Martin O'Neill

This article seeks to defend prioritarianism against a pair of challenges from Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve. Otsuka and Voorhoeve first argue that prioritarianism makes implausible recommendations in one-person cases under conditions of risk, as it fails to allow that it is reasonable to act to maximize expected utility, rather than expected weighted benefits, in such cases. I show that, in response, prioritarians can either reject Otsuka and Voorhoeve's claim, by means of appealing to a distinction between personal and impersonal value, or alternatively they can harmlessly accommodate it, by means of appealing to the status of prioritarianism as a view about the moral value of outcomes, rather than as an account of all-things-considered reasonable action. Otsuka and Voorhoeve secondly claim that prioritarianism fails to explain a divergence in our considered moral judgement between one-person and many-person cases. I show that the prioritarian has two alternative, and independently plausible, lines of response to this charge, one more concessive and the other more unyielding. Hence, neither of Otsuka and Voorhoeve's challenges need seriously trouble the prioritarian

If solutions to the problem of inequality are to be as radical as reality now demands, what is instead required is a reimagining of what would be involved comprehensively to tame capitalism through democratic means. This will involve much further development of the kind of plurality of institutional and policy proposals sketched by Meade, and will involve both the private and public – individual and collective – forms of capital predistribution that Meade advocated. Piketty, like Meade, sees the need for both redistribution and predistribution, and both see that the institutional means necessary to create a more equal society will involve pursuing a plurality of parallel paths. It is closely in keeping with the spirit of Piketty’s Capital that the political and intellectual agenda ahead will be one that economics on its own cannot hope to encompass. It’s a vital agenda, with high stakes, and presents challenges to both academic researchers and political activists. On the success of this endeavour depends nothing less than the prospects for legitimate continuation of our economic system.

What would be a fair model for flood insurance? Catastrophic flooding has become increasingly frequent in the UK and, with climate change, is likely to become even more frequent in the future. With the UK's current flood insurance regime ending in 2013, we argues that: - there is an overwhelming case for rejecting a free market in flood insurance after 2013; - this market-based approach threatens to leave many thousands of properties uninsurable, leading to extensive social blight; - there are a number of possible flood insurance models that would be fairer and more sustainable. We outline three approaches to 'fairness' in flood insurance, and argues that the second and third of these would be the most 'solidaristic' – i.e. those at lower risk of flooding would contribute to the support of people at higher risk: 'pure actuarial fairness' – insurance costs directly reflect the level of risk faced by individuals; 'choice-sensitive fairness' – insurance costs should reflect only those risks that result from each individual's choices; 'fairness as social justice' – insurance should be provided independently of individuals' risks and choices when covering basic requirements of social justice.

If pursued with serious intent, Pre-distribution has the capacity to create an exciting and radical new agenda for social democracy. But the politics of Pre-distribution cannot be innocuous or uncontroversial. In its more radical forms, predistribution is a potentially radical and inspiring project for social democrats who have come to see the limitations of the old ways of doing things. It’s a project that promises a strategy to deliver abundantly on values of social justice, economic freedom, and equality of opportunity. But it’s a project that involves going head-to-head with entrenched interests, breaking up existing concentrations of wealth and economic power. The politics of Pre-distribution, if taken seriously, simply cannot be a politics without enemies. Labour must decide whether its engagement with pre-distribution is to be limited to tinkering at the edges of neoliberalism, or whether it will instead fully embrace the opportunities of the present moment, decide to be radical, and realise the full promise of the politics of predistribution.

The focus of this article is on the place of the limited-liability joint stock corporation in a satisfactory account of social justice and, more specifically, the question of how such corporations should be regulated and taxed in order to secure social justice. Most discussion in liberal political philosophy looks at state institutions, on the one hand, and individuals, on the other hand, without giving much attention to intermediate institutions such as corporations. This is in part a consequence of a certain degree of idealization in terms of the background model of society with which such theories operate. Intermediate institutions are in an important sense optional or discretionary, and one would be hampering an account of justice if it built-in from the start particular kinds of institutions which we could imagine doing without. The only non-state institution that has received adequate attention in political philosophy is the nuclear family, in part because of its pervasiveness and resilience. But the corporation is probably second only to the family in its significance, in terms of its effects on the lives of individuals, and yet has been left without adequate attention.

This review essay looks at two important recent books on the empirical social science of inequality, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level and John Hills et al .'s Towards a More Equal Society? , situating these books against the important work of Michael Marmot on epidemiology and health inequalities. I argue that political philosophy can gain a great deal from careful engagement with empirical research on the nature and consequences of inequality, especially in regard to empirical work on the relationship between socioeconomic inequality, status, self-respect, domination, autonomy, the quality of social relations, and societal health outcomes. The essay also raises some methodological questions about the approach taken by Wilkinson and Pickett, as well as questioning the ways in which their argument is (or is not) best understood as being fundamentally egalitarian in character. It concludes with some reflections, prompted by Hills et al ., on the lessons that should be learned by egalitarians from the experience of the Blair and Brown governments in the UK