•  1316
    Life as a Trust Game: a comment on The Option Value of Life
    Economics and Philosophy 38 (2): 300-308. 2022.
    According to Burri, a major reason why suicide is often irrational lies in the option value of life. Remaining alive is valuable because this allows for a larger menu of options, and the possibility of committing suicide in the future adds further value to the act of remaining alive now. In this note, I represent life as a trust game played by two selves – the young self and the old self – and I argue that the possibility to commit suicide in the future can encourage committing suicide now, agai…Read more
  •  341
    The Value of a Life-Year and the Intuition of Universality
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (3): 355-381. 2022.
    When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, according to which the value of a life-year should depend on what this extra-life-year allows for, and, hence, on the quality of that life-year, because the …Read more
  •  222
    An Age-Differentiated Tax on Bequests
    In Greg Bognar & Axel Gosseries (eds.), Ageing Without Ageism: Conceptual Puzzles and Policy Proposals, Oxford University Press. pp. 254-266. 2023.
    This chapter presents four arguments supporting an age-differentiated tax on bequests, that is, a tax rate on bequests that is varying with the age of the deceased. Whereas those arguments are based on various ethical foundations, and lead to an inheritance tax that can be either increasing or decreasing with the age of the deceased, our comparative analysis leads us to regard one of these arguments as more convincing than the three others: the argument supporting a bequest tax increasing with t…Read more
  •  197
    Lifetime Well-Being
    In Matthew Adler Marc Fleurbaey (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy. pp. 871-900. 2016.
  •  12
    Justice sociale et générations. Pourquoi et comment transmettre un monde plus juste, Cédric Rio (review)
    Revue de Philosophie Économique 16 (2): 193-201. 2015.
  •  11
    Les économistes mesurent le dommage causé par un décès en quantifiant le coût d’opportunité de ce décès (tout ce qui est perdu par le défunt à cause de ce décès). Ce calcul contredit la thèse de la neutralité de la mort défendue par divers philosophes depuis l’Antiquité. Cet article revisite plusieurs arguments anciens justifiant la neutralité de la mort et, par un effet de contraste, révèle des présupposés de l’analyse économique de la mort, tels le caractère consolidé des vies et le caractère …Read more
  •  7
    The Welfare State insures citizens against the risk of losing one’s job (unemployment insurance), the risk of disease (health insurance), the risk of old-age poverty (pension insurance) and the risk of fertility (family allowances). However, the Welfare State does not insure citizens against the most dramatic of all risks: the risk of having a short life, that is, the risk of premature death. Worse: existing pension systems organize implicit monetary transfers from short-lived persons to long-li…Read more
  • This paper examines the relevancy of the Ecological Footprint indicator for the study of environmental justice between generations. While EF statistics - measuring the pressure put on nature by generations co-existing at a particular period under the prevailing production technology - can hardly be interpreted on its own, it is argued that interpretational difficulties vanish once the EF is corrected for changes in technology, and once it is made explicit that the EF is concerned with environmen…Read more
  • Discrimination in gustibus et de facto
    Revue de Philosophie Économique 8 (1): 95-112. 2007.
    Alors que l'approche économique traditionnelle des discriminations tend à réduire les goûts des décideurs aux choix des décideurs, cet article introduit une distinction entre, d'une part, la discrimination in gustibus, c'est-à-dire la prise en compte, par le décideur, de caractéristiques non pertinentes pour le choix en question, et, d'autre part, la discrimination de facto, c'est-à-dire le choix traitant différemment des individus égaux sur des caractéristiques pertinentes. Il est montré que ce…Read more
  • Alors que la défense d'une organisation davantage démocratique de la production est souvent basée sur une réduction implicite du bien-être de la population au bien-être d'un sous-groupe de celle-ci, cet article a pour objectif d'étudier la désirabilité de la démocratie d'entreprise du point de vue d'un observateur impartial se mettant dans la position de tous les membres de la population et évaluant, à la lumière des intérêts de chacun, le bien-fondé d'une démocratisation de la production. Il es…Read more
  • Whereas the Risk Equity axiom, discussed by Diamond (1967), states that, when the expected number of fatalities is the same in two distributions of fatal risks, a more equitable distribution of risks should be preferred to a less equitable distribution of risks, the Preference for Catastrophe Avoidance axiom, introduced by Kenney (1980), states, on the contrary, that, when facing the same choice, one should prefer a distribution in which at least some people survive to a distribution in which it…Read more
  • The democratic firm L'entreprise démocratique
    Revue de Philosophie Économique 9 (1): 3-9. 2008.
    The idea of workplace democracy is not on the political agenda. And yet, democratic firms exist in various forms in today's economy. The idea and the practice is not only economically and philosophically challenging. The worries to which it responds are not bew either. This is well illustrated by John Stuart Mill's conjecture of the end of the wage-earner system, dating back to more than one century ago.