•  12
    Justice and Housing
    Philosophy 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
  •  25
    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
  •  50
    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.
  •  1
    Inheritance and the Right to Bequeath: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)
    with Schmidt am Busch Hans-Christoph and Gutmann Thomas
    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
  •  73
    Positional Goods and Upstream Agency
    Australasian 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...
  •  104
    Private education, positional goods, and the arms race problem
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 15 (2): 150-169. 2016.
    This article defends the view that markets in education need to be restricted, in light of the problem posed by what I call the ‘educational arms race’. Markets in education have a tendency to distort an important balance between education’s role as a gatekeeper – its ‘screening’ function – and its role in helping children develop as part of a preparation for adult life. This tendency is not merely a contingent fact about markets: It can be traced to ways in which education is a partly positiona…Read more
  •  35
    On 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
  •  11
    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
  •  4
    Inheritance and the Right to Bequeath: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)
    with Schmidt am Busch Hans-Christoph and Gutmann Thomas
    Routledge. 2022.
    This book addresses the nature, social function, ethics and politics of the right to bequeath.
  •  1
    Book Review (review)
    Law and Philosophy 42 (1): 87-92. 2023.
  •  36
    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
  •  6
    Editorial
    Intergenerational 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
  •  16
    Economic Rent, Rent-Seeking Behavior, and the Case of Privatized Incarceration
    In David Boonin, Katrina L. Sifferd, Tyler K. Fagan, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Michael Huemer, Daniel Wodak, Derk Pereboom, Stephen J. Morse, Sarah Tyson, Mark Zelcer, Garrett VanPelt, Devin Casey, Philip E. Devine, David K. Chan, Maarten Boudry, Christopher Freiman, Hrishikesh Joshi, Shelley Wilcox, Jason Brennan, Eric Wiland, Ryan Muldoon, Mark Alfano, Philip Robichaud, Kevin Timpe, David Livingstone Smith, Francis J. Beckwith, Dan Hooley, Russell Blackford, John Corvino, Corey McCall, Dan Demetriou, Ajume Wingo, Michael Shermer, Ole Martin Moen, Aksel Braanen Sterri, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Jeppe von Platz, John Thrasher, Mary Hawkesworth, William MacAskill, Daniel Halliday, Janine O’Flynn, Yoaav Isaacs, Jason Iuliano, Claire Pickard, Arvin M. Gouw, Tina Rulli, Justin Caouette, Allen Habib, Brian D. Earp & Andrew Vierra (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Springer Verlag. 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
  •  3
    Replies to Shein, Voigt and Chapman
    Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (5): 291-292. 2016.
  •  14
    Tobacco bans and smokers’ autonomy
    Journal 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
  •  9
    What explains our intuitions about knowledge ascriptions?
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (1): 377-386. 2005.
  •  146
    Justice and Taxation
    Philosophy 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
  •  128
    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…Read more
  •  72
    Holism about value: some help for invariabilists
    Philosophical Studies 165 (3): 1033-1046. 2013.
    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…Read more
  •  40
    The ethics of a smoking licence
    Journal 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.
  •  90
    Is Inheritance Morally Distinctive?
    Law and Philosophy 32 (5): 619-644. 2013.
    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 w…Read more
  •  61
    What explains our intuitions about knowledge ascriptions&quest
    Proceedings 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
  •  159
    Contextualism, comparatives and gradability
    Philosophical 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