Journal of Political Philosophy最新文献

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.(Eleanor Roosevelt).

Something seems troubling about Miguel's behavior. Yet it is hard to say what he is doing wrong. He did not ask anyone to act for his benefit. He never agreed to any park-walking plan. Given the number of people involved in the watch (imagine it is a town with thousands of volunteers at the ready), he is not meaningfully adding to anyone's burden.

Put more precisely:

Much about this claim is controversial: does the mere receipt of benefits really trigger obligations? Does this hold if beneficiaries do not acquiesce? Must the relevant benefits track objective or subjective good? But my interest lies in a further puzzle, one that arises once we accept that something in this vein explains the wrongness of Miguel's actions.

Many scholars treat Park and Snow as different in kind. While the former is said to involve wrongful free-riding, the latter is viewed as a predatory demand. Consequently, while Miguel is said to have a duty to join in, Neda is thought to do nothing wrong if she refuses to pay the bill.

The problem is that the two scenarios look remarkably similar. In both situations, a group of people provide an unrequested benefit and take their doing so to trigger an obligation for beneficiaries to repay in a manner specified by their benefactors. My goal in this essay is to make sense of these competing intuitions by developing an account of what differentiates predatory demands from practices that properly generate duties of fair play. In fact, I will argue, cases like Snow and Park are even more similar than theories of fair play have acknowledged. Nonetheless, we can distinguish the two by properly situating fair play in the broader moral landscape. Doing so better grounds the duty and, more precisely, illuminates its scope—but it requires profoundly reimagining what fair play asks of us in a way that calls into question long-standing assumptions about civic ethics.

My argument proceeds as follows. In Section I, I detail an account of the moral motivation that underlies the duty of fair play. Building on recent work by Garrett Cullity and others, I argue that such obligations arise from a concern for fairness best understood as a demand for appropriate impartiality. Those who free-ride make unjustified exceptions by granting themselves a privilege that they would deny to others. In Section II, I raise a challenge to recent attempts by Isabella Trifan to flesh out the relevant notion of impartiality. We can, she suggests, distinguish cases of free-riding and predatory demands by looking to participants' attitudes. On her account, people are similarly situated such that non-contributions constitute violations of impartiality so long as they share a preference for receiving the same good without contributing to its production. But this approach, I show, fails to capture widesprea

When discussing theories of justice, most philosophers take the moral equality of human beings as their starting point. As Will Kymlicka says, in all contemporary plausible theories of justice, moral equality constitutes an “egalitarian plateau”.1 Arguably, the most prominent novel theory of justice in recent years is relational egalitarianism—a theory on which justice requires people to relate as equals. Relational egalitarians are no exception to Kymlicka's claim. They too start from the idea of moral equality. As one of us previously put it, “as a matter of fact, we are one another's moral equals and in relating as equals we honour that fact, and this is what grounds the ideal of relational egalitarianism”.2

In this article, we will assume that not all human beings are moral equals. This is an assumption, not an assertion, on our part. It is motivated partly by the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph, and partly by the nature of the present inquiry: to wit, examining what, if anything, relational egalitarianism implies when it comes to relationships between moral unequals. Must moral unequals relate as moral equals?4 Or as unequals? Or in some third way? We will show that relational egalitarianism has much to say about such relationships. And we will show that what it has to say is plausible.

Before proceeding, we need to defend our line of inquiry in view of the following skeptical challenge. For its supporters, what grounds relational egalitarianism is the fact—so they claim—that people are moral equals. For instance, this seems to be what the following passage from Kolodny implies: “Insofar as we are to have ongoing social relations with other moral equals, we have reason to relate to them as social equals”.5 Hence, to ask what relational egalitarians are committed to saying about social relations in a—in their view—hypothetical situation, where people are not moral equals, is to ask a moot question. It is like asking what a utilitarian is committed to, as regards the right thing to do, if welfare is not valuable. The question makes no sense, because the notion that welfare has value is built into, and therefore presupposed by, utilitarianism. Similarly, the notion that people are moral equals is presupposed by relational egalitarianism.6

While this challenge makes sense, we think that, ultimately, we are asking a perfectly justifiable question, and one we have the resources to answer. First, Kolodny's remark is most naturally taken to mean that moral equals must relate as social and political equals given that, more generally, the way people relate, socially and politically, should fit the way they relate in terms of moral status. If this is correct, Kolodny's view is underpinned by a general commitment to some kind of fittingness; and this general commitment, surely, has implications for the question of how moral unequals should relate, even if Kolodny thinks that people are not moral u