•  526
    The 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
  •  507
    Assessing the Wellbeing Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Three Policy Types: Suppression, Control, and Uncontrolled Spread
    with Richard Bradley, Maddalena Ferranna, Marc Fleurbaey, James Hammitt, and Alex Voorhoeve
    Thinktank 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
  •  402
    Does 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
  •  128
    This 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
  •  108
    This book addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or “utility” metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. This book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey da…Read more
  •  103
    Prioritarianism: A response to critics
    Politics, 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...
  •  94
    How to Balance Lives and Livelihoods in a Pandemic.
    with Richard Bradley, Marc Fleurbaey, Maddalena Ferranna, James Hammitt, Remi Turquier, and Alex Voorhoeve
    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
  •  85
    Future Generations: A Prioritarian View
    George Washington Law Review 77 1478-1520. 2009.
    Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are …Read more
  •  70
    Cognitivism, controversy, and moral heuristics
    Behavioral 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
  •  60
    Decision 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
  •  60
    This 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
  •  55
    Aggregating moral preferences
    Economics and Philosophy 32 (2): 283-321. 2016.
    :Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. ‘Ideal-advisor’ accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the advisors’ moral preferences. Do we have reason to believe that the advisors, albeit idealized, can still di…Read more
  •  45
    A 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
  •  40
    Personal rights and rule-dependence
    Legal 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?
  •  36
    Cost-benefit analysis: legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives (edited book)
    with Eric A. Posner
    University of Chicago Press. 2001.
    Cost-benefit analysis is a widely used governmental evaluation tool, though academics remain skeptical. This volume gathers prominent contributors from law, economics, and philosophy for discussion of cost-benefit analysis, specifically its moral foundations, applications and limitations. This new scholarly debate includes not only economists, but also contributors from philosophy, cognitive psychology, legal studies, and public policy who can further illuminate the justification and moral impli…Read more
  •  36
    Review of Matthew H. Kramer (ed.), Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (9). 2002.
  •  33
    Well-Being Thresholds and Moral Priority
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (6): 773-786. 2015.
  •  29
    How 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
  •  23
  •  23
    Rights and rules
    with Michael C. Dorf
    Legal Theory 6 (3): 241-251. 2000.
    Prior to recent decades, the United States Supreme Court often invoked the political question doctrine to avoid deciding controversial questions of individual rights. 1 By the 1970s and 1980s, standing limits traced to Article IIIs arsenal of threshold decision making, 3 in the last decade the Court has turned with increasing frequency to the distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to perform the gatekeeping function. However, although there is a considerable body of scholarship con…Read more
  •  23
    The law within each legal system is a function of the practices of some social group. In short, law is a kind of socially grounded norm. H.L.A Hart famously developed this view in his book, The Concept of Law, by arguing that law derives from a social rule, the so-called “rule of recognition.” But the proposition that social facts play a foundational role in producing law is a point of consensus for all modern jurisprudents in the Anglo-American tradition: not just Hart and his followers in the …Read more
  •  21
    Prioritarianism in Practice (edited book)
    with Ole F. Norheim
    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
  •  11
    Book Review (review)
  •  5
    Contributors and Selected Bibliography
    In Francis J. Mootz (ed.), On Philosophy in American Law, Cambridge University Press. pp. 28--295. 2009.
  •  4
    In pursuit of social progress
    Economics 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