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18The Idea of Equality in Environmental EthicsEnvironmental Ethics 46 (2): 149-169. 2024.In recent decades, it has often been argued by environmental ethicists that human beings and the natural world ought to be considered as equals in some basic sense. The aim of this paper is to make sense of this view by examining what role, if any, the idea of equality ought to play in environmental ethics. Specifically, we have two aims: the first aim is to identify those environmental claims that are distinctively egalitarian. The second aim is to show these claims do not rest on a principled …Read more
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25Parental Love and Filial EqualityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 1-15. forthcoming.It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider and treat their children a…Read more
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22What Does It Mean to Be Moral Equals? in advanceSocial Theory and Practice. forthcoming.This paper develops a novel theory of the meaning of moral equality. This theory has two original and significant implications: first, it shows—contra what is commonly held in the literature—that adults and children are not always each other’s equals; rather, the former are sometimes inferior and sometimes superior to the latter, depending on the interest at stake. Second, it reveals that human beings’ comparative moral status changes across time, and what matters is that they are each other’s e…Read more
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39Contingency, arbitrariness, and the basis of moral equalityRatio 36 (3): 224-234. 2023.Hardly anyone denies that (nearly) all human beings have equal moral status and therefore should be considered and treated as equals. Yet, if humans possess the property that confers moral status upon them to an unequal degree, how come they should be considered and treated as equals? It has been argued that this is because the variations in the degree to which the status‐conferring property is held above a relevant threshold are contingencies that do not generate differences in degrees of moral…Read more
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70Are Adults and Children One Another’s Moral Equals?The Journal of Ethics 27 (1): 31-50. 2023.The question of the basis of human equality has recently gained increasing attention. However, much of the literature has focused on whether persons—understood as fully competent adults—have equal moral status, while relatively less attention has been devoted to the analysis of what grounds the equal moral status of those human beings who are not fully competent adults. This paper contributes to this debate by addressing the question of the equality of moral status between adults and children. S…Read more
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56A pluralist account of the basis of moral statusPhilosophical Studies 178 (6): 1859-1877. 2020.Standard liberal theories of justice rest on the assumption that only those beings that hold the capacity for moral personality have moral status and therefore are right-holders. As many pointed out, this has the disturbing implication of excluding a wide range of entities from the scope of justice. Call this the under-inclusiveness objection. This paper provides a response to the under-inclusiveness objection and illustrates its implications for liberal theories of justice. In particular, the p…Read more
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41Two concerns about the rejection of social cruelty as the basis of moral equalityEuropean Journal of Political Theory 19 (3): 408-416. 2020.In his recent book, Humanity without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights, Andrea Sangiovanni argues that the principle of moral equality should be grounded in the wrongness of treating others as inferiors insofar as this constitutes an act of social cruelty. In this short piece, I will raise two concerns about the rejection of social cruelty as the basis of moral equality: first, Sangiovanni’s account seems to give rise to disturbing implications as to how those beings that have b…Read more
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65On the Basis of Moral Equality: a Rejection of the Relation-First ApproachEthical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1): 237-250. 2019.The principle of moral equality is one of the cornerstones of any liberal theory of justice. It is usually assumed that persons’ equal moral status should be grounded in the equal possession of a status-conferring property. Call this the property-first approach to the basis of moral equality. This approach, however, faces some well-known difficulties: in particular, it is difficult to see how the possession of a scalar property can account for persons’ equal moral status. A plausible way of circ…Read more
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32Luck Egalitarianism, written by K. Lippert-Rasmussen (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (4): 487-490. 2018.
Heslington, York, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Basic Equality |
Equality |
Distributive Justice |
Oppression |
Animal Ethics |
Areas of Interest
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Social and Political Philosophy |
Normative Ethics |
Political Theory |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Value Theory |
Justice |