Egalitarian Justice Research Articles

Utilitarianism, Social Justice, and the Trolley Problem: An Ethical Theory without Egalitarian Morality

This article examines the implications of utilitarianism for social justice considering different cases of the trolley problem. Utilitarianism comprises a cluster of ethical theses, which have political and legal implications. In general, utilitarianism is assumed to augment the common good, such as pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, and utility, or to reduce pain, suffering, dissatisfaction, and disutility. The article investigates a key problem whether utilitarianism brings about social justice as a moral theory. In recent literature, many moral philosophers have developed several thought experiments, known as trolley problems, that help understand the utilitarian applications to social justice. Philippa Foot and others formulated several thought experiments to help explain the utilitarian difference between the maximum good and the minimum loss. Considering different cases of the trolley problem, I argue that utilitarianism does not do egalitarian justice to all people because it does not eliminate unjust inequalities in society. I hold that utilitarianism is an ethical theory without an egalitarian morality. John Rawls posited a landmark theory of social justice in contrast to the utilitarian notion of social justice. Utilitarianism does not provide social justice to the few, the minority, or the weak in the social world. So, utilitarianism is an inadequate moral theory for acquiring social justice. In qualitative research methodology, I adopt a method of an empirically informed philosophical analysis to examine documentary resources, including journal papers, academic books, and conferences and congresses.

Lifelong Educational and Decolonization Programs for the Batwa Indigenous People of Southwestern Uganda

This article is based on a study conducted among the Batwa Indigenous people in southwestern Uganda between 2021 and 2022. The study aimed to explore culturally relevant lifelong education and decolonization programs for the Batwa people. Using indigenous research methodology, 60 participants comprising of elders, parents, children and teachers were recruited from the Batwa community for the study. We used Egalitarian liberalism and justice in education (ELJE) theory as analytical framework. Key findings demonstrate that participants were conscious of the challenges faced by their community and collectively brainstormed practical redress measures. These measures include but are not limited to setting up an entrepreneurship education program, vocational and skilling programs, and promotion of Rutwa language. Besides, some specific Batwa life skills identified by participants are briefly described as imperative for integration in the schooling system to achieve the decolonization mission

Thomas Nagel’s Theory of Justice

Theories of justice have become the central theme of liberal philosophy over the past century. Among these, one devoted to the problem of global justice, which has come to be particularly relevant at the turn of the century, deserves particular attention. Among liberal theories of global justice numerous competing conceptions have emerged; they could be presented as three broad lines of argumentation: ‘moral cosmopolitanism’, ‘political cosmopolitanism’ and ‘statism’. Thomas Nagel’s Hobbesian conception of global justice has become one of the most influential ‘statist’ theories. Having used the key points of Hobbes’ theory, Nagel significantly modified his original ideas. This allowed him, first, to invoke the principles of egalitarian justice at the level of the state and, second, to argue that international relations are not the territory of a moral vacuum. These modifications led to a two-level theory of ethics in which justice can exist only in separate sovereign states while the requirements of minimal humanitarian morality apply at the supranational level. As a result, Nagel’s theory of justice at the level of the state proved to be highly logical and persuasive, as well as able to withstand criticism from its opponents; whereas the requirements of minimal humanitarian morality seemed inconsistent and unrelated to justice in separate sovereign states. This has led to an ambivalent attitude towards Nagel’s theory. This article focuses on Nagel’s theory of global justice and the debate surrounding his statist arguments. This article also offers further criticism of the problems and prospects of Nagel’s theory of global justice.

Political activism, egalitarian justice, and public reason

Political activism, egalitarian justice, and public reason

Liberal egalitarian justice in the distribution of a common output. Experimental evidence and implications for effective institution design – ERRATUM

Liberal egalitarian justice in the distribution of a common output. Experimental evidence and implications for effective institution design – ERRATUM

An egalitarian fortress? Global distributive justice and the EU

ABSTRACT This article offers an original political theory perspective on debates about EU integration and EU justice by discussing possible tensions with the demands of global justice. In particular, it asks whether global egalitarians can consistently argue for further European integration and for an egalitarian EU while maintaining that the scope of egalitarian justice should be global. After highlighting several tensions between EU equality and EU integration on the one hand, and global justice, on the other hand, it explores strategies available to global egalitarians to defend the focus on the EU. It concludes that global egalitarians can only have instrumental reasons to value the EU, and not any EU, nor merely a just EU; only the most instrumental to the realization of global justice, which can lead to different conclusions on EU integration or EU justice from the standardly assumed ones.

The Use of Fluorides in Public Health: 65 Years of History and Challenges from Brazil.

Untreated dental caries is the most common disease globally and fluoride use at the population level is crucial for its control. To investigate the economic and political conditions under which the trajectory of population-based fluoride use has occurred is key for a more comprehensive view on its current and future challenges. The objective was to give a brief history and summarize the information on the use of fluorides at the population level in Brazil from 1952 to 2017 and to point to current and future challenges. A critical overview was undertaken based on country-level analyses comprising political and economic conditions. The analytical approach adopted a set of premises applicable to the study of capitalist democracies. Fluoride methods of systemic and topic use began to be employed in Brazilian public health programs in the 1950s and in a combined way from 1974. Differences in political and economic contexts were highlighted for four periods: the first interventions from 1952 to 1974, when the fluoridated water law was approved; the expansion after 1974 until 1988, when a new constitution was enacted; the following time until 2010; and the final period. From the 1980s to 2008, water fluoridation coverage increased progressively, consolidating as a major strategy of systemic use in spite of inequalities among territories. Activities aimed to promote access to topical fluoride use increased and maintained stability until 2014, when they dropped sharply. Regulation of fluoride dentifrice’s quality remained insufficient. It was hypothesized that the strengthening of conservative liberalism and the increase in fiscal austerity observed in recent years might produce serious constraints on public investment and limit access to fluorides. To reduce inequities and promote benefits for all, including the most vulnerable groups, policies based on egalitarian and social justice theoretical perspectives are needed more than ever.

Robert Veatch’s transplantation ethics: obtaining and allocating organs from deceased persons

This essay appreciatively and critically engages the late Robert Veatch's extensive and important contributions to transplantation ethics, in the context of his overall ethical theory and his methods for resolving conflicts among ethical principles. It focuses mainly on ways to obtain and allocate organs from deceased persons, with particular attention to express donation, mandated choice, and presumed consent/routine salvaging in organ procurement and to conflicts between medical utility and egalitarian justice in organ allocation. It concludes by examining the unclear relations between Veatch's ideal moral theory and his nonideal moral theory, especially in organ allocation.

Liberal egalitarian justice in the distribution of a common output. Experimental evidence and implications for effective institution design

AbstractWe present an experiment that sets up a context of production of a common output obtained by using production means that are randomly and unequally distributed. Before the production phase, subjects must choose a distributive principle for the output division, under ignorance of the allocation of the production means. Subsequently, they make a distributive choice fully aware of their luck and performance. The aim of the experiment is to test, first, whether ordinary subjects in an impartial situation are capable of converging on a fair principle of distribution – able of redressing the arbitrariness of the initial production means allocation; and second, whether these same ordinary subjects are capable of actually following that principle in a real distributive choice that excludes coercion, reputation effects and other forms of social pressures. The main finding is that a distributive rule that redresses initial inequalities is both acceptedex-anteand actually appliedex-postby most individuals. Our conclusion is relevant for the issue of realism of normative theories of justice and the possibility of institution design aimed at implementing distributive justice principles and policies.

EQUALITY’S DEMANDS ARE REASONABLE

AbstractThere are various egalitarian moral doctrines. They differ in the requirements they impose on institutions and social practices and on individual conduct. This essay sketches two versions of egalitarian social justice and claims that the requirements they impose should strike us as reasonable, all things considered. One is welfarist egalitarianism, a cousin of classical utilitarianism. This version requires bringing about good quality lives for people and fair (equal) distribution of this good across persons. A notable feature of welfarist egalitarianism is that it accommodates the seemingly antiegalitarian claim that it does not matter in itself how one person’s condition compares to that of another, so a fortiori it does not matter in itself whether or not one person’s condition compares to that of others in the one particular way of being equal. The other version is relational or freedom-oriented egalitarianism, which holds that we should above all ensure that people are free to live as they choose and relate as equals, without social hierarchy. In the latter half of the twentieth century, John Rawls developed a powerful articulation of relational egalitarian justice. This essay sketches the two rival egalitarianisms with a view to showing their respective moral attractiveness and to suggesting that the welfarist version has greater moral attraction.

Knowing What Justice Means and Being Committed to It: Remarks on Allen Buchanan's Analysis of Conservative Factual Beliefs

ABSTRACTAllen Buchanan argues that a particular set of false factual beliefs, especially when part of a comprehensive ideology, can lead persons to develop ‘morally conservative’ convictions that stand in the way of realising justice even though these persons have a ‘firm grasp of correct principles of justice and a robust commitment to their realisation’. In my remarks, I raise some questions concerning the core argument: How ‘firm’ can a grasp of principles of justice be if a person is blind to the realities of injustice? And how ‘sincerely committed’ to justice can such an injustice‐insensitive person be? Alternatively: How firm is that grasp or commitment if one has a radically pessimistic view about human nature so that one does not believe that (egalitarian) justice can or could ever be realised? Secondly, I ask: If such ideologies or false beliefs are in play in reproducing injustice, do they not also ‘mask’ existing injustices?

Bayes factor testing of equality and order constraints on measures of association in social research

Measures of association play a central role in the social sciences to quantify the strength of a linear relationship between the variables of interest. In many applications researchers can translate scientific expectations to hypotheses with equality and/or order constraints on these measures of association. In this paper a Bayes factor test is proposed for testing multiple hypotheses with constraints on the measures of association between ordinal and/or continuous variables, possibly after correcting for certain covariates. This test can be used to obtain a direct answer to the research question how much evidence there is in the data for a social science theory relative to competing theories. The stand-alone software package ‘BCT’ allows users to apply the methodology in an easy manner. The methodology will also be available in the R package ‘BFpack’. An empirical application from leisure studies about the associations between life, leisure and relationship satisfaction and an application about the differences about egalitarian justice beliefs across countries are used to illustrate the methodology.

Egalitarian Trade Justice

Abstract This article begins by distinguishing between two approaches to egalitarian trade justice – the explicative approach and the applicative approach – and notes that the former has been used to defend conclusions that are less strongly egalitarian than those defended by advocates of the latter. The article then engages with the primary explicative account of trade egalitarianism – that offered by Aaron James – and argues that its egalitarian conclusions are unduly minimalistic. The aim of the article is not to criticize the explicative approach, but rather to show that the arguments and commitments of its best-known defender – James – either fail to rule out, or in fact positively support, more robustly egalitarian conclusions.

Rare diseases in healthcare priority setting: should rarity matter?

Rare diseases pose a particular priority setting problem. The UK gives rare diseases special priority in healthcare priority setting. Effectively, the National Health Service is willing to pay much more...

Treaties and re-setting the colonial relationship: Lessons for Australia from the Treaty of Waitangi

Colonial hegemony distinguishes relationships between the Australian state and Indigenous nations. British government was violently established and there was no accommodation with the Indigenous populations to allow settlement to proceed, as occurred through treaties in Canada and New Zealand. Indigenous arguments for treaties in Australia are, however, well established. Notwithstanding some Commonwealth and state and territory governments considering such agreements over the past 40 years, none have been concluded, and more modest forms of recognition have been alternatively proposed. In 2015, following extensive Indigenous advocacy, the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition appointed a Referendum Council to consult on an amendment to the Commonwealth Constitution to recognise Australia’s first peoples. The recommendation of a Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth telling and agreements to allow ‘coming together after a struggle’ suggested a transformative ambition beyond the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition’s expectations. Makarrata does not stipulate treaties as an ideal form of agreement, but in raising the possibility, the Council added to the concept’s political momentum. This article discusses the place of treaties in contemporary Australian discourse, including treaty negotiations that are in progress in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. It uses examples from New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi to discuss their possibilities and limits in Australia. From these examples, two overarching arguments are made. Firstly, that treaties are potentially transformative, not because they may settle historical grievances, but because their required mutual recognition of each party’s enduring political standing means that they define ongoing, just terms of association. Secondly, the substantively different political arrangements that they presume mean that they are not merely instruments of egalitarian justice and are instead concerned with the distribution of political authority – Indigenous authority over their affairs and through a distinctive and culturally contextualised state citizenship.

In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester

Reviewed by: In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester Akira Inoue Katrina Forrester. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 432. Cloth, $35.00. In the Shadow of Justice presents a powerful reconstruction of Anglophone political philosophy. Although the central focus of the book is on the origin and influence of John Rawls's theory of justice, it also uncovers the significance of British political theories (especially Brian Barry's theory) in ways that contrast them with the Rawlsian liberal egalitarian idea. The book is, thus, a work of intellectual history that engages with the traditions of normative political theories. By referring extensively to the literature of philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and the archived materials of Rawls, Katrina Forrester puts forward two provocative theses. First is that the core idea of Rawls's liberalism is framed by the liberalism of postwar America, that is, antistatist, pluralist liberalism; second, it continues to survive as a dominant political ideology to this day by abstracting the intellectual building blocks away from political and socioeconomic realities. According to the first thesis, Rawls's anti-interventionist and republican idea lurking behind his theory of justice reflects postwar liberalism. Although Rawls's thinking went through minor changes, specifically in a more egalitarian direction, the postwar-liberal idea was intact. It was reinforced by Rawls's visit to Oxford in 1952–53. At that time, he encountered the Labor revisionists who attempted to embrace both equality and decentralization in order to reconcile them with market efficiency. In addition, he proceeded to work on justice under the influence of Oxford ordinary language analysis. Since then, Rawls has treated justice implicitly or explicitly as rules of a game that are applied to social practices in an egalitarian manner. The notions of social cooperation and the basic structure exemplify this. This way of understanding justice enabled Rawls (and his followers) to detach his framework from the realities of the 1970s and 1980s. This leads to the second thesis. Forrester provides the following evidence for it: Rawls's justification of civil disobedience in a restrictive way, his (and their) neglect of the acute problems of racism and colonialism, his marginalization of the issues of justice in international politics, his limited treatment of the interests of future generations, and his (and their) underestimation of the impact of the New Right. These issues that Rawls (and his followers) restrictively treated, neglected, marginalized, and underestimated are fundamental issues of justice and legitimacy in contemporary society. However, the Rawlsian framework cannot help sidestepping these issues in order to fend off the collapse of the fair game of a society. Forrester thus concludes that it is time to see the Rawlsian philosophy as a product of its time. Forrester reveals the limitations of Rawlsian philosophy by contrasting it with other political theories: British political theories and the Lockean libertarian theory. Among the former, Barry's theory is pivotal. For example, Barry criticized Rawls's theory of intergenerational justice as tied too closely to moderate economic growth. To include the concerns of later generations about resource depletion and environmental destruction, Barry decoupled intergenerational justice from growth. Forrester opines, "Only Barry tried [End Page 527] to do so" (203). She thus holds Barry's fundamental challenges against Rawls's framework in high regard, but the background of Barry's challenges remains unaddressed. The Lockean libertarian theory also plays an important role in unearthing the problematic features of Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism. Robert Nozick attacked Rawls's vision for games of fair division and presented a historical entitlement theory of justice as a better alternative to liberal egalitarianism. Forrester analyzes how Rawlsians' response to Nozick promoted the abstraction of morality from political realities so as to deny the noninstitutional claims about historical entitlements and defend the forward-looking focus on egalitarian justice in light of the ideal of Kantian moral persons. This, Forrester contends, encouraged the Rawlsian neglect of historical injustices. However, this may be questioned for two reasons. First, Nozick's entitlement theory influenced prominent egalitarian theorists such as G. A. Cohen, his disciples, and leftlibertarians...

Stages and goals of modern reform Russian pension system through the prism of Aristotle's ethics and virtues

In the article analyzes the reasons for the failure of pension reforms in the Russian Federation pen-sion system, based on the principles of ethics of virtue and types of justice developed by Aristotle. It suggests that in the course of reforming of the pension system gradually ceased to be insurance at its core, transforming into a solidarity distribution system, and, in the words of Aristotle, egalitarian justice with its equivalence principle that initially was included in the mandatory pension insurance system has become in distributing justice, when the link between wages and pension payments have become less distinct

Triage of critical care resources in COVID-19: a stronger role for justice

Some ethicists assert that there is a consensus that maximising medical outcomes takes precedence as a principle of resource allocation in emergency triage of absolutely scarce resources. But the nature...

The End of Global Constitutionalism and Rise of Antidemocratic Politics

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the idea of “constitutional antagonism” this article offers a critique of the liberal cosmopolitan framing global constitutionalism and its response to the rise of antidemocratic and “populist” authoritarian politics. Liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global constitutionalism generally pay inadequate attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideology and rationality have come to dominate the fragmented networks and structures of global constitutionalism and the connected emergence of an anti-cosmopolitan and authoritarian discourse of “nationalist neoliberalism”. Against the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism, and against the twin threats of neoliberal transnational governance and neoliberal nationalist, interstate conflict, it is argued that if an idea of transnational or global constitutionalism is to be held onto and retain any value then it must be based upon socially transformative ideas of egalitarian and ecological social justice and enacted through legal and political strategies and struggles that attempt to actively displace neoliberal ideology and rationality.

Differential Voting Weights and Relational Egalitarianism

Two prominent relational egalitarians, Elizabeth Anderson and Niko Kolodny, object to giving people in a democratic community differential voting weights on the grounds that doing so would lead to unequal relations between them. Their claim is that deviating from a “one-person, one-vote” scheme is incompatible with realizing relational egalitarian justice. In this article, I argue that they are wrong. I do so by showing that people can relate as moral, epistemic, social, and empirical equals in a scheme with differential voting weights. I end the article by showing that from the perspective of relational egalitarianism, it is sometimes true that differential voting weights are more just than equal voting weights.