basis for thinking we are beings entitled to respect. Finally, Kraut’s work leaves unexplicated the “matching relation” he says holds between a living being and what is good for it.tract

If ever there were a time in which concerns about equality as a primary issue for social policy disappeared from public view, now is not that time. Recent work in economics on inequality has climbed to the top of best-sellers lists, and the issue was a major talking point in American midterm elections in 2014. The sheer bewildering volume of scholarship and discussion of equality makes it difficult to distinguish signal from noise. What, of all that we know about ways in which we are equal and ways in which we are unequal, matters? If, as seems plausible, we neither are nor should desire to be equal in every respect that we could in theory be equal, in which ways ought we to care about being equal? Does the kind of equality of outcome — perhaps equality of income or wealth — that is frequently the focus of discussion matter most? Does opportunity matter more? What about less material forms of equality such as equality of status, or power, or authority? How do these various forms of equality interact with each other? The essays in this volume represent the work of a number of leading scholars from different disciplines on these questions. Drawing on sources in philosophical analysis, empirical science, and history, they sort through competing claims and counterclaims about the intuitions that drive our concern for equality. Their conclusions are not in unison, but nonetheless represent important advances in our attempts to grapple with this crucial social value.