Daniel Halliday

Private education, positional goods, and the arms race problem

This article defends the view that markets in education need to be restricted, in light of the problem posed by what I call the ‘educational arms race’. Markets in education have a tendency to distort an important balance between education’s role as a gatekeeper – its ‘screening’ function – and its role in helping children develop as part of a preparation for adult life. This tendency is not merely a contingent fact about markets: It can be traced to ways in which education is a partly positional good and how markets respond to (and stimulate) demand for positional goods over non-positional goods. The problem with arms races is that they allow markets to facilitate wider use of defection in a collective action problem. Using these claims, I argue that markets in education have a distinctive tendency to become objectionably exploitative. I conclude by applying some of my conclusions to illuminate various egalitarian claims about justice in education.

The ethics of a smoking licence

Many governments implement policies that officially aim to discourage tobacco use among their citizens. Much of this effort is realised through attempts to better educate people about the effects that tobacco has on health. Most familiar are the increasingly graphic warnings displayed on cigarette packets. Other policies combat the activities of the tobacco industry, for example, restrictions on advertising. It is widely accepted, however, that it is not enough to simply educate users and coerce industry. Some amount of coercion must also be imposed on peoplei to make them smoke less or not start. So, governments often attach substantial consumption taxes to tobacco products. Almost always, this is implemented as sales tax, or VAT: Each time someone buys a tobacco product, they are required to pay a certain extra amount. The idea is that people will respond by smoking less, quitting smoking or not starting in the first place. But sales tax is not the only consumption tax available. The licence approach, as I shall call it, is a plausible alternative. Its main distinguishing feature is that users are forced to pay a relatively large amount of tax before being allowed to make any tobacco purchases. In this paper, I am going to explore some of the moral considerations relating to smoking licences. And I shall offer a limited defence of licences as a replacement for sales tax on tobacco products. This defence will include some moral arguments in favour of one particular licence design over others. What follows is, in at least some respects, an attempt at doing non-ideal theory. Very roughly, ideal theory attempts to give an account of what an ideally just society would look like, with relatively little attention paid to contingent facts about society. Non-ideal theory seeks to develop proposals about how to cope …

Big Data and the Liberal Conception of Education.

This article develops a perspective on big data in education, drawing on a broadly liberal conception of education’s primary purpose. We focus especially on the rise of so-called learning analytics and the associated rise of digitization, which we evaluate according to the liberal view that education should seek to cultivate individuality and proceed partly by way of experimentation and with an emphasis on civic education. Our argument is not that the use of big data is wholly out of place in education. Indeed, it might have significant value in pursuit of certain educational aims. Nevertheless, the liberal conception shows how education is distinct from other domains in which big data are being applied, in ways that suggest that considerable caution must be exercised when they are used in educational contexts.

Egalitarianism and Consumption Tax

Consumption taxes are often used to dissuade citizens from purchasing products that cause negative health outcomes, such as tobacco and alcohol. Such taxes are often criticized on the grounds that they discriminate against the poor: Consumption taxes are ‘regressive’, insofar as they require poor persons to pay a larger fraction of their income per consumed unit of good. After an attempt to spell out exactly what this objection asserts, this chapter attempts to respond to it. The apparently egalitarian complaint about regressive taxation can be countered by other egalitarian worries about the vulnerability of low-income groups to the harms resulting from the type of consumption being taxed. This calls for the redesign of consumption taxes rather than abolition. Further progress can be made by recognizing there are ways of taxing consumption other than the standard model of a sales tax that is typically assumed in these debates. One is to hypothecate the revenues from ways that aid the poor, mitigating the regressivity of the tax burden. Another is to replace sales taxes with licences or permits. Hypothecation and licensing can also be combined in ways that can eliminate regressivity altogether. This contribution attempts to develop these ideas in more detail.

Inheritance and Hypothetical Insurance

This paper examines Ronald Dworkin’s treatment of inherited wealth, which is stated only briefly, but represents a sophisticated stance, to which Dworkin remained committed over multiple writings. Dworkin’s contentions are that (i) the goal of restricting bequest is to prevent formation of hierarchies of social class, and (ii) this goal can be pursued through a progressive estate tax that models citizens’ hypothetical insurance choices concerning protection against class harm. This paper seeks to support Dworkin’s commitment to the diagnostic significance of class injustice, but finds problems with his attempt to use the hypothetical insurance approach. After identifying various difficulties around hypothetical insurance, the paper ends on a more positive note: Dworkin’s concern to address class hierarchies can be adapted so that an inheritance tax gains support from the various principles that make up the liberty/constraint system in chapter three of Sovereign Virtue. This may not result in a completely adequate treatment of inherited wealth, but it promises to drawn on principles that supplement, rather than rely on, any ideas about hypothetical insurance.

Tobacco bans and smokers' autonomy.

Should tobacco be banned? The answer depends largely on two further questions. How much are smokers benefitted by being made to stop, or to not start? And what is the moral cost of their being made to stop by their government, as opposed to stopping due to the influence of policies that fall short of coercion? Kristin Voigt provides one answer to the first question. She argues that the benefits of cessation are high enough to justify a ban on tobacco products.1 I partly agree: I share Voigts view that the harms of tobacco consumption are great enough to justify at least some policies that force (rather than merely encourage) people to not smoke.i But the differences between policies of this sort are large enough that any general conclusion in favour of ‘a ban’ is incomplete.ii By not elaborating on what a ban might come to, Voigt leaves the second question rather unaddressed. Of course, Voigt hardly means to say that anything goes when it comes to forming policies that force people to not smoke. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to build on her defence of the benefits of forced cessation by comparing different sorts of bans, and by comparing bans with other sorts of coercive policies. I will pick up, therefore, where Voigt leaves off: granting that a bans effects on well-being would be overall positive, a principal moral cost of a ban can be measured in terms of its infringement of smokers’ autonomy. Comparisons, then, can be sought in terms of how different policies infringe autonomy in different ways. What exactly might it mean, however, to speak of smokers’ autonomy? According to Voigt, autonomy should be thought of as a sort of ‘self-direction’ which obtains given ‘the absence of external obstacles to self-rule, most obviously various …

Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. ix + 208

Political liberals very often appeal to a so-called division of moral labour that separates the regulation of institutions from that of personal conduct. Probably the most famous statement of this idea is found in these remarks from John Rawls: The principles of justice for institutions must not be confused with the principles which apply to individuals and their actions in particular circumstances. These two kinds of principles apply to different subjects and must be discussed separately. (A Theory of Justice, rev. edn. (1999), p. 47) Kok-Chor Tans excellent new book renews and extends the case for accepting some version of Rawlss view, which Tan calls the ‘institutional focus’ in distributive justice. If Tan is right, then the liberal focus on institutions is not only defensible in its own right, but also helps support further elements of egalitarian theorizing, including some that Rawlsians often reject. In particular, Tan believes that a focus on institutions helps secure a more plausible ‘luck egalitarian’ approach to distributive justice, and that it also supports a version of cosmopolitanism about global justice.