Nicole Hassoun

This paper demonstrates that the property of Replication Invariance, generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. This fact raises questions about what constitutes an appropriate headcount assessment of poverty, in terms of whether one should focus on the proportion, or the absolute numbers, of the population in poverty. This observation, in turn, has important implications for tracking poverty and setting targets for its reduction or elimination.

Policy makers increasingly use measures of individuals’ ability to fulfill their basic needs – from the Genuine Progress Indicator and multidimensional poverty indexes, to metrics in the World Happiness Report alongside traditional economic indexes like Gross Domestic Product. This paper defends the ‘philosophy first’ approach to measuring individuals’ ability to meet their basic needs. It argues that scientists should employ a philosophically well-justified theory of basic needs to develop measures that approximate the theory well enough for a given purpose. This approach benefits both the resulting measures and the theory itself.

The following “Good Practices” document was developed by the Women in Philosophy / Demographics in Philosophy group under the directorship of Nicole Hassoun, with substantial contributions from co-directors, advisory board members, and collaborators from 2018 to 2024. It is the result of extensive feedback and discussion from many sources including: two large panel discussions at Pacific APA meetings in 2018–2019; email queries to a large number of journal editors and department heads from 2019 to 2023; the creators of the British Philosophical Association’s Good Practice Scheme;1 referees and editors at Ethics which published a portion of it in 2022; blog readers at the Blog of the APA, Daily Nous, and The Splintered Mind; several committees of the American Philosophical Association; and numerous informal exchanges with members of the profession. In 2023, a version of it was endorsed by the APA’s Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession. One thing that has become clear over the course of many discussions is that almost every thoughtful reader will find something to object to in the document—some positions expressed too strongly or not strongly enough, some recommendations overly detailed or insufficiently detailed, some underrepresented groups given too much relative focus or too little relative focus. This document is the compromise result of many hands, and we hope that philosophers who are broadly supportive of diversity and inclusion will find value in it even if those compromises haven’t all landed exactly where they prefer.

When is it legitimate for technocrats to make decisions with significant allocative consequences? With the rapid expansion of the administrative state and international organizations, technocratic decisions with significant allocative consequences now affect many people’s basic life prospects and technocrats are not as democratically accountable as most elected officials, so answering this question is incredibly important. This article proposes a necessary condition for legitimate technocratic decisions with significant allocative consequences: Those affected by the decision should have a say in the decision process so that the allocation responds appropriately to their interests, at least whenever aspects of the decision exceed the decision-maker’s expertise. These decisions will be better and fairer than those that do not consider the affected people’s interests. Moreover, this principle might elicit an ‘overlapping consensus’ amongst those with different philosophical views on legitimacy. After all, most competing accounts of legitimacy either strengthen requirements on the decision’s outcome or on the process by which the decision is made.

Abstract:InThe Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz argues against a right to autonomy. This argument helps to distinguish his theory from his competitors'. For, many liberal theories ground such a right. Some even defend entirely autonomy‐based accounts of rights. This paper suggests that Raz's argument against a right to autonomy raises an important dilemma for his larger theory. Unless his account of rights is limited in some way, Raz's argument applies against almost all (purported) rights, not just a right to autonomy. But, on the traditional way of limiting accounts like his, Raz's account actually supports the conclusion that people have a right to autonomy. So, unless there is another way of limiting his account that does not have this consequence, Raz's argument against a right to autonomy does not go through.

Judith Jarvis Thomson argued that abortion is permissible because no one must sacrifice their rights to bodily autonomy. However, assuming a fetus has full moral personhood, and focusing on when abortion is unjust in particular, we argue that Thomson's view of what we ought to sacrifice to aid others is too impoverished. Instead, we argue that abortion is permissible when pregnancy threatens the ability of the mother, or the child, to live minimally well. After explaining the minimally good life account and its application to abortion, we explain its advantages over alternative views. Finally, we examine arguments concluding that abortion is permissible because fetuses are not persons. We argue that personhood is probably a matter of degree rather than a binary property. Thus, abortion is generally permissible early in pregnancy, but as the fetus gets closer to full personhood, adopting the minimally good life standard is appropriate.

Should people have a legal human right to health? And, if so, what exactly does protecting this right require? This essay defends some answers to these questions recently articulated in Global Health Impact. It explains how these answers depend on a particular way of thinking about health and the minimally good life, how quality of life matters at and over time, what various agents should do to help people who are unable to live well enough, and many other things. Moreover, it suggests some ways of improving common metrics for measuring and advancing our collective global health impact.

This article provides the first large-scale, longitudinal study examining publication rates by gender in philosophy journals. We find that from 1900 to 1990 the proportion of women authorships in philosophy increased, but it has plateaued since the 1990s. Top Philosophy journals publish the lowest proportion of women, and anonymous review does not increase the proportion publishing in these journals. Value Theory journals do not publish articles by women in proportion to their presence in the subdiscipline. Although the proportion of women authorships in philosophy has increased over time, measurable disparities persist.

What, if anything, do we owe others as a basic minimum? Sufficiency theorists claim that we must provide everyone with enough – but, to date, few well-worked-out accounts of the sufficiency threshold exist, so it is difficult to evaluate this proposition. Previous theories do not provide plausible, independent accounts of resources, capabilities, or welfare that might play the requisite role. Moreover, I believe existing accounts do not provide nearly enough guidance for policymakers. So, this article sketches a mechanism for arriving at an account of the minimally good life that can help locate the sufficiency threshold.

We live in tragic times. Millions are sheltering in place to avoid exacerbating the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. How should we respond to such tragedies? This paper argues that the human right to health can help us do so because it inspires human rights advocates, claimants, and those with responsibility for fulfilling the right to try hard to satisfy its claims. That is, the right should, and often does, give rise to what I call_ the virtue of creative resolve_. This resolve embodies a fundamental commitment to finding creative solutions to what appear to be tragic dilemmas. Contra critics, we should not reject the right even if it cannot tell us how to ration scarce health resources. Rather, the right gives us a response to apparent tragedy in motivating us to search for ways of fulfilling everyone’s basic health needs.

A recent trend in international development circles is ‘New Institutionalism’. In a slogan, the idea is just that good institutions matter. The slogan itself is so innocuous as to be hardly worth comment. But the push to improve institutional quality has the potential to have a much less innocuous impact on aid efforts and other aspects of international development. This paper provides a critical introduction to some of the literature on institutional quality. It looks, in particular, at an argument for the conclusion that making aid conditional on good institutional quality will promote development by reducing poverty. This paper suggests that there is little theoretical or empirical evidence that this kind of conditionality is good for the poor.

ABSTRACT What kind of basic minimum do we owe to others? This paper defends a new procedure for answering this question. It argues that its minimally good life account has some advantages over the main alternatives and that neither the first-, nor third-, person perspective can help us to arrive at an adequate account. Rather, it employs the second-person perspective of free, reasonable, care. There might be other conditions for distributive justice, and morality certainly requires more than helping everyone to secure a basic minimum. Still, if the minimally good life account is correct, and we owe everyone a basic minimum, we must ensure that everyone lives well enough.

On the traditional Christian doctrine: 1. People have free will (in Heaven as on Earth). 2. Those with free will can go to Hell. 3. Heaven is eternal. Many Christians also hold: 4. God is all powerful, knowing and good and 5. Free will can justify eternal suffering, evil, or hell. The paper argues that those who accept a version of Christianity that endorses 1–5 face a dilemma: Either deny that free will can justify suffering, evil, or hell or accept that we can fail in heaven and so go to hell. It suggests that compassionate Christians may do best to i) give up on the idea that free will is valuable enough to justify significant suffering. This may require: ii) accepting that something has gone woefully wrong on Earth and iii) giving up the idea that people can suffer significantly in Hell, but allows Christians to maintain that iv) Heaven is eternal.

This chapter reviews the literature on experimental political philosophy. Much of the literature considers individuals’ intuitions about distributive justice, retributive justice, and key concepts such as the doing/allowing distinction. The chapter argues that although there is relatively little experimental political philosophy proper, there are many avenues for future research. It presumes some familiarity with political philosophy, but its main aim is not to explain the relevance of studies to particular debates. The chapter provides an overview of interesting empirical results that may be of some broad interest and suggests that there is reason for those interested in experimental political philosophy to do new kinds of empirical work and employ new methods from many disciplines. Experimental philosophy need not model itself primarily on the discipline of psychology. There are many useful methods available for answering important questions experimental philosophers might want to address in these other disciplines.

How should we measure medicines’ global health impact to set targets, monitor performance and improve health around the world? Can such a metric provide a philosophically well-grounded basis for an ethical consumption campaign that will create incentives for pharmaceutical companies and other agents to expand (equitable) access to essential medicines? And if such metrics exist, how should we think about our individual obligations to support ethical consumption campaigns on this basis? This paper reflects on these questions in light of Tim Campbell’s, Yukiko Asada’s, and Andreas Albertsen’s worries about the answers I provide in Global Health Impact: Extending Access on Essential Medicines. I explain how reflecting on treatments consequences for individuals’ ability to live minimally well supports the creation of the Global Health Impact (GHI) index (https://global-health-impact.org/). I also consider how the index might be modified to better support efforts to promote everyone’s human rights. Finally, I argue that individuals should often promote positive change through GHI and other ethical consumption campaigns.

:How should consumers exercise their basic economic powers? Recently, several authors have argued that consumption to bring about social change must be democratic. Others maintain that we may consume in ways that we believe promote positive change. This paper rejects both accounts and provides a new alternative. It argues that, under just institutions, people may consume as they like as long as they respect the institutions’ rules. Absent just institutions, significant moral constraints on consumption exist. Still, it is permissible, if not obligatory, for people to pursue non-democratic, genuinely positive, change within whatever moral constraints exist.

While rich countries like the USA and UK are starting to vaccinate their populations against COVID-19, poor countries may lack access to a vaccine for years. A global effort to provide vaccines through the COVAX facility Accelerator) aims to distribute 2 billion vaccinations by the end of next year, but the USA has refused to join and even those rich countries that have joined are entering into bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies to buy up the supply. Canada, for instance, has already secured enough to vaccinate its entire population nine times over, and the USA, European Union, UK, Australia and Japan can vaccinate their populations between 2 and 8 x.1 Vaccine nationalism is neither ethically justified, nor even in rich countries’ long-term self-interest. No one deserves the luck of their birth and few have much control over their country of residence. So, when there are four ventilators per 12 million people in some low-income and middle-income countries, and people are being buried in cardboard boxes in mass graves, it is simply unconscionable to argue that wealthy countries can keep their vaccines to themselves or even help their populations first.2 Vaccine nationalism fails to respect basic human rights and the people who have them. Moreover, many argue that rich countries have contributed to global poverty through a shared and violent history of colonialism and oppression and profit from instituting, upholding and sustaining coercive rules that often exacerbate, rather than alleviate, global poverty.3 Be that as it may, putting basic health systems in place to ensure everyone can get vaccinated, not only against COVID-19 but a host of other terrible diseases, would better protect even the rich from …

There are two broad approaches to environmental ethics. The “conservationist” approach on which we should conserve the environment when it is in our interest to do so and the “preservationist” approach on which we should preserve the environment even when it is not in our interest to do so. We propose a new “relational” approach that tells us to preserve nature as part of what makes us who we are or could be. Drawing from Confucian and Daoist texts, we argue that human identities are, or should be, so intimately tied to nature that human interests evolve in relationship to nature.

A recent trend in international development circles is ‘New Institutionalism’. In a slogan, the idea is just that good institutions matter. The slogan itself is so innocuous as to be hardly worth comment. But the push to improve institutional quality has the potential to have a much less innocuous impact on aid efforts and other aspects of international development. This paper provides a critical introduction to some of the literature on institutional quality. It looks, in particular, at an argument for the conclusion that making aid conditional on good institutional quality will promote development by reducing poverty. This paper suggests that there is little theoretical or empirical evidence that this kind of conditionality is good for the poor.