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102How Much of What Matters Can We Redistribute? Love, Justice, and LuckHypatia 24 (4): 68-90. 2009.By meeting needs for individualized love and relatedness, the care we receive deeply shapes our social and economic chances and therefore represents a form of luck. Hence, distributive justice requires a fair distribution of care in society. I look at different ways of ensuring this and argue that full redistribution of care is beyond our reach. I conclude that a strong individual morality informed by an ethics of care is a necessary complement of well-designed institutions.
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1308The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (edited book)Routledge. 2018.Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life as it is a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source…Read more
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121The Role of Love in Animal EthicsHypatia 27 (3): 583-600. 2012.Philosophers working on animal ethics have focused, with good reason, on the wrongness of cruelty toward animals and of devaluing their lives. I argue that the theoretical resources of animal ethics are far from exhausted. Moreover, reflection on what makes animals ethically significant is relevant for thinking about the roots of morality and therefore about ethical relationships between human beings. I rely on a normative approach to animal ethics grounded in the importance of meeting needs in …Read more
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3440The Goods of Work (Other Than Money!)Journal of Social Philosophy 47 (1): 70-89. 2016.The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of excellence; 2) making a social cont…Read more
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1Review of Raymond Geuss History and Illusion in Politics (review)The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics 4 (2): 177-9. 2005.
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840Children's rights, parental agency and the case for non-coercive responses to care drainIn Diana Tietjens Meyers (ed.), Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights, Oxford University Press Usa. 2014.Worldwide, many impoverished parents migrate, leaving their children behind. As a result children are deprived of continuity in care and, sometimes, suffer from other forms of emotional and developmental harms. I explain why coercive responses to care drain are illegitimate and likely to be inefficient. Poor parents have a moral right to migrate without their children and restricting their migration would violate the human right to freedom of movement and create a new form of gender injustice. …Read more
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40Review of Cecile Fabre, Whose Body is It Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the Person (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (12). 2006.
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82Review of Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit Disadvantage (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 7 (1): 148-50. 2010.
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85The parental love argument against 'designing' babies: the harm in knowing that one has been selected or enhancedIn Ruth Chadwick, Mairi Levitt & Darren Shickle (eds.), The Right to Know and the Right Not to Know: Genetic Privacy and Responsibility, Cambridge University Press. pp. 151-164. 2014.In this chapter, I argue that children who were selected for particular traits or genetically enhanced might feel, for this reason, less securely, spontaneously and fairly loved by their parents, which would constitute significant harm. ‘Parents’ refers, throughout this chapter, to the people who perform the social function of rearing children, rather than to procreators. I rely on an understanding of adequate parental love which includes several characteristics: parents should not make children…Read more
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58The Ethics of Parenthood – By Norvin RichardsJournal of Applied Philosophy 28 (4): 416-419. 2011.
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1345Gender JusticeJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2): 1-24. 2012.I propose, defend and illustrate a principle of gender justice meant to capture the nature of a variety of injustices based on gender: A society is gender just only if the costs of a gender-neutral lifestyle are, all other things being equal, lower than, or at most equal to, the costs of gendered lifestyles. The principle is meant to account for the entire range of gender injustice: violence against women, economic and legal discrimination, domestic exploitation, the gendered division of labor a…Read more
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137Is the Family Uniquely Valuable?Ethics and Social Welfare 6 (2): 120-131. 2012.Family relationships are often believed to have a unique value; this is reflected both in the special expectations that family members have from each other and in the various ways in which states protect family relationships. Commitment appears to set apart family relationships from other close relationships; however, commitment is in fact present in other close relationships. I conclude that family relationships do not have any special value; love does. In the case of families with children, ho…Read more
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905Arguments for Nonparental Care for ChildrenSocial Theory and Practice 37 (3): 483-509. 2011.I review three existing arguments in favor of having some childcare done by nonparents and then I advance five arguments, most of them original, to the same conclusion. My arguments rely on the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. I discuss the importance of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children's structural vulnerability to their careg…Read more
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4329The Right to Parent One's Biological BabyJournal of Political Philosophy 20 (4): 432-455. 2011.This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing t…Read more
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2182The 'intrinsic goods of childhood' and the just societyIn Alexander Bagattini & Colin Macleod (eds.), The Nature of Children's Well-being: Theory and Practice, Springer. 2014.I distinguish between three different ideas that have been recently discussed under the heading of 'the intrinsic goods of childhood': that childhood is itself intrinsically valuable, that certain goods are valuable only for children, and that children are being owed other goods than adults. I then briefly defend the claim the childhood is intrinsically good. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis, and rejection, of the claim that certain goods are valuable only for children. This has …Read more
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384Solidarity, justice and unconditional access to healthcareJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (3): 177-181. 2017.Luck egalitarianism provides a reason to object to conditionality in health incentive programmes in some cases when conditionality undermines political values such as solidarity or inclusiveness. This is the case with incentive programmes that aim to restrict access to essential healthcare services. Such programmes undermine solidarity. Yet, most people's lives are objectively worse, in one respect, in non-solidary societies, because solidarity contributes both instrumentally and directly to ind…Read more
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747Children's Vulnerability and Legitimate Authority Over ChildrenJournal of Applied Philosophy 60-75. 2018.Children's vulnerability gives rise to duties of justice towards children and determines when authority over them is legitimately exercised. I argue for two claims. First, children's general vulnerability to objectionable dependency on their caregivers entails that they have a right not to be subject to monopolies of care, and therefore determines the structure of legitimate authority over them. Second, children's vulnerability to the loss of some special goods of childhood determines the conten…Read more
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1Review of Eva Feder Kittay Love's Labor (review)The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics 5 (1): 173-7. 2005.
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173Equality-Promoting Parental LeaveJournal of Social Philosophy 42 (2): 173-191. 2011.In this paper we provide a critical discussion of how the most progressive parental leave policies are doing with respect to three goods which we identify as essential for liberal egalitarian feminists interested in parental leaves: the good of parental care, the good of gender fairness, and the good of individual choice. Then we offer our own model, based on the power of defaults, which promotes the goods of parental care and gender justice by sacrificing as little as possible of the good of in…Read more