Marcos Picchio

Recruiting incarcerated individuals as firefighters to slow the spread of wildfires is a controversial practice. We argue that, provided certain important conditions are met, this practice can be made ethically permissible. While these conditions have not yet been satisfied, we contend that achievable and promptly operable reforms—short of more comprehensive reforms to the criminal-legal system—could fulfill them. In this paper, we address three main arguments against this contentious practice: (1) firefighting is too risky for incarcerated individuals; (2) incarcerated firefighters are both unduly induced into participation and exploited in their work; and (3) the future employment prospects for incarcerated firefighters are unsatisfactory. In response to these concerns, we propose actions including more comprehensive and frequent health screening, ensuring adequate safety training and equipment, and improving pathways to future firefighting employment. While the first two actions only reduce the chances of exploitation, we show how improving future firefighting employment can simultaneously reduce the chances of both exploitation and undue inducement.

In a typical clinical trial, researchers are required to obtain participants’ informed consent. But for some policy experiments, it is impracticable to obtain informed consent. As a result, these trials sometimes randomize individuals to interventions without their consent. Some critics allege that these experiments fail to show respect for persons and are therefore unethical. Given that governments are increasingly relying on randomized experiments to determine which policies are evidence-based and cost-effective, it is important to assess this criticism. I argue that policy experiments conducted by democratically authorized actors, most notably, democratic governments and their respective institutions, show respect for persons despite not obtaining informed consent.

Unlike with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in clinical research, little has been said about the ethical principles that should regulate the use of RCTs in experimental development economics. One well-known principle in clinical research ethics is the principle of clinical equipoise. Some recent commentators suggest that an analogue of clinical equipoise should play a role in experimental development economics. In this article, I first highlight some difficulties with importing the concept to experimental development economics. I then argue that MacKay’s (2018, 2020) notion of policy equipoise avoids these difficulties and has a role to play in experimental development economics.

In this article, I address a controversial aspect of Rawls’s treatment of the question of justice between generations: how the parties in the original position could be motivated to select Rawls’s preferred principle of intergenerational savings, which he dubs the just savings principle. I focus on the explanation found in his later work, where he proposes that the correct savings principle is the principle that any generation would have wanted preceding generations to have followed. By expanding upon this explanation, I respond to the objection that this explanation disregards the perspective of the first generation. I demonstrate that this objection ceases to be a concern when a proper account of the parties’ reasoning is developed. What is notable about the explanation I defend is that it relies on the parties adopting maximax – not maximin – as a rule for rational decision making. Having established this intermediary conclusion, I depart with Rawls and consider what savings principle the parties would choose if given more options. Ultimately, I argue that the parties would select a principle that Rawls would have undoubtedly rejected if presented to him at face value. This is because the principle of savings I argue would be selected requires continual economic growth over generations to increase upwards indefinitely – a conclusion Rawls is explicitly trying to avoid in his theory of justice.

A central feature of experimental development economics is the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the effectiveness of prospective socioeconomic interventions. The use of RCTs in development economics raises a host of ethical issues which are just beginning to be explored. In this article, I address one ethical issue in particular: the routine use of the status quo as a control when designing and conducting a development RCT. Drawing on the literature on the principle of standard care in medical research ethics, as well as considerations of distributive justice in non-ideal circumstances, I argue that the practice of using the status quo as a control is ethically justifiable. However, I add an important qualification based on the natural duty of rescue to address the concern that my account is overly permissive.

In this paper I challenge the pernicious aspects of Milton Friedman's methodological outlook that continues to hold sway over mainstream neoclassical economists. I do this by showing how Friedman's own methodological dicta could have been used against him when he famously advanced the expectations critique of the Phillips curve at his presidential address to the American Economic Association. I use this case study to further suggest that psychological and neurophysiological data should not be deemed irrelevant to economic science.