Christopher Freiman

Why Poverty Matters Most: Towards a Humanitarian Theory of Social Justice

Sufficientarians claim that what matters most is that people have enough. I develop and defend a revised sufficientarian conception of justice. I claim that it furnishes the best specification of a general humanitarian ideal of social justice: our main moral concern should be helping those who are badly off in absolute terms. Rival humanitarian views such as egalitarianism, prioritarianism and the difference principle face serious objections from which sufficientarianism is exempt. Moreover, a revised conception of sufficientarianism can meet the most prominent undefeated challenges to the view. I contend that prevailing versions of sufficientarianism have not satisfactorily defined the sufficiency threshold, and so I offer an original specification of the threshold. I also address perhaps the most common objection to sufficientarianism, namely that sufficientarian regimes will channel all of societys resources towards elevating people to the sufficiency threshold regardless of the gains foregone by those above the threshold.

Why Parents Should Enhance Their Children

Christopher Freiman argues that parents have a defeasible moral obligation to use biotechnological enhancements to improve their children’s health and well-being. Freiman is skeptical that the distinction between an environmental enhancement and a biological enhancement is morally significant in its own right. Freiman also rejects the claims that parents must only pursue treatment but not enhancement, as well as the claim that parents should avoid enhancement on the grounds that they are likely to do more harm than good by attempting to actively control their children. Freiman concludes by considering the social costs and benefits of allowing parents to enhance their children, and ultimately maintains that even if there are some social costs and if enhancement strikes some people as repugnant, concerns about costs and feelings of repugnance do not undermine the case in favor of enhancing one’s children.

Poverty, partiality, and the purchase of expensive education

Prioritarianism doesn’t value equality as such – any reason to equalize is due to the benefits for the worse off. But some argue that prioritarianism and egalitarianism coincide in their implications for the distribution of education: Equalizing educational opportunities improves the socioeconomic opportunities of the worse off. More specifically, a system that prohibits parents from making differential private educational expenditures would result in greater gains to the worse off than a system that permits these expenditures, all else equal. This article argues that prioritarianism opposes a cap on educational expenditures. The argument, in brief, is that an equalized provision of schooling does a worse job of channeling the partiality of rich families in ways that produce positive spillover for poorer children. My challenge to the prioritarian case for educational equality is an internal one: the very concerns about parental partiality that underlie prioritarian objections to uncapped educational expenditures apply with even greater force to a system that caps educational expenditures.