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Value and Cost-Benefit AnalysisIn Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.Cost-benefit analysis —understood as a technique for evaluating governmental policies in light of individual well-being—rests upon a preference view of welfare. A policy’s effect on a given individual is measured, on a money scale, with reference to her preferences as between money and other goods, captured in her “utility” function. This chapter describes the methodology of CBA, and discusses the various conditions on individual preferences that are required for the existence of an individual u…Read more
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What Public Policy Can BeErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 16 (2). 2024.The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics(EJPE) interviewed Adler about his formative years (section I); his work on the theoretical foundations of public policy, zooming in onwelfare-consequentialism and social welfare functions(section II), welfarism and interpersonal comparisons(section III), the ethical deliberator and the role of the philosopher (section IV); and, finally,his views and visions for interdisciplinary work in law, economics, and philosophy,as well as his…Read more
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148How to Balance Lives and Livelihoods in a Pandemic.In Julian Savulescu & Dominic Wilkinson (eds.), Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X., Oxford University Press. pp. 189-209. 2023.Control measures, such as “lockdowns”, have been widely used to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. Under some conditions, they prevent illness and save lives. But they also exact an economic toll. How should we balance the impact of such policies on individual lives and livelihoods (and other dimensions of concern) to determine which is best? A widely used method of policy evaluation, benefit–cost analysis (BCA), answers these questions by converting all the effects of a policy into monetary equiva…Read more
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1THE RULE OF RECOGNITION AND THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.
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5Regulatory TheoryIn Dennis M. Patterson (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Blackwell. 1996.This chapter contains sections titled: What I s Regulation? How Should We Morally Evaluate Regulation? Welfarism; the Pareto Principle; Kaldor‐Hicks Efficiency versus Social Welfare Functions The Two Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics and the Market Failure Framework Externalities Public Goods and Monopoly Power The Coase Theorem Information and Paternalism as Rationales for Regulation Regulatory Forms and Regulatory Choice Criteria References.
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142Prioritarianism: A response to criticsPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 18 (2): 101-144. 2019.Prioritarianism is a moral view that ranks outcomes according to the sum of a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation of individual well-being. Prioritarianism is ‘welfarist’ (namel...
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6In pursuit of social progressEconomics and Philosophy 34 (3): 443-449. 2018.In 2014, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote: ‘Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today's great debates … I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don't cloister yourselves like medieval monks – we need you!’ At that time, a group of academics were working to launch the International Pane…Read more
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7Response to our commentators on the report of the international panel on social progress 2018Economics and Philosophy 34 (3): 477-482. 2018.The contributors to this symposium have brought up many important points in their discussions of five chapters of the Report, and we are very grateful to them. Since the authors of the chapters would be better able to respond to many of the specific comments, we will confine ourselves here to a brief discussion of a few major issues highlighted by the contributors. We are in particular inspired by the following comments: Alina Rocha Menocal's point about the role of the state and committed elite…Read more
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33Prioritarianism in Practice (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2022.Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism …Read more
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576Assessing the Wellbeing Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Three Policy Types: Suppression, Control, and Uncontrolled SpreadThinktank 20 Policy Briefs for the G20 Meeting in Saudi Arabia 2020. 2020.The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of Statistical Life Years (VSLYs); Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs); and social welfare analysis, and argue that the latter are superior. We also discus…Read more
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34Arnold, N. Scott . Imposing Values: An Essay on Liberalism and Regulation . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 . Pp. 486. $74.00 (cloth) (review)Ethics 120 (4): 831-836. 2010.
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32Book ReviewsLouis Kaplow,, and Steven Shavell,. Fairness versus Welfare.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 544. $50.00 (review)Ethics 115 (4): 824-828. 2005.
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2Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 19 (3): 168-171. 1999.
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36How should we make interpersonal comparisons of well-being levels and differences? One branch of welfare economics eschews such comparisons, which are seen as impossible or unknowable; normative evaluation is based upon criteria such as Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks efficiency that require no interpersonal comparability. A different branch of welfare economics, for example optimal tax theory, uses “social welfare functions” to compare social states and governmental policies. Interpersonally comparable …Read more
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57Personal rights and rule-dependenceLegal Theory 6 (4): 337-389. 2000.Can constitutional rights be both personal and rule-dependent? Can it be true of constitutional adjudication (1) that a constitutional litigant must assert rights, and yet also (2) that the viability of a constitutional challenge depends (or sometimes depends) on whether a particular type of legal rule, for example, a discriminatory or poorly tailored rule, is in force?
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77Cognitivism, controversy, and moral heuristicsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4): 542-543. 2005.Sunstein aims to provide a nonsectarian account of moral heuristics, yet the account rests on a controversial meta-ethical view. Further, moral theorists who reject act consequentialism may deny that Sunstein's examples involve moral mistakes. But so what? Within a theory that counts consequences as a morally weighty feature of actions, the moral judgments that Sunstein points to are indeed mistaken, and the fact that governmental action at odds with these judgments will be controversial doesn't…Read more
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581The Pigou-Dalton (PD) principle recommends a non-leaky, non-rank-switching transfer of goods from someone with more goods to someone with less. This Article defends the PD principle as an aspect of distributive justice—enabling the comparison of two distributions, neither completely equal, as more or less just. It shows how the PD principle flows from a particular view, adumbrated by Thomas Nagel, about the grounding of distributive justice in individuals’ “claims.” And it criticizes two comp…Read more
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39Review of Matthew H. Kramer (ed.), Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (9). 2002.
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131This Article provides a comprehensive, critical overview of proposals to use happiness surveys for steering public policy. Happiness or “subjective well-being” surveys ask individuals to rate their present happiness, life-satisfaction, affective state, etc. A massive literature now engages in such surveys or correlates survey responses with individual attributes. And, increasingly, scholars argue for the policy relevance of happiness data: in particular, as a basis for calculating aggregates suc…Read more
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65Decision theory seems to offer a very attractive normative framework for individual and social choice under uncertainty. The decisionmaker should think of her choice situation, at any given moment, in terms of a set of possible outcomes, that is, specifications of the possible consequences of choice, described in light of the decisionmaker's goals; a set of possible actions; and a "state set" consisting of possible prior "states of the world." It is this framework for choice which provides the f…Read more
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55A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they willing to sacrifice it for other attributes, such as income and health? Tackling this question has largely been the preserve of philosophers. In this article, we find out just how much happiness matters to ordinary citizens. Our sample consists of nearly 13,000 members of the UK …Read more
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1Richard A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (review)Philosophy in Review 20 (2): 142-145. 2000.
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68Extended Preferences and Interpersonal Comparisons: A New AccountEconomics and Philosophy 30 (2): 123-162. 2014.This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ra…Read more
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454Does individual desert matter for distributive justice? Is it relevant, for purposes of justice, that the pattern of distribution of justice’s “currency” (be it well-being, resources, preference-satisfaction, capabilities, or something else) is aligned in one or another way with the pattern of individual desert? This paper examines the nexus between desert and distributive justice through the lens of individual claims. The concept of claims (specifically “claims across outcomes”) is a fruitful…Read more
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63This chapter is an essay in a volume that examines constitutional law in the United States through the lens of H.L.A. Hart's "rule of recognition" model of a legal system. My chapter focuses on a feature of constitutional practice that has been rarely examined: how jurists and scholars argue about interpretive methods. Although a vast body of scholarship provides arguments for or against various interpretive methods -- such as textualism, originalism, "living constitutionalism," structure-and-re…Read more
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Duke UniversityRegular Faculty
Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |