Daniel Halliday

Demographic aging has only recently begun to occupy the attention of political philosophers. Existing work on the topic, though valuable, has tended to focus on one or another specific problem emerging from, or exacerbated by, the trend towards aging societies. Such work has typically relied on a cursory and limited understanding of exactly what demographic aging is. Demographic aging is, however, a rather complex phenomenon that can occur in different forms, according to variations in which factors are dominant. Greater attention to such complexity would be beneficial. This paper aims to provide a primer for future work by, first, highlighting some of the complexities within demographic aging and identifying how they align with various issues of distributive justice. A distinction is then emphasized between optimal population size and the problem of managing the transition from a larger to smaller population size. The later parts of the paper then explore ways in which demographic aging creates or exacerbates inequalities both across birth cohorts and within birth cohorts, before concluding with some comments on principles of intergenerational savings.

It is often thought that compulsory retirement funding gains support from paternalistic considerations. This paper examines this claim. I argue that compulsory retirement funding is more coherent when understood as an attempt at temporal smoothing than counterfactual insurance. An implication is that any paternalistic case for retirement funding faces problems that are more severe than they would be if compulsory retirement funding were insurance. I label these the problems of ‘inverted bias’ and of the ‘arbitrariness of income from labour’. The paper then makes some suggestions about how these points about paternalism bear on the problem of justice in retirement funding.

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 while they are implementing reasonable public health interventions. Practically, a noncrisis level of mortality is that experienced during a bad influenza season, which society considers an acceptable background risk. Governments take action to limit mortality from influenza, but there is no emergency that includes severe lockdowns. This “flu-risk standard” is a nonarbitrary and generally accepted heuristic. Mortality above the flu-risk standard justifies greater governmental interventions, including retaining vaccines for a country's own citizens over global need. The precise level of vaccination needed to meet the flu-risk standard will depend upon empirical factors related to the pandemic. This links the ethical principles to the scientific data emerging from the emergency. Thus, the FPR framework recognizes that governments should prioritize procuring vaccines for their country when doing so is necessary to reduce mortality to noncrisis flu-like levels. But after that, a government is obligated to do its part to share vaccines to reduce risks of mortality for people in other countries. We consider and reject objections to the FPR framework based on a country: having developed a vaccine, raising taxes to pay for vaccine research and purchase, wanting to eliminate economic and social burdens, and being ineffective in combating COVID-19 through public health interventions.

In Organizations as Wrongdoers, Stephanie Collins maintains that shareholders are members, and parts, of organizations. As such, they stand to be implicated in organizational wrongdoing. In this paper, I suggest that there are alternative ways of making sense of how shareholders (sometimes) incur moral obligations in light of wrongdoing by companies in which they own shares. Such obligations can be seen as implications of shareholders having property rights in companies (despite legal protections of limited liability) and implications of plausible general principles about the morality of benefitting from injustice. Neither of these approaches require treating shareholders as being parts or members of companies. I then present some independent reasons for doubting whether shareholders really stand in membership or parthood relationships to firms in which they own shares. This depends on some reconstruction of more abstract claims Collins makes about parts “realizing a structure” of a whole, and how exactly the ideas of parthood and membership make for distinct (if coextensive) concepts. Finally, I argue that if shareholders must count as members of firms, then so too must some other agents that Collins wants to treat as nonmembers, such as self-employed contractors.

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 various difficulties with Dworkin’s actual approach, the paper ends on a more positive note: Dworkin’s concern to address class hierarchies can be adapted so that an inheritance tax gains support from the various principles that make up the liberty/constraint system in chapter three of Sovereign Virtue, principles which work alongside the envy test and hypothetical insurance approach.

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, according to which old age is subject to distinctive goods. The importance of being able to access these goods in old age favours an eventual exit from labour market participation that retirement provisions enable. This view is stronger than one that treats retirement as merely a safety net to enable people to stop work only when advanced aging makes it unreasonably burdensome. At the same time, the view likely does not justify status quo retirement ages, meaning that some increase to the retirement age might be defensible. The article also seeks to illuminate ways in which different aspects of population aging – in particular the distinction between dependency ratios and inequalities in longevity – bear differently on the wider debate about justice and retirement.

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 highlight some of the recent contributions to the field of housing justice while also identifying areas that have received less attention. Specifically, we emphasize the importance of further philosophical exploration into how macroeconomic factors, like fiscal and monetary policy, impact housing justice. Additionally, we advocate for normative approaches that underscore justice issues not readily addressed by frameworks prioritizing human flourishing or relational equality.

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 ethics of economic systems-specifically capitalism, socialism, and feudalism-and whether various contemporary economic injustices can be interpreted as legacy of each system. There are also study questions at the end of each chapter and an author-created companion website.

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: What is the nature of the right to bequeath? What are the social functions of bequest and inheritance? What arguments concerning justice have philosophers and legal scholars advanced in favour or against practices of bequest and inheritance? How should we think about taxing the wealth transfers that occur in bequest and inheritance? In discussing these questions, the authors break new ground and offer much needed insight into several related domains, such as the philosophy of law; legal theory; general and applied ethics; social and political philosophy; theories of justice; and the history of legal, political, and economic thought. This book will be of great interest to scholars in these areas as well as policy-makers.

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 positional good and how markets respond to demand for positional goods over non-positional goods. The problem with arms races is that they allow markets to facilitate wider use of defection in a collective action problem. Using these claims, I argue that markets in education have a distinctive tendency to become objectionably exploitative. I conclude by applying some of my conclusions to illuminate various egalitarian claims about justice in education

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 wage, sick pay, and so on. In addition, classification disputes have philosophical significance because their resolution requires some foundational account of why the law should make a distinction between employed and freelance workers in the first place. This paper aims to fill this foundational gap. Central to it is the idea that employment involves a worker ceding certain freedoms in return for a degree of security, at least with respect to income. Insofar as the misclassification objection has force against digital platforms, it is when a platform is attempting to have it both ways: Workers are giving up freedom but not being granted a proportionate increase in security. As I shall explain, this approach offers some flexibility as to how actual disputes might be resolved – justice may be indifferent between whether platforms offer greater security or permit workers greater freedom, provided they do at least one of these things.

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 implies that a charity sector oriented largely around the pursuit of justice will come at a moral cost to a liberal society, at least when the state is in a position to take the greater share of the responsibility. So, a positive account of charity provides at least a pro tanto reason for preferring a division of labor in which the state takes a greater share of the responsibility for pursuing justice. As well as developing and defending this conception in its own right, we apply it in offering some criticisms and enhancements of existing views about the division of labor.

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 market. A slightly different, though perhaps complementary view is that the practice of inheritance may, over time, be among the factors maintaining an objectionable class hierarchy. Again, such hierarchies might not be so profound in a society where all incomes were due to individuals’ own efforts. On the other hand, there are reasons to defend intergenerational wealth transfers as a means through which families can retain important assets, like a cherished home, and so that parents can exercise a degree of partiality towards their offspring or other chosen recipients. And then there is the long-standing idea that part of what it means to own something in the first place is to have the power to transfer it to someone else. Current trends suggest that, independent of any moral analysis, the prospects of receiving an inheritance are becoming an increasingly significant determinant of people’s material prospects. This is in part due to the stagnation of earnings from labour, increased life expectancy and cost of aged care, and the increased cost of homeownership for young adults. These facts also remind us that while the study of inherited wealth owes much of its motivation to a concern to work out the degree to which it is compatible with justice, much can be learned from an interdisciplinary approach in which the tools of political philosophy are combined with those of the social sciences. A comprehensive assessment of the place of inheritance in society will draw on some appreciation of such things as how much intergenerational transfers actually increase or decrease wealth inequality over time, the age at which people inherit and the impact it actually has on their lives, and the importance of a right to bequest in shaping the financial planning of older members of society. Similarly, proposals to tax or otherwise regulate inheritance need to be assessed not just in light of these background facts but in terms of what sort of legal reforms are defensible, how the relevant political narratives seem to evolve, and any likely impact on incentives in the jurisdiction in question. This issue comprises three pieces that each offer contributions to an interdisciplinary approach to inherited wealth. In the first piece, Martin Eriksson, Asa Gunnarson and Ann Mumford develop a comparative analysis of the history of inheritance taxation in the United Kingdom and Sweden, with some emphasis on recent trends. As they note, it may come as a surprise to some readers that, of the two, it is only Britain that still has any form of estate tax, with Sweden having abolished its inheritance tax early this century. Here the authors argue that the Swedish abolition of the tax owes much to the way in which “the identity of the figurative taxpayer” has played a different role in the political narratives around inheritance taxation in both countries. They argue that inheritance taxes are inherently fragile. If this view is right, then both the abolition in Britain and the reinstatement in Sweden could happen in the future. The second article in this issue, from Johannes Stößel, Julian Schneidereit and Sonja Stockburger, focuses on intergenerational capital transfers in Germany. Central to the focus in this article is the constitutional provision in Germany for the protection of family-owned businesses. They emphasise that any legislation, including tax legislation, is bound by the constitutional order and subject to the decisions of the rulings of the constitutional court. The rationale for such protection is that an inheritance tax could result in the demise of family businesses when there is insufficient liquidity to pay the tax. The authors argue, however, that the continued existence of transferred enterprises could be secured with a lower level of preferential treatment than is currently the case. Finally, the third article, from Lukas Brenner and Oscar Stolper, studies the relationship between the receipt of intergenerational transfers and the recipient’s private pension savings. Again, the focus is on Germany. Examination of data reveals that there is a sizeable difference in private pension savings between persons who inherit non-trivial fortunes and persons who inherit little or nothing. This suggests, in turn, that inheritance is a major factor in accounting for inequality among the retired segment of the population, something which ought to be of greater concern to political philosophers. The article makes an important contribution to the study of inequalities among people of post-retirement age. Such inequalities have typically been overlooked in political philosophy. The contributions to this issue of the Intergenerational Justice Review represent the sort of work that can enhance the broader study of inherited wealth as a problem of distributive and intergenerational justice, but one where there is much to be learned from attention to the sort of details discussed in these articles. Daniel Halliday, Guest Editor

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 income. This chapter seeks to acquaint readers with this problem. The privatization of incarceration is then supplied as an important case study in current rent-seeking behavior.

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 which they can sell it on, given what other costs they incur in the process, such as those associated with transportation and storage. (Opportunities for arbitrage can be enhanced by certain ways of designing licences—see the discussion of Chapman's proposal below.) Shein is right to distinguish between a black market in actual tobacco products, and a black market in licences granting a legal right to purchase such products. As he points out, a market in stolen or forged licences would be likely to carry much lower storage and transportation costs than those associated with tobacco itself. This is an astute observation. But it would be hasty to assume that illegal trade in licences would be easy to get off the ground. Illicit selling would have to rely on forgery and/or the ability to modify licences so as to change the identity of their bearer. Accordingly, perhaps the best response to Shein's concern is that licence design can likely profit from ongoing progress in anticounterfeiting technology, such as that used to combat black markets in other documents that are intended to be non-transferable across users, such as passports. As these technologies continue to improve, it is likely that a black market in licences will become gradually less viable. Shein's second concern is more philosophical: As I acknowledged in …

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 view that the harms of tobacco consumption are great enough to justify at least some policies that force (rather than merely encourage) people to not smoke.i But the differences between policies of this sort are large enough that any general conclusion in favour of ‘a ban’ is incomplete.ii By not elaborating on what a ban might come to, Grill and Voigt leave the second question rather unaddressed. Of course, the authors hardly mean to say that anything goes when it comes to forming policies that force people to not smoke. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to build on their defence of the benefits of forced cessation by comparing different sorts of bans, and by comparing bans with other sorts of coercive policies. I will pick up, therefore, where they leave off: granting that a ban's effects on well-being would be overall positive, a principal moral cost of a ban can be measured in terms of its infringement of smokers’ autonomy. Comparisons, then, can be sought in terms of how different policies infringe autonomy in different ways. What exactly might it mean, however, to speak of smokers’ autonomy? According to Grill and Voigt, autonomy should be thought of as a sort of ‘self-direction’ which obtains given ‘the absence of external …

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