Nethanel Lipshitz

The contributions in this volume discuss some of the fundamental debates that emerged during the pandemic. The aim of the authors of this chapter is to reflect on some of these contributions, offer their own perspective on several debates they engage in, and identify areas that will benefit from further attention by both scholars and policymakers. This chapter focuses on two broad issues: personal liberty and global justice. Regarding the former, it takes a more sympathetic view of liberty-restricting measures than some of the other contributors do. It also evaluates the proposal of using selective liberty-restricting measures and encourages a distinction between different kinds of freedom when balancing liberty protection and harm reduction. Regarding global justice, the chapter proposes a human-rights framework as a possible alternative or supplement to a duty-of-easy-rescue framework. It ends by mentioning some areas not much discussed in the current volume which should engage future theoretical thinking about pandemics ethics: the challenge to democracy posed by public health crises, public health governance, and the interests of children.

Egalitarianism in education faces the charge that it excessively limits the academic development of gifted children. Call it the giftedness challenge. Following an elucidation of the challenge, a novel defense of egalitarianism is presented. The paper begins with the formulation of the principle of Equal Distribution of Educational Goods, which calls for the equal distribution of knowledge, understanding and skills among children, and which is particularly vulnerable to the giftedness challenge. I then propose that egalitarians can answer the giftedness challenge if they supplement Equal Distribution of Educational Goods with a further egalitarian principle, namely, Equal Distribution of Educational Burdens.

According to the effort principle, those who expend much effort deserve to earn more than those who expend little. While accepted by some philosophers and popular outside academic philosophy, the effort principle, that rewards the industrious ants rather than the idle grasshoppers, has been criticized for being unfair and impractical. This paper develops a novel argument against this principle. It targets the claim, implied by advocates of the effort principle, that it can be derived from a more fundamental desert principle, one that identifies moral responsibility, economic contribution, or compensation as the fundamental desert bases for income. We argue that the effort principle cannot be derived from any such principle. Thus, even if one endorses these principles, one need not accept the effort principle. Furthermore, we show how intuitions that seem to support the effort principle can be vindicated without it. We conclude by endorsing skepticism about the effort principle and by gesturing at an alternative possible role that the notion of effort can play in a theory of distributive justice.

“Basic equality” is the thesis that all (or nearly all) human beings are equal in moral status. Widespread interpersonal differences among humans make the task of justifying basic equality notoriously difficult. One strategy for circumventing this difficulty is to identify some morally significant binary (“all-or-nothing”) property that all humans have. This strategy seems promising: if the basis of equality is binary, then those who have it have it equally. However, skeptics have argued against this strategy on the grounds that a proper defense of basic equality requires that we identify a morally significant property that can vary among humans but does not in fact vary. This paper examines various ways in which this skeptical argument can be motivated and concludes that they all fail.

Human brain organoids (HBOs) are novel entities that may exhibit unique forms of cognitive potential. What moral status, if any, do they have? Several authors propose that consciousness may hold the answer to this question. Others identify various _kinds of_ consciousness as crucially important for moral consideration, while leaving open the challenge of determining whether HBOs have them. This paper aims to make progress on these questions in two ways. First, it proposes a framework for thinking about the moral status of entities other than paradigmatic persons. This framework identifies four qualities that ground moral status: evaluative stance, self-directedness, agency, and other-directedness. Second, we speculate on ways in which these qualities are relevant to dimensions of conscious experience that have been, or could be, identified in nonhuman animals. We further explore how these approaches could be adapted for use in HBOs, and argue that such studies, or something similar to them, will have to be performed if we wish to have empirical indications that HBOs have consciousness of a morally significant kind. We end by proposing that in our current scientific and epistemic situation, it is too soon to attribute any moral status to HBOs, but that this might change in the future.

ABSTRACT:In the last two decades it has become increasingly common to advocate for a complete ban on the sale of cigarettes. One reason in favor of such a ban is egalitarian: differences in the prevalence of smoking between socioeconomic groups go a long way in explaining health inequality, and a complete ban might be effective in reducing this inequality. However, a complete ban might also be objectionable on egalitarian grounds if issued with a discriminatory intent or if it is selectively paternalistic. This article argues that a complete ban is likely to be guilty of both, especially when one of its aims is to reduce unequal rates of smoking between groups. A complete ban on the sale of cigarettes thus exhibits a curious feature: in aiming to reduce inequality it threatens to be inegalitarian. This is characteristic of a wider class of public health policies that deserves further attention by egalitarians.