Welfare

Ever since the Harsanyi-Sen debate, it is controversial whether someone's welfare should be measured by her von-Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) utility, for instance when analysing welfare intensity, social welfare, interpersonal welfare comparisons, or welfare inequality. We prove that natural working hypotheses lead to a different welfare measure. It addresses familiar concerns about VNM utility, by faithfully capturing non-ordinal welfare features such as welfare intensity, despite resting on purely ordinal evidence such as revealed preferences or self-reported welfare comparisons. Using this welfare measure instead (...) of VNM utility alters social welfare analysis -- for instance, Harsanyi's `utilitarian theorem' now effectively supports prioritarianism. VNM utility is shown to be a hybrid object, determined by an interplay of two factors: welfare and attitude to intrinsic risk, i.e., to risk in welfare rather than outcomes. (shrink)

Many fields (social choice, welfare economics, recommender systems) assume people express what benefits them via their 'revealed preferences'. Revealed preferences have well-documented problems when used this way, but are hard to displace in these fields because, as an information source, they are simple, universally applicable, robust, and high-resolution. In order to compete, other information sources (about participants' values, capabilities and functionings, etc) would need to match this. I present a conception of values as *attention policies resulting from constitutive judgements*, and (...) use it to build an alternative preference relation, Meaningful Choice, which retains many desirable features of revealed preference. (shrink)

We develop new experimental paradigms for measuring welfare in language models. We compare verbal reports of models about their preferences with preferences expressed through behavior when navigating a virtual environment and selecting conversation topics. We also test how costs and rewards affect behavior and whether responses to an eudaimonic welfare scale - measuring states such as autonomy and purpose in life - are consistent across semantically equivalent prompts. Overall, we observed a notable degree of mutual support between our measures. The (...) reliable correlations observed between stated preferences and behavior across conditions suggest that preference satisfaction can, in principle, serve as an empirically measurable welfare proxy in some of today's AI systems. Furthermore, our design offered an illuminating setting for qualitative observation of model behavior. Yet, the consistency between measures was more pronounced in some models and conditions than others and responses were not consistent across perturbations. Due to this, and the background uncertainty about the nature of welfare and the cognitive states (and welfare subjecthood) of language models, we are currently uncertain whether our methods successfully measure the welfare state of language models. Nevertheless, these findings highlight the feasibility of welfare measurement in language models, inviting further exploration. (shrink)

Technological visionaries often paint a future powered by clean energy, yet these optimistic visions tend to overlook the messy socio-political realities of such transitions. As A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press) powerfully illustrates, there is a vast difference between a so-called ‘just’ transition and one that is genuinely just. This book offers a much-needed, thought-provoking, and meticulously documented exploration of how political and business leaders can ensure fairness for all stakeholders—especially vulnerable workers (...) and their communities—as the world shifts toward a carbon-free future. -/- "As time passes, news about the now hotter Earth buzzes through the bird village. Those kingfishers residing along the banks of the Red River often report drying riverbeds and skinny fish. As Kingfisher casts his gaze upon the events that have unfolded, he can’t help but feel a sense of unease creeping up within him. He decides to collect all the scientific information concerning climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. An elite squad with a unique talent for gathering vital information is formed for emergency information collection." -In GHG emissions, Wild Wise Weird: The Kingfisher Story Collection, Vuong (2025)- . (shrink)

This article defends informed preference satisfaction theories of welfare against the most influential objections put forward in the economic and philosophy of science literatures. The article explicates and addresses in turn: the objection from inner rational agents; the objection from unfeasible preference reconstruction; the objection from dubious normative commitments; the objection from conceptual ambiguity; and the objection from conceptual replacement. My defence does not exclude that preference satisfaction theories of welfare face significant conceptual and practical challenges. Still, if correct, it (...) demonstrates that philosophers/welfare economists are justified in relying on specific versions of such theories, namely informed preference satisfaction theories. (shrink)

Classical liberals have a long and convoluted history with the welfare state. Welfare policy has engaged liberals ever since the debates round poor relief, land ownership, and distributive justice in authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. However, the majority of the welfare state debate, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, has been conducted primarily on the basis of rule-consequentialist reasoning, weighing the expected (long-term) costs and benefits of different institutional (...) rules. Classical liberals tend to be primarily concerned with welfare in the “happiness of individuals” sense and only secondarily with welfare in the “government handout” sense. This necessitates an investigation into the expected benefits and costs of various institutional rules and social policies. As a result, any disagreements about the best institutional pathway forward must be settled through comparative institutional analysis. Today, it seems to me that the classical liberal perspective must choose between two alternative pathways, each of which has its pros and cons, and each of which seems compatible with the abstract and general rules of the market society: 1) The Minimally Redistributive State based on a classical liberal constitution supported by robust market institutions and a civil society mosaic of polycentric mutual aid networks; or 2) The Welfare State of Law which, in addition to all of the above, adds a few carefully rule-bound and market-conforming redistributive mechanisms, the most important of which is the robust guarantee of something like a conditional minimum income scheme or an unconditional UBI/NIT scheme. In addition, the 3) “Third Way” models of the Social Market Economy and the Free Market Welfare State are also sometimes included as a third option. (shrink)

The harm principle entails the subprinciple that harm to others provides a pro tanto moral reason for legal or social coercion. We address a ‘scope problem’ for that subprinciple: how can what counts as harm be restricted sufficiently, without sacrificing extensional adequacy, to protect the harm principle’s liberal credentials? While recognizing the centrality of such basic liberties as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of movement to any liberalism worthy of the name, a satisfactory solution to the scope (...) problem must secure a distinction between conduct that harms others and conduct that, while it might negatively affect others (casually or relationally), does not harm them. We ground such a distinction in a further distinction between needs and attitudes. (shrink)

Im this paper I argue that Rawls distinguishes two different ways in which a system can be inconsistent with justice as fairness. The first concerns those systems that are based on principles that simply deny justice as fairness, as in the case of capitalism. The second concerns systems that, while pursuing aims similar to those of justice as fairness, are structured in ways that cause them to work very differently from their intended aims. Following Esping-Andersen’s identification of different “worlds” of (...) welfare states, I will show which specific kind of welfare state falls under Rawls’s first argument. (shrink)

This article presents a new argument against many forms of moral and prudential value incompleteness. The argument relies on two central principles: (i) a weak "negative dominance" principle, to the effect that Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2, and (ii) a weak form of ex ante Pareto, to the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better (stochastically dominant) prospect to some (...) individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2. Given modest auxiliary assumptions, these two principles rule out incompleteness in the prudential ranking of individual lives, and many forms of incompleteness in the moral rankings of outcomes and lotteries. (shrink)

This is the first book to investigate the nature and extent of artificial intelligence (AI) suffering risks. It argues that AI suffering risk is a serious near-term concern and analyzes approaches for addressing it. AI systems are currently treated as mere objects, not as bearers of moral standing whose wellbeing may matter in its own right. However, we may soon create AI systems which are capable of suffering and thus have moral standing. This book examines the philosophy and science of (...) AI suffering risks. Its investigation is deeply grounded in philosophy of mind, comparative psychology, the science of consciousness, AI research, and applied AI ethics. The book has three primary goals: 1. It argues that there is a significant probability that we will soon create AI systems capable of suffering. 2. It presents the first systematic assessment of approaches for reducing AI suffering risks. 3. It provides a rigorous overview and discussion of the most important research and ideas on AI sentience, AI agency, and the grounds of moral status. -/- Saving Artificial Minds is essential reading for researchers and graduate students working on the philosophy or ethics of AI. (shrink)

This paper examines the challenges behavioural public policy faces in reconciling its interventions with liberal principles, as illustrated by Adam Oliver’s concept of “budging.” While “nudging,” a prominent application, aims to steer individuals towards better choices using subtle “choice architecture” tweaks, it has been criticized for its paternalism and potential for manipulation. As a purportedly non-paternalistic alternative, Adam Oliver proposed “budging,” which shifts the focus from the individual to regulating third parties (especially market actors) that exploit known cognitive biases for (...) profit. Oliver argues budging aligns with John Stuart Mill’s harm principle by preventing harm caused by others, specifically “behavioural externalities,” without dictating personal choices. This paper critically evaluates budging’s claim to non-paternalistic legitimacy within a Millian liberal framework, incorporating insights from Feinberg and Raz. It argues that budging often fails to escape paternalism, frequently becoming a form of ‘crypto-paternalism’: interventions justified with the non-paternalistic rationale of preventing third-party harm that nevertheless have the primary effect of steering an individual’s self-regarding choices. The core issue lies in the entanglement of regulating third-party exploitation (externalities) and influencing individual choices potentially affected by biases (internalities). Regulating exploitative practices inevitably steers individuals away from choices deemed suboptimal, which can be interpreted both paternalistically and non-paternalistically. The paper explores challenges related to defining exploitation versus legitimate catering, the difficulty in isolating non-paternalistic justifications, and the potential overlap with existing regulations. Ultimately, it concludes that while budging offers valuable insights, it struggles to cleanly separate itself from paternalism and requires further refinement to be fully compatible with robust liberal principles. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is often contrasted with egalitarianism, and sometimes rejected for its alleged neglect of egalitarian concerns. Utilitarians, it appears, do not care who gets what or how we relate to one another, so long as overall well-being is maximized. Egalitarians, on the other hand, prefer social arrangements in which the degree to which some have more than others, or that some are placed above others, is less. I argue, however, that utilitarianism should be considered an egalitarian theory. Real-world egalitarian movements (...) aim to reduce inequalities in wealth and hierarchical social relations. Utilitarianism, I argue, shares these aims, and does so in similar way to contemporary egalitarian theories. If I am right, utilitarianism should not be rejected for failing to be egalitarian, but engaged with as an egalitarian theory—and utilitarians should take egalitarian concerns seriously. (shrink)

There is a large and growing body of empirical work on people’s intuitions about distributive justice. In this paper, we investigate how well luck egalitarianism and desertism—the two normative approaches that appear to cohere well with people’s intuitions—are supported by more fine-grained findings in the empirical literature. The time is ripe for a study of this sort, as the positive literature on justice has blossomed over the last three decades. The results of our investigation are surprising. In three different contexts (...) (good option luck, good brute luck, and bad brute luck) in which the demands of luck egalitarianism and those of a mainstream desert-based view come apart, the latter carries the day. One ramification of these findings is that people’s intuitions about justice are moralized; that is, they appeal to particular conceptions of the good. Luck egalitarians must decide whether to embrace these moralized intuitions by adopting desertism—or to resist them. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the philosophical underpinnings of current experimental investigation into animal affect-related decision-making. Animals’ affective states are standardly operationalised by linking positively valenced states with “approach” behaviours and negatively valenced states with “avoidance” behaviours. While this operationalisation has provided a helpful starting point to investigate the ecological role of animals’ internal states, there is extensive evidence that valenced and motivational states do not always neatly align, namely, instances where “liking” does not entail “wanting” (and vice versa). To address (...) this limitation, this paper proposes the (re-)integration of dominance as a dimension of affect. In particular, I argue that dominance, construed as a measure of organisms’ self-assessed behavioural control, can provide the necessary nuance to understand animal affect-related decision-making. Thus, after addressing the theoretical and methodological challenges related to incorporating dominance into a definition of “core affect”, this paper introduces the “Valence-Arousal-Dominance” model of animal affect. This model is explored for its potential applications in two domains. Firstly, in the study of animal affect-related decision-making under predation risk, and secondly, in the study of animal wellbeing. Through these applications, this model aims to bring experimental paradigms of animal affect-related behaviour closer to ecologically relevant scenarios. (shrink)

John Rawls was a major 20th-century political philosopher, and his work was animated by his loathing of the fact that many of the circumstances of human lives were due to fortune. Why should there be inequalities among men, he asked, that were produced by mere blind luck? To support his intuition, he came up with a version of social contract theory built around the device of the "original position." We imagine that people gather up for a discussion of what social (...) institutions are best, but they forget, in order not to be swayed by their own personal interests, who they are in the actual society. They do not know their religion, social position, wealth and income, their particular ends, or anything else that might prejudice their judgment. Under this veil of ignorance, they – or rather the philosopher who is shattered into numerous ghostly persons – seek to come to an agreement regarding the just basic structure of society. This book demolishes Rawls' every argument in support of his egalitarianism and shows that the original position, to the extent that it is not completely sterile, outputs libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism. It defends the view of justice as either a virtue or a legal system that promotes harmony and progress in human affairs. (shrink)

Intellectual property (IP) can internalize positive externalities associated with the creation and discovery of ideas, thereby increasing investment in efforts to create and discover ideas. However, IP law also causes negative externalities. Strict IP rights raise the transaction costs associated with consuming and building on existing ideas. This causes a tragedy of the anticommons, in which valuable resources are underused and underdeveloped. By disincentivizing creative projects that build on existing ideas, IP protection, even if it increases original innovation, can inadvertently (...) reduce the rate of iterative innovation. The net effect of IP law on innovation and welfare depends on the relative magnitude of these positive and negative externalities. We argue that the current regime probably suffers from excessive, and excessively rigid, IP protection. This motivates the search for institutional alternatives and complements. We suggest that a monocentric IP rights regime may not be the only, or the most efficient, way to internalize the positive externalities of innovation. The knowledge economy supports the emergence of diverse, polycentric forms of bottom-up self-governance, both market and community led, that entail the citizen coproduction of the norms and practices of intellectual creation and discovery. (shrink)

Liberal-minded basic income scholars often argue that UBI has two key properties that work together to justify it. Let us call these the freedom justification and the narrative justification. On the one hand, UBI is defended because it gives people more freedom to do what they want to do. (Stigler, 1946, Friedman, 1962; Van Parijs, 1995; Widerquist, 2013) They exhibit primary concern for the purely formal properties of the regime of liberal neutrality. On the other hand, many scholars, including many (...) of the same liberal scholars, argue that UBI also pushes society substantively towards desirable social outcomes. They combine the freedom justification with substantive predictions and expectations. (Rifkin, 1995; Murray, 2016; Weeks, 2020) However, I show that both existentialist philosophy (Sartre) and complexity theory (Knight, Hayek, Schumpeter) suggest that a liberal social order is compatible, at best, with rough pattern prediction about a multiply realizable future that remains narratively open to multiple possible trajectories. Liberal neutrality, to the extent that it nourishes radical freedom, is incompatible with strong, stable narrative predictions. As Nozick put, it “liberty upsets patterns”. This is true of all liberal UBI models, and liberal institutions in general. (shrink)

Welfarism is the view that individual welfare is the only thing that matters. One important contribution of social choice theory has been to provide a precise formulation and axiomatic characterization of welfarism using Amartya Sen's framework of social welfare functionals. This paper is motivated by the observation that the standard formalization of welfarism is too restrictive, since a welfarist social planner need not be committed to maximizing a preference ordering or any other binary relation over alternatives. We therefore provide a (...) characterization of welfarism in a more general choice-functional setting and show that welfarism, so understood, carries no commitment to rationalizability. This characterization is compatible with welfare values having any structure whatsoever. It also sheds light on different formulations of anonymity, revealing only some of these to be fundamental requirements of impartiality. (shrink)

According to Joseph Heath, privatizations should be judged on a case-by-case basis with appeal to the Pareto criterion. This approach, or so I argue, amounts to a depoliticization of privatization. While Heath’s approach is effective and at times illuminating, I show that a consistent application of his methodology is self-defeating in that it eventually requires a politicization of privatization. With appeal to transaction cost theory, I show there are social costs associated with affirming the competitive pressures of the market. Subsequently, (...) I argue that while private actors may, according to Heath, pursue efficiency with appeal to an adversarial morality, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are much more constrained in how they may achieve such gains. Due to the pressures of liberal neutrality, SOEs may chase efficiency only without setting actors back. Conversely, the private sector’s potential for success is predicated on its ability to compete for Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, which specifically allows for win-lose interactions. While SOEs are often no more able than the private sector to achieve Pareto optima, this discrepancy makes it so that SOEs produce gains that are ex-ante lower but more equal, whereas the private sector produces gains that are ex-ante higher but more unequal. Thus, the social cost of affirming the competitive pressures of the market is ex-ante inequality. If this premise is accepted, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that a consistent case-by-case approach requires a structural, political view on how privatizations affect the state’s ex-post Pareto-enhancing abilities. (shrink)

How can libertarianism—which is thought to be hostile to any redistribution—support universal, unconditional cash transfers in the form of a Basic Income? Surprisingly, many vocal proponents of programmes similar to Basic Income—such as economist Milton Friedman, public intellectual Charles Murray, and eBay co-founder Pierre Omidiyar—are self-described libertarians. As this chapter demonstrates, these and other libertarian proponents are not deviating from libertarian thought: instead, they reflect the nuance and diversity of its theoretical foundations. To that end, this chapter explores several justifications (...) for a Basic Income grounded in libertarianism. By libertarianism, we mean a family of theories that emphasize the right of the individual to be free from coercion, a strong respect for private property rights and the free market, and a presumption that market distributions are just and should be disturbed only in limited circumstances. We argue that each variant of libertarianism justifies, but does not mandate, redistribution, although for differing reasons and at different levels. Because this conclusion runs counter to most readers’ impressions of libertarianism, this chapter focuses on making the libertarian case for redistribution. We further show that once one accepts the case for redistribution, providing such redistribution through unrestricted, unconditional cash transfers best reflects core libertarian principles. (shrink)

What does effective poverty relief entail? How are we to assess the capacity of advanced industrialized societies to solve the problem of poverty? What role, if any, is left for the welfare state? This chapter argues that poverty relief, far from being primarily a matter of post hoc redistribution, primarily consists in a Hayekian-Schumpeterian discovery (or innovation) procedure whereby the problems of the poor are continuously discovered, identified, and eventually solved from the bottom up. This suggests new avenues for reform. (...) I argue, from the point of view of complexity theory, that governments must overcome knowledge and governance problems that limit their competence in the realm of solving the problems of the poor. As a result, any efficient system of poverty relief is unlikely to emerge from imposing an efficient and equitable top-down delivery of given goods and services based on established practices or preferences. The knowledge of what goods and services are required, and what practices should be modified to produce them, is not given to policy makers; it needs to be discovered. And this discovery is best modeled as an entrepreneurial, inquisitive, and experimental process. This process is best understood by applying complexity theory and the Austrian (Hayekian) epistemic paradigm. (shrink)

In his insightful book, Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier (2021) convincingly shows that the legitimacy and sustainability of liberal democratic institutions are dependent upon the maintenance of social and institutional trust. This insight, I believe, has value beyond the illustrious halls of post-Rawlsian, post-Gausian thought. Indeed, while I remain skeptical towards some of the premises of public reason liberalism, I am convinced that any liberal democratic political philosopher who takes the trust literature seriously and who has made their (...) (pragmatic or principled) peace with redistribution has good reasons to sympathize with the general outlines of the institutional palette that emerges out of his book. In this article, I will take for granted Vallier’s assumption that the erosion of social and institutional trust is a serious problem. This motivates investigating the trust-bearing attributes of the redistributive welfare state and the “principle of social insurance” that underpins it. I reconstruct and critically analyse Vallier’s case for a liberal democratic welfare state. I show that he makes a convincing public reason argument for universal social insurance but proceeds too hastily to exclude the principle of unconditionality from consideration. The rest of my paper consists of defending this claim by presenting two kinds of arguments— empirical and theoretical—that I think public reason liberals like Vallier, according to their own commitments, should be motivated to incorporate into their comprehensive discussion of the public justifications for and against basic income. They will show that Universal Basic Income (UBI), although it remains contentious, has some features that could appeal to a diverse citizenry, and thus tilt the balance of public reason judgments towards UBI. (shrink)

Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...) one another or in sequence, and of evaluatively basic propositions via conjunction. All of these proposals turn out to carry highly controversial commitments about the good. I do not claim that these commitments are unacceptable. But they suggest that we cannot simply take for granted, as many philosophers do, that there is any such thing as the sum of well-being. (shrink)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, (...) we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

The theory of interventionism of the Austrian School of Economics explains the successes and failures of the transformation processes in Central and Eastern European countries and offers a deep insight into contemporary economic phenomena. Three decades have passed since the collapse of communism that precipitated the economic transformation of these countries. This book describes the Austrian view of socialism and in such a context explains the transformational success of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, it shows that the (...) theory of interventionism has not lost its relevance, and the theory itself-along with its modifications-may be used to explain current economic events. The book is divided into four sections. The first part presents the Austrian perspective on socialism; the second discusses a new approach to the Austrian theory of interventionism, suggesting that the theory should be revised and that its scope should be extended beyond the transformation of the 1990s into the realm of contemporary economic reality; the third part is oriented towards pragmatic considerations, whereby the authors employ the Austrian perspective to analyze specific factors that, according to their view, had an impact on the transformational success of post-communist countries; while the final part is ideological and philosophical in character. Here the authors search for certain principia that govern broadly understood social and economic transformations. The book is addressed to those interested in the Austrian School of Economics and the political transformation of the 1990s, as well as those who wish to understand contemporary economic trends. (shrink)

Tourism is one of the socio-economic trends that significantly contributes to the shift of the planetary system into the Anthropocene regime. At the same time, it is also a socio-cultural practice characteristic of the imperial mode of living, or consumerism. Thus, it is a form of commodification of nature, also a way of deepening social inequalities between a privileged minority of the global population and an exploited majority providing services to those whose socio-economic status allows them to travel for fun (...) and commoditised “experience”. This is not an inevitable activity, an activity in which environmental costs (carbon footprint, water footprint, energy consumption, and waste production) are necessary to ensure the basic resources of life. Tourism is therefore a form of luxury consumption. For any tourism model to be, not only, environmentally sustainable but also socially just, or at least acceptable, it would have to be accessible to all people. Ecotourism should also have to meet the criterion of a solidarity mode of living referred to as sufficiency. This is hardly conceivable in the climatic, demographic, and political regime of the Anthropocene. The latter is likely to be characterized by, among other things, mass migration of climate or environmental refugees on the one hand and climate apartheid of the states of the global North on the other. Ecotourism, accessible to an even smaller proportion of the world`s population than the current mass tourism, will thus be more likely to accentuate the social and environmental inequalities of which it is already a significant manifestation. Therefore, the question is whether the concept of ecotourism is not just another manifestation of greenwashing, i.e. an attempt to legitimize economic, social, and cultural activities that devastate the social and environmental environment. (shrink)

This handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines and from around the world to examine the history, characteristics, effects, viability and implementation of basic income. The first edition of this book contributed a comprehensive treatment of multiple aspects of the basic income debate. This updated, expanded edition tackles new topics that are becoming increasingly prominent in the global debate. New chapters are devoted to recent research on the history of basic income; the development and peacemaking potential of basic income in (...) conflict zones; municipal experiments in the United States; requirements for pilot projects and experiments; and the public health implications of basic income. Existing chapters on the implementation of basic income have also been substantially updated to take account of new research on microsimulation, land value tax, local currencies, and blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, along with new material on the increasing use of opinion polls and the difficulties related to that. New political and ethical perspectives on the role of trade unions and their increasing engagement with the basic income debate are also introduced, while the section on pilot projects and experiments has been updated to cover recent political developments. Fully updated to reflect new global developments in the basic income debate, this handbook will be of interest to researchers, teachers and research-oriented policymakers in a range of fields. (shrink)

The paper analyses some parts of the GKN Industrial Plan. While not appearing to be an authentic industrial document, the tool performs a valuable narrative function of developing a political strategy to benefit the trade union groups that still operate within the factory. The plan that aims to demonstrate the existence of a different socially integrated factory model shows the need for radical change on a global scale. Through the definition of potential factory forms, the plan describes the potential economic (...) and financial transformations of the Florentine system, beginning with workers' democratic involvement in the production process. (shrink)

Politics never became a central intellectual interest of Murdoch’s, but she produced one important and visionary political essay in the ‘50’s, several popular writings on political matters, and a significant chapter in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that echoes throughout that book. In the 1958 “House of Theory,” she sees the welfare state as having almost entirely failed to address the deeper problems of capitalist society, including a failure to create the conditions for values she saw as central to (...) the socialist tradition—equality, absence of exploitation, meaningful work, and a sense of community. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch abandons the idea that moral ideals provide a guide to constructing a good society. She retains from her earlier work that the individual-moral domain is governed by perfectionism, but society cannot be. ‘Society must be thought of as a bad job to be made the best of’, for example, through the liberal idea of rights. Murdoch had a lifelong engagement with Marxism as a philosophy, introduced to her as a member of the Communist Party in the late ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and continuing through her subsequent long Labour period, and even when she moved to the Right in the Thatcher era. Marx and Marxism were always part of her mental universe, and she continued to work out what she agreed and disagreed with in it. (shrink)

The conditions of transport and slaughter at the end of their lives are a major challenge to the welfare of agricultural animals. • End-of-life experiences should be of a greater ethical concern than others of similar intensity and duration, due to their position in the animal’s life. • End-of-life welfare can have both internal importance to the animals and external ethical importance to human decision-makers. • We should pay extra care to ensure that the conditions during transport and slaughter are (...) as positive as possible. (shrink)

Nearly all large policy decisions influence not only the quality of life for existing individuals but also the number-and even identities-of yet-to-exist individuals. Accounting for these effects in a policy evaluation framework requires taking difficult stances on concepts such as the value of existence. These issues are at the heart of a literature that sits between welfare economics and philosophical population ethics. Despite the inherent challenges of these questions, this literature has produced theoretical insights and subsequent progress on variable-population welfare (...) criteria. A surprisingly bounded set of coherent alternatives exists for practitioners once a set of uncontroversial axioms is adopted from the better-studied welfare criteria for cases where populations are assumed to be fixed. Although consensus has not yet been reached among these remaining alternatives, their recommendations often agree. The space has been sufficiently restricted and well explored that applications of the theoretical insights are possible and underway in earnest. (shrink)

The mid-century object relations approach saw the category of schizoids as crucial to its own formation. Rooted in a developmental phase where the perception of the mother as a whole and real person had not yet been secured, the schizoid constitution impeded relationships and forced schizoids to communicate through a compliant persona while the kernel self remained isolated. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip thought that schizoid features underlay many other pathologies that earlier, Freudian psychoanalysis had misidentified. To correct this, a move (...) to the attachment-oriented theory was necessary, triggering the development of the object relations perspective as a distinct and independent approach. While playing this role in the development of object relations theory, the schizoid category also attracted a note of disapproval. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip described schizoids as harmful to society through their everyday actions and through the ideas they propagated. This judgemental nuance highlights an aspect of the alliance between object relations theory and the contemporary welfare state ideology. Culminating in the Beveridge plan, that ideology framed citizenship as comprehensive engagement with society on multiple levels. Citizenship was not just a political activity but also a personally rewarding one, as it allowed expression to each person’s wishes in ways that benefited others. Inability to engage and be rewarded in this way marked obstinate classes and produced rigid and conservative ideologies that opposed the welfare state. Object relations theory described the schizoid condition along similar lines and castigated its consequences for similar reasons. (shrink)

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a potential way in which welfare states could be made more responsive to the ever-shifting evolutionary challenges of institutional adaptation in a dynamic environment. It has been proposed as a tool of “real freedom” (Van Parijs) and as a tool of making the welfare state more efficient. (Friedman) From the point of view of complexity theory and evolutionary economics, I argue that only a welfare state model that is “polycentrically” (Polanyi, Hayek) organized (...) as an evolving network of distributed decision-making can respond to the challenges of complexity in an adaptively efficient manner. UBI has the theoretical possibility to facilitate flexible, bottom-up innovation, since a) it embodies the “rule of law” principles of generality, nondiscrimination, simplicity, and transparency, and b) it grants people widespread freedom to experiment, innovate, and deviate from established practices and norms; but whether it can be made to work as intended depends on a number of variables in its design. I situate my research in the contemporary UBI debate around automation and technological development, which I interpret creatively through the lens of contemporary evolutionary political economy. I advance a syncretic model of institutional design based upon the shared insights of the Santa Fe, Neo-Hayekian, and Neo-Schumpeterian schools of evolutionary economics that, following Adam Thierer and Michael Munger, I call the framework of Permissionless Innovation (PI). Under the PI framework, which is a development of the tradition of evolutionary liberalism (Hume, Smith, Mandeville, Mill, Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter, Hodgson), individuals are granted the default right to innovate without having to ask for permission, and the right to basic income, which they can use to support their right to innovate, mutate, and experiment. This framework is a liberal framework to the extent it relies on widespread human freedom as a means of fostering innovation and social learning. And it is an evolutionary framework to the extent that it seeks to facilitate evolutionary socioeconomic processes for the sake of social progress and welfare advancement. I proceed to show, through an analysis of how innovation operates in both the economy and the cultural domain, that UBI can be used as an important cornerstone of an evolutionary liberal model of “ecostructural” governance that treats the socioeconomic order as an ecological garden of spontaneous growths, adaptations, and innovations. I call this the Permissionless Innovation Universal Basic Income (PIUBI) framework. In it, the right to innovate, deviate, and mutate is upheld as the “gold standard” of institutional design whereby individuals are granted widespread freedoms combined with the provision of UBI and other innovation-fostering (carefully bound) services and regulations. In the coming decades, UBI may even enable poor people to take better advantage of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) and other experimental innovations. Such a framework is compatible with a fast pace of evolutionary development, but the regulatory model accompanying such a framework must be capable of responding to evolutionary lock-ins, maladaptive innovations, self-destructive behaviour on the part of UBI recipients, and the management of catastrophic and existential risks. In the end, I will have shown that the PIUBI framework can be justified as a plausible default institutional mechanism for responding to radical uncertainty, but it needs to be experimentally adapted to changing circumstances with the help of various situation-specific, polycentric, multi-level, approaches. (shrink)

A review of Thomas Piketty's book "A Brief History of Equality" (2021).

The notion of social welfare was created by the paradigm shift from duty‐based to right‐based morality, in which the satisfaction of human needs is a right in line with preserving human dignity. This paper investigates Kant’s view on social welfare in light of redistribution policy. Kant bases his political philosophy on external freedom. Notwithstanding the ethical principles of his philosophy, he is the first prominent thinker to clearly emphasize the necessity of a redistribution policy by the government toward providing for (...) the needs of the poor and the needy. The important question remaining is whether or not the Kantian ideas of external freedom and redistribution for the sake of satisfying the right to social welfare can reach a compromise. It seems that Kant believes the redistribution policy to be not the right of the poor to be provided welfare by the state, but the right of the state, and as such, the states' right to task the people with providing for the welfare of the poor. Such a policy challenges the freedom of the wealthier class and apparently leads to an inconsistency between the two pillars of Kant’s sociopolitical philosophy. The current paper aims to find Kant’s response to this challenge by referring to his scattered arguments. (shrink)

Ordinary private property rights to things like land and money are typically assumed to be permanent. In contrast, intellectual property (IP) rights usually have term limits. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks all expire by default sometime after they’re formed. I argue that ordinary property (OP) should be more like IP. Certain types of private property rights should be subject to term limits, and after expiration the property should enter a tangible public domain. First, I define private property. Second, I argue the (...) purpose of private property rights is to facilitate access to resources, goods, and services. Conceptions of private property which undermine such access are unjustified. Third, I argue that term limits and the public domain help IP rights fulfill their purpose and could do the same for OP rights. Fourth, I consider specific policy proposals which would put term limits into practice. Finally, I raise and counter potential objections. (shrink)

The practice of philanthropy, which releases private property for public purposes, represents in many ways the best angels of our nature. But this practice's noteworthy virtues often obscure the fact that philanthropy also represents the exercise of private power. In The Tyranny of Generosity, Theodore Lechterman shows how this private power can threaten the foundations of a democratic society. The deployment of private wealth for public ends may rival the authority of communities to determine their own affairs. And, in societies (...) characterized by wide disparities in wealth, philanthropy often combines with background inequalities to make public decisions overwhelmingly sensitive to the preferences of the rich. Allowing private wealth to dictate social outcomes collides with core commitments of a democratic society, a society in which people are supposed to determine their common affairs together, on equal terms. But why exactly is democracy valuable? How should these values be weighed against the liberty of donors and the many social benefits that philanthropy promises? Lechterman explores these questions by examining various topics in the practice of philanthropy: the respective roles of philanthropy and government, public subsidies for private giving, the use of donations for political speech, instruments of perpetual giving, the rise in giving by commercial corporations, and effective altruism as a guide for individual giving. These studies build to a surprising conclusion: realizing the democratic ideal may be impossible without philanthropy--but making philanthropy safe for democracy also requires fundamental changes to policy and practice. (shrink)

As a response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments have turned to various discretionary measures such as cash transfers to consumers and businesses with mixed results. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is back on the agenda as well. One of the main advantages of UBI, as scholars like F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James M. Buchanan have argued, is that it does not depend upon competent and benevolent government discretion—which is often in short supply—but upon pre-established rules. This paper argues that the (...) UBI scheme holds tentative promise from the point of view of improving the institutional crisis preparedness of a complex socioeconomic order. The pre-established rules of UBI buttress the rule of law framework that improves the ability of economic agents to spontaneously coordinate their actions in times of crisis characterized by radical uncertainty, disequilibrium shocks, and institutional instability. Furthermore, UBI combines the distribution of fungible resources with the delegation of independent decision-making power to millions of crisis-struck individuals and communities. Compared to discretionary tax-and-transfer schemes, the rules of UBI therefore appear more compatible with the polycentric discovery of novel solutions from the bottom-up. In times of crisis, UBI may be relied upon as one cornerstone of what I shall call the permanent crisis management framework. Having such a permanent scheme may minimize - although it does not altogether eliminate - the need for discretionary transfers, targeted intervention, and technocratic management in times of crisis. However, this theoretical model of UBI as a facilitator of polycentric crisis preparedness faces several practical challenges that need to be addressed in further research. (shrink)

*Taxation in Utopia" by Donald Morris makes a valuable contribution to social theory. It offers new taxonomies of actual and potential social schemes according to their diabolically creative sacrificial impositions. Perhaps the main reason to celebrate Morris’s contribution is its ability to provide insightful parallels between pecuniary and nonpecuniary “required sacrifices.” Utopian literature is rife with—indeed inseparable from—demands of sacrifice for the sake of the collective good. Morris reminds us that the full cost of Utopian schemes is measured not in (...) monetary value alone, but in the loss of freedoms, dignity, privacy, autonomy, etc. At the same time, a comprehensive analysis should also take full account of the positive side of the Utopian social calculus. It is not enough to condemn the sacrifices; one also needs to appraise the positive achievements. (shrink)

In a number of works, James M. Buchanan set out a proposal for a ‘demogrant’— a form of universal basic income that applied the principles of generality and non discrimination to the tax and the transfer sides of the scheme and was to be implemented as a constitutional rule outside the realm of day-to-day politics. The demogrant has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, but this article locates it in Buchanan’s broader constitutional political economy project and shows it was a logical (...) application of his theoretical framework to the problem of inefficient and unfair welfare systems when reform to the basic institutions of majoritarian democracy was not forthcoming. The demogrant aims to end the problems of majority cycling and rent seeking that plague contemporary welfare states and therefore offers a model of welfare without rent seeking—a constitutional welfare state. We compare Buchanan’s demogrant model to other universal basic income and negative income tax models and consider the most important criticisms. We conclude that rescuing the demogrant model from relative obscurity would be a fruitful future task of applied constitutional political economy and public choice. (shrink)

This article is a review of the contemporary ‘leftist’ republican project. The project stands on two legs, and we examine them both in turn. The first leg is a novel reading of history. This reading suggests, on the one hand that, contrary to some popular assumptions, republicanism does have a leftist, even a radical stream. But on the other hand, it also suggests that several authors and movements that did not self-identify as republicans actually did, in fact, employ a characteristically (...) republican thinking. The second leg of the project is a normative one. It is essentially an attempt by political philosophers to demonstrate that there is something in republican theory from which all these leftist, even radical streams spring forth. Primarily, it is suggested that it is republicanism’s sensitivity to the freedom-restricting role of great inequalities of power that provides the normative resource for the development of a characteristically republican critique of capital and capitalism. We briefly review the main arguments in favor of these claims, and also, as a conclusion, raise a few challenges that the ‘leftist’ republican project potentially faces. (shrink)

When reflecting on human need as a moral-political category, it is natural to include some intersubjective conditions. Surely, children need to be socialized, adults need to be recognized, and the poor need to be given certain resources. I point out that there are two different respects in which such intersubjective factors could be considered needs. On the one hand, they might be needed roughly for their own sake, that is, for exemplifying relational values such as caring for others and sharing (...) a way of life with them. On the other hand, those intersubjective conditions might be needed for the realization of intrinsic values distinct from them, such as autonomy, biological health, or the absence of pain. After spelling out this intrinsic/relational way of valuing intersubjectivity, I provide reason to take seriously the characteristically African idea that we need others in our lives largely because certain ways of relating are valuable as ends and not merely as means to intrinsic goods. I also argue that acknowledging that we need others for such relational considerations would affect public policy in revealing and plausible ways, specifically with respect to poverty, employment, education, and the fourth industrial revolution. (shrink)

The proposal on offer is a radical form of egalitarianism. Under it, each citizen receives the same income, regardless of profession or indeed whether he or she works or not. This proposal is bad for two reasons. First, it is inefficient. It would eliminate nearly all incentive to work, thereby shrinking national income and leaving all citizens poorly off (albeit equally poorly off). I illustrate this inefficiency via an indifference curve analysis. Second, the proposal would be regarded as unjust by (...) almost everyone. The empirical work on justice makes this plain. Equal pay for equal work is desirable; equal pay no matter what is something else entirely. It is an idea not likely to find adherents. (shrink)

This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any one (...) of the premises. I argue instead that Harsanyi was right: his theorem and its weighted-utilitarian conclusion do not require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. The key to making sense of this possibility is to treat Harsanyi's weights as dimensional constants rather than dimensionless numbers. (shrink)

Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in a population is “completely (...) ignorant” about which utility functions belong to which individuals. Lerner models this ignorance with a certain uniform probability distribution, and shows that, under certain further assumptions, income should be equally distributed. Much of the criticism of the relevance of Lerner’s result centers on the representation of ignorance involved. Imprecise probabilities provide a general framework for reasoning about various forms of uncertainty including, in particular, ignorance. To what extent can Lerner’s conclusion be maintained in this setting? (shrink)

We present a vignette study conducted with a quota sample of the German population (n = 400). Subjects had to redistribute a good between two hypothetical persons who contributed equally to the available amount but differed in quantity needed and the reason for their neediness. On a within-subjects level, we tested for the effects of need, accountability, and resource availability on their third-party distribution decisions. Between subjects, we further varied the kinds of needs: The persons either needed the good as (...) a means to survive, to live a decent life, to participate in society, or to be autonomous. Despite equal productivity, the mean share allocated to the needier person was significantly higher than an equal share. However, this share turned out significantly smaller when the needier person was accountable for needing more than the other. Nonetheless, even if accountable, the needier person still got a share larger than their contribution would suggest. When there was a surplus of resources, the needier person got an even higher share than when resources were scarce. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, David Faraci argues that the value of fairness can plausibly be appealed to in order to vindicate the view that consensual, mutually beneficial employment relationships can be wrongfully exploitative, even if employers have no obligation to hire or otherwise benefit those who are badly off enough to be vulnerable to wage exploitation. In this commentary, I argue that several values provide potentially strong grounds for thinking that it is at least sometimes better, morally (...) speaking, for employers to hire worse-off people at intuitively exploitative wages than to hire better-off people at intuitively fair wages. Rather than suggesting that hiring badly off people at intuitively exploitative wages is permissible, however, I suggest that this gives us reason to think that employers can be obligated to hire worse-off people rather than better-off people and to pay them nonexploitative wages. (shrink)