Serena Olsaretti

The justification of the parent-child relationship that lies at the core of the family raises two main challenges for liberal egalitarianism: the challenge of authority and the challenge of partiality. These point, respectively, to the burdens of justifying to children their parents’ having rights over them, and to third parties parents’ favoring of their children in ways that negatively affects others. This paper examines some recent attempts at justifying the family and meeting these two challenges by appealing to the non-instrumental value of the parent-child relationship. It argues that these accounts do not capture some important convictions about the moral status of the parent-child relationship and thereby do not fully meet the two stated challenges. The paper also offers an alternative basis for justifying the parent-child relationship on which parents, by virtue of being morally responsible for their children’s existence, have an obligation to enter a relationship with them.

One of the most distinctive features of Ronald Dworkin’s egalitarian theory is its commitment to holding individuals responsible for the costs to others of their ambitions. This commitment has received much criticism. Drawing on Dworkin’s latest statement of his position in Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), we suggest that it seems to be in tension with another crucial element of Dworkin’s own theory, namely, its endorsement of the importance of people leading authentic lives – lives that reflect their own values. We examine this tension between responsibility and authenticity, and some strategies Dworkin does and could deploy to defuse it, which we think are unsuccessful. We then propose a solution for reconciling the demands of responsibility and authenticity, which is, so we claim, friendly to Dworkin’s fundamental commitments but which leads to a revisionist interpretation of the demands of equality of resources.

This paper addresses the questions of how we should interpret the autonomy of children and of how we should identify the treatment their autonomy demands of others. In examining this question, the paper casts doubt on two views of the nature and relevance of the autonomy of children. It criticises Joel Feinberg’s well-known view that the autonomy claims of children are reducible to the autonomy claims of the future adults the children will become. It also raises objections to Matthew Clayton’s proposal that the treatment of children should be constrained not only by their future autonomy, but also by a particular component of their autonomy, namely, their independence. We believe Clayton’s proposal has the merit that it does not, unlike Feinberg’s proposal, restrict the basis of the autonomy-claims of children purely to the future autonomy they will enjoy as adults. Nevertheless, we do not believe that the concern with independence adequately captures the autonomy claims of children. After considering these alternative views, the paper proposes that the autonomy claims of children are in fact routed in their evolving capacities for autonomous decision-making. We argue that this proposal both fits with some common-sense ideas about how children ought to be treated, and upholds Clayton's radical proposal that parents should not enrol their children into their comprehensive views about the good life, including their religious views.

In academic and public debates, defenders of the case for sharing the costs of children often claim that by having and rearing children parents produce public goods for the rest of society, or perform socially valuable or necessary labour, and that it would be unfair to parents for others to not share the costs of children, for example through publicly funded parental leave and schools for this reason. Critics of the public goods argument have claimed that it fails because there is no defensible principle that can serve to buttress the claims of parents. Furthermore, these same critics, as well as others, have argued that a certain view of liberal equality militates against sharing the costs of children.This paper challenges both the contention that there is no defensible principle of fairness that can buttress the public goods argument and the contention that liberal equality militates against socialisation. It accomplishes these two tasks together, arguing that the ideal of equality of resources, rather than militating against socialisation, in fact grounds a principle of productive fairness that can serve as the normative premise of the public goods argument for sharing the costs of children.

In her ‘Abortion and Democratic Equality’, Japa Pallikkathayil argues that restrictive abortion laws are incompatible with equality before the law and with several core convictions from the liberal philosophical tradition, which support viewing citizens' bodily rights as inalienable in some important senses. This article raises some doubts about Pallikkathayil's arguments in the hardest case to defend: the use of surgical abortion to terminate an intentional pregnancy, especially for discretionary reasons. These doubts arise if we assume, as she does, that the fetus is a citizen. The article starts by identifying the key claims attributable to Pallikkathayil regarding what our bodily rights protect us against, before raising some questions about Pallikkathayil's argument to the effect that the bodily rights of procreators would be infringed by restrictive abortion laws in cases of intentional pregnancies and that those of fetuses would not be if those pregnancies were terminated by surgical abortion.

The Moral Equivalence Thesis claims that procreation in affluent countries and eco‐gluttony are morally on a par, and that both are impermissible. We argue that this ambiguates between two different theses, the Strict and the Lax. On the Strict Reading of the thesis, procreation and eco‐gluttony are both wrong for the same reasons, that is, because both involve individuals overstepping their carbon budget. We argue that this is false at least with regard to a certain number of children and a range of the costs of children. By contrast, a Lax Reading of the thesis is, we think, defensible. On this reading, procreation and eco‐gluttony may both be wrong, but for different reasons and under different conditions. While eco‐gluttony is wrong across a range of ideal and non‐ideal conditions because it is a failure to live within one's fair carbon budget, having a child is only wrong, if it is wrong, under non‐ideal conditions where prospective parents have weighty reasons, or an obligation, to pick up the moral slack of others.

This article examines the relation among luck, justice, and desert in the context of contemporary political theory. The distinctive feature of the conventional view of desert-based justice consists in its claim that we deserve on the basis of our achievements, the outcome of our actions, or the quality of our performances. One challenge to the conventional view's treatment of the relation between justice, luck, and desert comes from those who hold that desert-based justice is compatible with more luck than is allowed by the conventional view.

Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people's lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being.

Egalitarian theories assume, without defending it, the view that the costs of children should be shared between non-parents and parents. This standard position is called into question by the Parental Provision view. Drawing on the familiar idea that people should be held responsible for the consequences of their choices, the Parental Provision view holds that under certain conditions egalitarian justice requires parents to pay for the full costs of their children, as it would be unfair for non-parents to bear the negative externalities of others’ choices to have children. This article examines closely the Parental Provision view and argues that various possible justifications for it are unsuccessful. In so doing, it brings to light respects in which the choice to have and rear children is special and may not be treated as being on a par with other choices for which we think people should be held responsible.

Contemporary egalitarian theories of justice constrain the demands of equality by responsibility, and do not view as unjust inequalities that are traceable to individuals' choices. This paper argues that, in order to make non-arbitrary determinate judgements of responsibility, any theory of justice needs a principle of stakes , that is, an account of what consequences choices should have. The paper also argues that the principles of stakes seemingly presupposed by egalitarians are implausible, and that adopting alternative principles of stakes amounts to fleshing out the demands of responsibility rather than imposing limits on them.

Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither argument is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics.

The compensatory desert argument is an argument that purports to justify inequalities in (some) incomes generated by a free labour market. It holds, first, that the principle of compensation is a principle of desert; second, that a distribution justified by a principle of desert is just; and third, that (some) rewards people reap on a free labour market are compensation for costs they incur. It concludes that therefore, a distribution of (some) rewards generated by a free labour market is just. In this chapter I criticise the first two premises of this argument. I argue that the principle of compensation is not a principle of desert (sections 3 and 4), and that a distribution of deserved compensatory payments may be unjust (sections 5 and 6). Before developing my critique of the compensatory desert argument, I start by illustrating further that argument in the version of it which has been defended by Julian Lamont (section 1), and to dispel two objections that have been moved against the view that compensation is a principle of desert.

This paper is part of a book symposium on Fred Feldman's, *Pleasure and the Good Life*. I argue that Feldman’s defence of hedonism, although successful on its own terms, is of less significance than it may seem at first, for two main reasons. First, Feldman’s defence of the claim that attitudinal pleasures are the chief good is either implausible or crucially incomplete. Second, Feldman’s claim that hedonists can overcome the objections levelled against them while remaining pure hedonists is only partially true.