Daniel Halliday

ExtractPolitical liberals very often appeal to a so-called division of moral labour that separates the regulation of institutions from that of personal conduct. Probably the most famous statement of this idea is found in these remarks from John Rawls: The principles of justice for institutions must not be confused with the principles which apply to individuals and their actions in particular circumstances. These two kinds of principles apply to different subjects and must be discussed separately., p. 47) Kok-Chor Tan's excellent new book renews and extends the case for accepting some version of Rawls's view, which Tan calls the ‘institutional focus’ in distributive justice. If Tan is right, then the liberal focus on institutions is not only defensible in its own right, but also helps support further elements of egalitarian theorizing, including some that Rawlsians often reject. In particular, Tan believes that a focus on institutions helps secure a more plausible ‘luck egalitarian’ approach to distributive justice, and that it also supports a version of cosmopolitanism about global justice.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality, pp. ix + 208.Volume 25, Issue 1DANIEL HALLIDAY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000520Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality, pp. ix + 208.Volume 25, Issue 1DANIEL HALLIDAY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000520Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality, pp. ix + 208.Volume 25, Issue 1DANIEL HALLIDAY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000520Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission.

G.E. Moore’s principle of organic unity holds that the intrinsic value of a whole may differ from the sum of the intrinsic values of its parts. Moore combined this principle with invariabilism about intrinsic value: An item’s intrinsic value depends solely on its bearer’s intrinsic properties, not on which wholes it has membership of. It is often said that invariabilism ought to be rejected in favour of what might be called ‘conditionalism’ about intrinsic value. This paper is an attempt to show how invariabilism might be filled out in ways that allow its proponents to answer their conditionalist opponents. The main point consists in identifying how some amount of extrinsic part-value may contribute to whole-value that is nevertheless intrinsic. This enables an invariabilist to explain how the intrinsic value of a whole may differ from the sum of its intrinsic part-values, without abandoning the Moorean doctrine that intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties (the proposal is nevertheless consistent with the view that invariabilist and conditionalist accounts might exist side by side). I finish with a brief explanation of how the main proposal could help construct invariabilist accounts of particular organic unities, looking beyond the more general argument they have with conditionalists.

This paper examines a rarely-discussed argument for the right to bequeath wealth. This argument, popular among libertarians, asserts that opposition to the practice of inheritance is prone to over-generalize, such that opponents of inheritance cannot avoid condemning other uses of private property, like gift-giving. The argument is motivated by an interesting methodological claim, namely, that the morality of bequest ought to be evaluated from the perspective of the donor, and not evaluated in ways that invoke the effects of bequest on the distribution of wealth. This paper argues that this donor-centric approach ultimately favors restricting the right of bequest. Specifically, I maintain that bequest generally carries a lower opportunity cost than other uses of property. Accordingly, inheritance tax is less coercive than other taxes, and bequest is less obviously as generous an act as gift giving. While the arguments made here will encourage traditional opponents of inheritance (such as egalitarians), I also suggest why they might be welcomed by at least some types of libertarian

Epistemological contextualism is often defended by appealing to the context sensitivity of our intuitions about knowledge ascriptions. A popular invariantist response is to explain this feature by an appeal to pragmatic implicature. In this paper I argue that this rejoinder faces a hitherto underestimated problem relating to the fact that such supposed implicatures do not appear cancellable, contrary to what we should expect. I defend contextualism by demonstrating that the current invariantist explanation of this lack of cancellability is unsuccessful, owing to a failure to appreciate the diversity of circumstances in which knowledge ascriptions may be used

Contextualists about knowledge ascriptions perceive an analogy between the semantics they posit for “know(s)” and the semantics of comparative terms like “tall” and “flat”. Jason Stanley has recently raised a number of objections to this view. This paper offers a response by way of an alternative analogy with modified comparatives, which resolves most of Stanley’s objections. Rather than being ad hoc, this new analogy in fact fits better with platitudes about knowledge and facilitates a better understanding of the semantics of gradability, such that an explanation of most of Stanley’s disanalogies becomes available. In addition, I argue that there are reasons to doubt Stanley’s claim that “knows(s)” cannot switch its content within a discourse, due to what may happen when we ascribe knowledge of more than one proposition.