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.

This paper examines Thomas Scanlon’s Value of Choice account of substantive responsibility, on which the fact that choice has value accounts both for why people should be provided with certain opportunities and for why it may be permissible, in those cases, to let people bear certain opportunity-accompanying burdens. Scanlon contrasts his view with the familiar one according to which it is permissible to require people to bear certain burdens if and only if they have actively chosen those burdens, because of the legitimating force of choice. The paper argues that Scanlon’s account, in its most distinctive version, is at best incomplete and can only justify claims about responsibility for a restricted class of burdens. It then goes on to suggest that, when Scanlon’s account is supplemented so as to be able to generate judgments of responsibility about a wider range of burdens, it is no longer clear that there is a difference between the Value of Choice account and a plausible version of the Forfeiture View.

In this paper we ask whether liberal egalitarians can endorse workfare policies that require that welfare recipients should work in return for their welfare benefits. In particular, we focus on the fairness-based case for workfare, which holds that people should be responsible for their own welfare since they would otherwise impose unfair costs on others. Two versions of the fairness-based case are considered: The first defends workfare on the grounds that it would form part of an unemployment insurance scheme that individuals would endorse under certain hypothetical conditions that are salient for the purposes of determining just public policy. The second appeals to the notion of reciprocity in order to justify the requirement that people work for their benefits. We cast doubt on both of these arguments for workfare. Neither argument shows that the unconditional provision of welfare benefits is unjust; hence, the fairness case for workfare is inconclusive.

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.

In a number of debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy and philosophy of economics, philosophers hold the conviction that preferences have normative significance. A central assumption that underlies this conviction is that a cogent account of preference-formation can be developed. This is particularly evident in debates about well-being. Those who defend subjective accounts of well-being, on which a person’s life goes better for her to the extent that her preferences are satisfied, often qualify that account so that it does not include malformed or adaptive preferences (that is, preferences formed in non-autonomous ways, or humble preferences tailored to stifling circumstances), the satisfaction of which does not seem to contribute to well-being. This assumes that there is a normative standard of preference-formation with which to identify those preference that are malformed or adaptive in the relevant sense. An account of preference-formation is also important for philosophers who uphold an objective theory of well-being, on which well-being consists of the pursuit of objectively valuable goals, but who also believe in the value of freedom and thus emphasise the importance of respecting individuals’ choices among various goals. For they, too, in extolling the importance of respect for choices, assume that these choices are not distorted by inauthentically formed preferences, and thus also need an account of preference-formation to help distinguish those cases in which we ought to respect people’s choices from those in which we do not. In the vast literature on preferences, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to the.