Gottfried Schweiger

This paper is based on the assumption that the high incomes of some professional sports athletes, such as players in professional leagues in the United States and Europe, pose an ethical problem of social justice. I deal with the questions of what should follow from this evaluation and in which ways those incomes should be regulated. I discuss three different options: a) the idea that the incomes of professional athletes should be limited, b) the idea that they should be vastly taxed by the state, and c) the idea that there is a moral obligation for the athletes to spend portions of their incomes on good causes. I will conclude that in today’s circumstances there are good reasons to advocate both option one (limitation) and option two (taxation), but that priority should be given to taxation.

In this paper I explore the philosophical debate about poverty. Although there is a significant amount of philosophical research on poverty – especially on world wide and absolute poverty – there is little reflection on what philosophical poverty research could be as a distinct research agenda and also little reflection on certain questions regarding the concept and normative evaluation of poverty. Here, I explore two important questions: What is poverty, which relates to conceptual issues and the definition of poverty. How can poverty be evaluated, which brings forward the normative substance of poverty and its special relation to morality and ethics. In the last section I conclude with further remarks on such a philosophy of poverty.