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Inheritance and Hypothetical InsuranceIn Wil Waluchow & Stefan Sciaraffa (eds.), The Legacy of Ronald Dworkin, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This chapter examines Ronald Dworkin’s treatment of inherited wealth. Dworkin’s contentions are that the goal of restricting bequests is to prevent the formation of hierarchies of social class, and this goal can be pursued through a progressive estate tax. This chapter seeks to support Dworkin’s commitment to the diagnostic significance of class injustice, but finds problems with his attempt to defend progressive estate taxation as a model of hypothetical insurance choices. After identifying var…Read more
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11Population Aging and the Retirement AgeJournal of Applied Philosophy. forthcoming.Numerous jurisdictions have recently raised the age of retirement or plan to do so. Pressure to extend people's working lives is due to population aging, which makes it harder to fund retirement through existing methods. Raising the retirement age can improve the ‘dependency ratio’ by increasing the fraction of the population that works (and pays taxes) relative to the fraction retired. This article gives sustained attention to connecting the case for retirement with one view about wellbeing, ac…Read more
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24Justice and HousingPhilosophy Compass 19 (3). 2024.This article surveys various topics that link questions about housing with considerations of economic justice. Housing has received increasing attention from philosophers within the last decade. In political philosophy, some aspects of a topic attract more attention than others. Presently, philosophical reflection focuses on the value of a home; homelessness; gentrification; segregation; and spatial justice, with a substantial body of literature developing on these interconnected themes. We high…Read more
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10Solving Social Dilemmas: Ethics, Politics and Prosperity, Roger Congleton. Oxford University Press, 2022, xvi + 451 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 1-6. forthcoming.
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7Inheritance and the Right to Bequeath: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)Routledge. 2022.In every Western democracy today, inheritances have a very profound influence on people’s lives. This motivates renewed scholarship on inheritance law by philosophy and the legal sciences. The present volume aims to contribute to some ongoing areas of inquiry while also filling some gaps in research. It is organized in a highly interdisciplinary way. In the thirteen chapters of the book, written by outstanding philosophers and legal scholars, the following questions, among others, are discussed:…Read more
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5Review of Juliana Bidadanure’s Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021, xi + 238 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 15 (2). 2022.
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91Positional Goods and Upstream AgencyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2): 279-293. 2020.Philosophical discussions of positional goods typically focus on parties competing for shares of such goods and on the inequalities among them that both shape and arise from these competitions. Les...
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33Positional Consumption and the Wedding IndustrySocial Theory and Practice 47 (4): 747-764. 2021.Recent decades have seen substantial increases in the average amount of money spent on wedding ceremonies in economically developed countries. This article develops an account of wedding expenditure as a form of positional competition where participation involves purchasing services in a market. The main emphasis is on the role that conspicuously expensive weddings can play in enabling certain kinds of signalling, most notably the signalling of commitment to a personal relationship and a distinc…Read more
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5Inheritance and the Right to Bequeath: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)Routledge. 2022.This book addresses the nature, social function, ethics and politics of the right to bequeath.
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712What are the obligations of pharmaceutical companies in a global health emergency?Lancet 398 (10304): 1015. 2021.All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including…Read more
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45On the Ethics of Vaccine Nationalism: The Case for the Fair Priority for Residents FrameworkEthics and International Affairs 35 (4): 543-562. 2021.COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be scarce for years to come. Many countries, from India to the U.K., have demonstrated vaccine nationalism. What are the ethical limits to this vaccine nationalism? Neither extreme nationalism nor extreme cosmopolitanism is ethically justifiable. Instead, we propose the fair priority for residents framework, in which governments can retain COVID-19 vaccine doses for their residents only to the extent that they are needed to maintain a noncrisis level of mortality …Read more
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60On the (mis)classification of paid labor: When should gig workers have employee status?Politics, Philosophy and Economics 20 (3): 229-250. 2021.The emergence of so-called ‘gig work’, particularly that sold through digital platforms accessed through smartphone apps, has led to disputes about the proper classification of workers: Should platform workers be classified as independent contractors (as platforms typically insist), or as employees of the platforms through which they sell labor (as workers often claim)? Such disputes have urgency due to the way in which employee status is necessary to access certain benefits such as a minimum wa…Read more
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26If You’re a Classical Liberal, How Come You’re Also an Egalitarian? A Theory of Rule Egalitarianism. Åsbjørn Melkevik, 2020 London, Palgrave MacMillan. 306 pp, £88.49 (hb), £55.60 (review)Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (4): 719-721. 2021.Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
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14Keeping justice (largely) out of charity: Pluralism and the division of labor between charitable organizations and the stateLegal Theory 26 (4): 281-304. 2020.Justice can be pursued by the state, or through voluntary charity. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the appropriate division of labor between government and charitable agencies by developing a positive account of the charity sector's moral foundations. The account given here is grounded in a legal conception of charity, as a set of subsidies and privileges designed to cultivate a wide variety of activities aimed at enhancing civic virtue and autonomy. Among other things, this i…Read more
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6EditorialIntergenerational Justice Review 6 (2). 2020.The intergenerational transfer of wealth and property attracts a fair amount of controversy. According to some, inheritance is a source of arbitrary material inequality. When some inherit and others do not, the resulting inequalities are apparently due to differences in luck or circumstance. Inequalities of this sort may be harder to justify than those owed to differences in the life choices or levels of effort, such as the sorts of inequalities that might arise in a properly meritocratic labour…Read more
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1834An ethical framework for global vaccine allocationScience 1. 2020.In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, s…Read more
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34The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation, Abraham Singer. Oxford University Press, 2019, xii + 296 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 36 (3): 465-471. 2020.
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33The Ethics of Capitalism: An IntroductionOup Usa. 2020.This is an undergraduate-level textbook that introduces classical political philosophy as a framework to evaluate the ethics of capitalism up to the present day. It is rooted in historical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century defenses of capitalism, as written by key proponents such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, and applies these arguments to contemporary issues such as wage inequality, global trade, climate change, and the welfare state. The authors aim to engage students in debating the et…Read more
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26Economic Rent, Rent-Seeking Behavior, and the Case of Privatized IncarcerationIn David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 455-467. 2018.The concept of economic rent is among the oldest in political economy. This reflects the fact that economies have always included parties whose income appears more parasitic than productive. The concept of rent-seeking refers to the efforts of parties seeking to secure such income by way of gaining influence over economic regulation or otherwise gaining favors from government. In spite of its intuitiveness, however, it has proven difficult to precisely distinguish rent from other categories of i…Read more
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11Review of Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage’s Taxing the Rich: a History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 288 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 10 (2): 96-102. 2017.
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69Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to BequeathOxford University Press. 2018.Daniel Halliday examines the morality of the right to bequeath or transfer wealth, and argues that inheritance is unjust to the extent that it enhances the intergenerational replication of inequality, concentrating opportunities in certain groups. He presents an egalitarian case for imposition of a significant inheritance tax.
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22Tobacco bans and smokers’ autonomyJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (5): 303-304. 2016.Should tobacco be banned? The answer depends largely on two further questions. How much are smokers benefitted by being made to stop, or to not start? And what is the moral cost of their being made to stop by their government, as opposed to stopping due to the influence of policies that fall short of coercion? Grill and Voigt provide one answer to the first question. They argue that the benefits of cessation are high enough to justify a ban on tobacco products.1 I partly agree: I share their vie…Read more
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4Replies to Shein, Voigt and ChapmanJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (5): 291-292. 2016.I'd like to thank all three commentators for their careful discussion of my proposals. I'll begin with David Shein, who makes two very important points. First, he raises the problem of black markets, which received only a passing mention in the original piece. Generally speaking, black markets can be expected to operate more readily, and on a larger scale, given opportunities for arbitrage: Much depends on how easy it is for illicit sellers to obtain the commodity at prices lower than those at w…Read more
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11What explains our intuitions about knowledge ascriptions?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (1): 377-386. 2005.
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43The ethics of a smoking licenceJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (5). 2016.In this paper, I am going to explore some of the moral considerations relating to smoking licences. And I shall offer a limited defence of licences as a replacement for sales tax on tobacco products. This defence will include some moral arguments in favour of one particular licence design over others.
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168Contextualism, comparatives and gradabilityPhilosophical Studies 132 (2). 2007.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 u…Read more
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158Justice and TaxationPhilosophy Compass 8 (12): 1111-1122. 2013.This article provides a survey of various topics in which questions about taxation feature alongside questions about justice. It seeks to argue mainly that taxation is a rather fragmentary domain of inquiry about which it is hard to envisage the development of views about what justice requires with respect to tax policy in general. Guided by this idea, the article attempts to highlight some aspects of taxation whose connection with justice has been under-explored by philosophers, as well as to a…Read more
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22What explains our intuitions about knowledge ascriptions&questProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (3): 393-402. 2005.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 …Read more