Journal of Political Philosophy最新文献

Severe uncertainty plays a critical role in many problems of distributive justice, such as social security, public health, public projects, budget deficits, and climate change. Under severe uncertainty, available information does not allow us to assign precise probabilities to possible states of affairs. A recent example of severe uncertainty is the impact of COVID-19. How policy-makers should evaluate different distributions of well-being in such a situation of severe uncertainty is of vital importance to society. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has induced a need to ration medical resources, such as vaccines, using relevant principles of distribution. Such principles have been hotly debated by egalitarians, many of whom are pluralists.1 This article addresses the problem of the distribution of well-being by using an axiomatic approach to pluralist egalitarianism.

Rowe and Voorhoeve’s view can be interpreted as an axiomatic approach to pluralist egalitarianism; it helps to clarify competing claims of a relevant kind and thereby enables policy-makers to evaluate uncertain social situations. They illustrate this by showing how RV pluralist egalitarianism works in particular examples.

There is a need to articulate the axioms involved more explicitly, however, as well as to analyze more rigorously whether and to what extent those axioms are compatible with each other. Furthermore, to assess and choose between competing claims, it would be useful to have a criterion for social evaluation that satisfies the relevant axioms and that orders all possible distributions in a consistent manner. In this article, we introduce axioms of impartiality, efficiency, ex post egalitarianism, and social rationality under severe uncertainty, and address the issue of their compatibility. We then characterize a social evaluation criterion, statewise maximin, by those axioms.3

Although we focus on cases of severe uncertainty, our results show that axiomatization is invaluable in determining what kind of value pluralism is promising as an egalitarian theory. As Iwao Hirose has argued in a different but related context, pluralist theories are often unclear about how many principles they include and/or to what extent those principles are (in)compatible with each other.4 An axiomatic analysis can address these issues—through axiomatic characterization, we can spell out a normative criterion of pluralist egalitarianism.

The argument in this article proceeds as follows. Section II presents our basic framework. Section III specifies the principles of egalitarianism, impartiality, and social rationality. Section IV argues that a standard efficiency axiom under uncertainty, ex ante Pareto, is not compelling, and substitutes another axiom, Pareto for equal or no risk. Section V addresses statewise maximin and its axiomatic representation. Section VI presents some brief concluding remarks. The Appendix lays out a formal analysis.

In this article, we argue that least-developed countries (LDCs) should be treated as a distinct group from developing countries within theories of international justice generally, and theories of trade justice more specifically. While authors within the trade justice literature occasionally make passing reference to LDCs’ entitlement to special favourable treatment from other states, they say little about what form this treatment should take, and how such entitlements relate to the obligations and entitlements of their trade partners, both developed and developing. This oversight is untenable because it overlooks the significantly different needs that LDCs have compared to developing countries with respect to the economic opportunities afforded by international markets. Moreover, by grouping states into the binary categories of developed and developing (or rich and poor), trade justice theorists have ended up obscuring and passing over a fundamental conflict between least-developed and developing countries’ interests, the weighing of which should be central to any complete normative evaluation of the trade regime.

The article proceeds as follows. In Section II, we introduce the category of least-developed countries, a category which is recognized as a basis for differential treatment of states within the global trade regime and the international order more broadly, but which is typically subsumed by political philosophers into the larger category of ‘developing countries’. We relate this neglect of the distinctive features and needs of LDCs to two broader shortcomings which characterize much of the philosophical literature on trade justice, shortcomings which we seek to overcome in our subsequent discussion of LDCs’ trade-based entitlements. In Section III, we argue that developed countries, as well as some of the wealthier and larger developing countries, have a duty to help remedy the extreme immiseration characteristic of life within LDCs by actively diverting trade flows towards LDCs. We suggest that they ought to do so by committing to ensuring that a certain minimum percentage of their imports come from LDCs. We label this proposal the ‘LDC quota’. In Section IV we note that wide adoption of an LDC quota would foreseeably harm some developing countries, some of which are themselves very badly off. Nevertheless, we argue that in the absence of better alternatives this does not undermine the basic case for diverting trade towards LDCs. We then raise and refute several objections that affected developing countries may have to the LDC quota. All told, this article presents both a novel conceptualization of the problems of trade justice, and a promising proposal for how states ought to act upon their duties to LDCs.

In the last decade or so, philosophers writing on international justice have increasingly shifted their focus away from big-picture debates about the international order as a whole towards normative analysis of specifi

It is a common view that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories. Following Herman Cappelen, we may refer to this view as centrality.1 Advocates of centrality typically assume that claims about cases (henceforth, case verdicts) are treated as evidence for and against philosophical theories because of their intuitiveness. On the basis of their examination of prominent philosophers’ use of cases, however, critics of centrality, like Cappelen and Max Deutsch, claim that philosophers argue for case verdicts, and take that to suggest that advocates of centrality are mistaken in their assumption that the intuitiveness of the verdicts plays an epistemic role.2 I’ll refer to these critics as “intuition deniers.”3 The intuition deniers’ rejection of centrality has launched a considerable debate over the nature of the philosophical method and the role of intuitions in philosophical argument.

This article contributes to that debate by investigating cases from a genre of philosophy—political philosophy—that has not been the main focus so far. Within this branch (and within moral philosophy more generally), not only has it been claimed that intuitions are treated as evidence,4 but some claim that not doing so would leave the prospects of the discipline quite bleak.5 I respond to the challenge of providing positive evidence for centrality—a challenge posed by Cappelen6—by developing an analytical framework. This framework will also help develop a common response to the intuition deniers’ arguments: that they mistake abductive arguments—in which case verdicts function as premises that support a theoretical account—for arguments that support case verdicts.

I examine cases from two influential articles in which some of the first attempts to formulate different versions of luck egalitarianism were made: Ronald Dworkin’s “What Is Equality? Part 1” and Gerald A. Cohen’s “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice.”7 I argue that a close examination of these articles indicates that their authors do treat intuitions as evidence. Both Dworkin and Cohen treat case verdicts as starting points for abductive arguments and use intuition-terminology (“intuition,” “intuitively,” and cognate terms) to express or to refer to these verdicts. I argue that the conjunction of these two observations constitutes positive evidence that they treat intuitions as evidence.

Cohen and Dworkin are viewed as being among the most influential thinkers in the literature on justice, and their discussion of expensive tastes is viewed as one of the most important debates in 1980s and 1990s political philosophy. Many regard them as two of the principal luck egalitarian thinkers.8 Due to their influence and importance, examining these articles is interesting in and of itself. Moreover, I think the current inquiry is of general interest. If centrality is false, we would not expect to find that intuitions figure as central evidence in influential co