Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

Egalitarianism, option luck, and responsibility

As construed by the majority of its current supporters, egalitarianism accommodates choice and responsibility. This is evident from representative statements of the basic egalitarian principle such as: ‘‘It is bad— unjust and unfair—for some be worse off than others [through no fault or choice of their own].’’ 1 Also, ‘‘[Egalitarianism’s] purpose is to eliminate involuntary disadvantage, by which I (stipulatively) mean disadvantage for which the sufferer cannot be held responsible, since it does not appropriately reflect choices that he has made or would make.’’ 2 It follows that, for most contemporary egalitarians, inequalities of outcome need not be bad.3 Responding to the idea that choice and responsibility bear upon the badness and justice of inequalities of outcome, many egalitarians treat inequalities reflecting what Ronald Dworkin has called ‘differential option luck’ as unobjectionable. Suppose you and I voluntarily engage in gambling. You win. I lose. Here I suffer bad option luck. By contrast you enjoy good option luck. Hence, unlike before, I am now (let us suppose)

Born free and equal: A philosophical inquiry into the nature of discrimination

Introduction 1. The questions 2. The approach 3. Overview of the book Part I: The concept of discrimination Chapter 1: What is discrimination? 1. Introduction 2. Discrimination in the generic sense 3. Irrelevance discrimination 4. The moralized concept of discrimination 5. Group discrimination 6. Social salience 7. Because 8. Treatment 9. Summary Appendix 1: Methodology Appendix 2: Discrimination skeptics: Oppression and dominance Chapter 2: Indirect discrimination 1. The distinction between direct and indirect discrimination 2. Altmans definition 3. The no-intention condition 4. The disadvantage condition 5. The disproportionateness condition 6. Sufficient for indirect discrimination? 7. Direct vs. indirect discrimination 8. Conclusion Appendix 1: Some other definitions of indirect discrimination Appendix 2: Institutional and structural discrimination Chapter 3: Statistical discrimination 1. Introduction 2. Statistical discrimination vs. non-statistical discrimination 3. Direct vs. indirect, statistical discrimination 4. What statistical discrimination is not 5. Conclusion Appendix: Genetic discrimination and social salience Part II: The wrongness of discrimination Chapter 4: Mental state based accounts 1. Introduction 2. Some common accounts 3. Mental states and permissibility 4. Different mental state accounts 5. Alexander on disrespect and discrimination: The falsehood account 6. Alexander on disrespect and discrimination: The comparative falsehood account 7. Alexander on disrespect and discrimination: The irrational, comparative falsehood account 8. Conclusion Chapter 5: Objective meaning accounts 1. Introduction 2. Hellmans account: Demeaning others 3. Some challenges to Hellmans account 4. Scanlon on racial discrimination and the meaning of actions 5. An important ambiguity 6. Some worries about Scanlons account 7. The moral distinctiveness of discrimination based on judgments of inferiority 8. Conclusion Chapter 6: Harm-based accounts 1. Introduction 2. The essentials of the harm-based account 3. The baseline issue 4. The metric of harm 5. Some challenges to the harm-based account 6. A desert-prioritarian account 7. Some objections 8. A test case: Moral wrongness of indirect discrimination 9. Conclusion Appendix: Moreau on deliberative freedom and discrimination Part III: Neutralizing discrimination Chapter 7: Discrimination and the aim of proportional representation 1. Introduction 2. The Simple View and ambition-sensitivity 3. The Counterfactual, Holistic View 4. Which counterfactual scenario? 5. Is absence of discrimination necessary for suitable representation? 6. Second-best representational aims 7. Conclusion Chapter 8: Discrimination in punishment 1. Introduction 2. Loci of legal discrimination 3. Criteria vs. indicators of discrimination 4. The pure discrimination case 5. The no-complaint argument 6. Conclusion Chapter 9: Reaction qualifications 1. Introduction 2. Discounting qualifications based on illegitimate preferences 3. Refining meritocracy 4. Illegitimate preferences not disadvantaging targeted groups 5. Respect and reaction qualifications 6. Conclusion Chapter 10: Discrimination in the private sphere 1. Introduction 2. A legal duty to engage in wrongful private discrimination 3. A legal right to engage in wrongful private discrimination 4. A legal duty not to engage in wrongful private discrimination 5. A legal duty or permission to engage in private discrimination that is not wrongful 6. A legal duty not to engage in private discrimination that is not wrongful 7. Conclusion Chapter 11: Racial profiling 1. Introduction 2. A right to be treated as an individual 3. Unequal treatment 4. Unfairness 5. The making of statistical facts and the justifiability of statistical discrimination 6. Putting the argument to the interpersonal test 7. Non-comprehensively justified? 8. Challenges 9. Conclusion Bibliography Index

Identification and responsibility

Real-self accounts of moral responsibility distinguish between various types of motivational elements. They claim that an agent is responsible for acts suitably related to elements that constitute the agents real self. While such accounts have certain advantages from a compatibilist perspective, they are problematic in various ways. First, in it, authority and authenticity conceptions of the real self are often inadequately distinguished. Both of these conceptions inform discourse on identification, but only the former is relevant to moral responsibility. Second, authority and authenticity real-self theories are unable to accommodate cases in which the agent neither identifies nor disidentifies with his action and yet seems morally responsible for what he does. Third, authority and authenticity real-self theories are vulnerable to counterexamples in which the provenance of the agents real self undermines responsibility.

Ethics, organ donation and tax: a proposal

Five arguments are presented in favour of the proposal that people who opt in as organ donors should receive a tax break. These arguments appeal to welfare, autonomy, fairness, distributive justice and self-ownership, respectively. Eight worries about the proposal are considered in this paper. These objections focus upon no-effect and counter-productiveness, the Titmuss concern about social meaning, exploitation of the poor, commodification, inequality and unequal status, the notion that there are better alternatives, unacceptable expense, and concerns about the veto of relatives. The paper argues that none of the objections to the proposal is very telling.

Hurley on egalitarianism and the luck-neutralizing aim

Susan Hurley’s admirable new book, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, brings together recent developments in the fields of responsibility and egalitarian justice. This article focuses on Hurley’s critique of luck-neutralizing egalitarianism. The article concludes that the bad-luck-neutralizing aim serves better as a justificatory basis for egalitarianism than the more general luck-neutralizing aim. Since the former does not simply assume that we should aim for equality, Hurley has not demonstrated (nor indeed does she claim to have shown) that this concern cannot form the justificatory basis of egalitarianism in a non-question-begging way. This, however, does not detract from the fact that Hurley’s book provides a very insightful discussion of the relationship between luck and justice.

Justice and the allocation of healthcare resources: should indirect, non-health effects count?

Alternative allocations of a fixed bundle of healthcare resources often involve significantly different indirect, non-health effects. The question arises whether these effects must figure in accounts of the conditions under which a distribution of healthcare resources is morally justifiable. In this article we defend a Scanlonian, affirmative answer to this question: healthcare resource managers should sometimes select an allocation which has worse direct, health-related effects but better indirect, nonhealth effects; they should do this when the interests served by such a policy are more urgent than the healthcare interests better served by an alternative allocation. We note that there is a prima facie case for the claim that such benefits (and costs) are relevant—i.e. they are real benefits, and in other contexts our decisions can permissibly be guided by them. We then proceed to rebut three lines of argument that might be thought to defeat this prima facie case: they appeal to fairness, the Kantian Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself, and the equal moral worth of persons, respectively.

Nationalism and multiculturalism in a world of immigration

Notes on Contributors Introduction: Multiculturalism and Nationalism in a World of Immigration S.Laegaard Liberal Nationalism on Immigration S.Laegaard Cosmopolitanism, Culture and Well-Being: A Cosmopolitan Perspective on Multiculturalism S.Caney The Luck-Egalitarian Argument for Group Rights K.Lippert-Rasmussen Equality and Difference-blind Rights N.Holtug Immigration and the Significance of Culture S.Scheffler Fear vs. Fairness: Migration, Citizenship, and the Transformation of Political Community J.Carens Immigration and Reciprocity D.Weinstock If there is no Common and Unique European Identity, should we Create One? A.Follesdal Bibliography Index

Responsible nations: Miller on national responsibility

In National Responsibility and Global Justice, David Miller defends the view that a member of a nation can be collectively responsible for an outcome despite the fact that: (i) she did not control it; (ii) she actively opposed those of her nations policies that produced the outcome; and (iii) actively opposing the relevant policy was costly for her. I argue that Millers arguments in favor of this strong externalist view about responsibility and control are insufficient. Specifically, I show that Millers two models of synchronic collective responsibility—the like-minded group model and the cooperative practice model—ground neither synchronic nor diachronic national responsibility, nor apply in the case of nations generally speaking.

Why Killing Some People Is More Seriously Wrong than Killing Others

Consider the following three theses about morally wrong conduct: 1. The Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis: The degree to which different killings of persons are wrong does not vary: all such killings are equally wrong. 2. The Unequal Wrongness of Renderings Unconscious Thesis: For any period, q, it is more wrong to render a person unconscious for a period longer than q than it is to render a person unconscious for q, other things being the same. 3. The Equivalence Thesis: It is neither more, nor less, wrong to deprive a person of a certain amount of conscious experience by killing her than it is to deprive her of the same amount of conscious experience by rendering her unconscious, other things being the same. Let me state a few assumptions that I am going to be making before I comment on how these theses relate to one another. First, thesis 2

Luck egalitarians versus relational egalitarians: on the prospects of a pluralist account of egalitarian justice

Pluralist egalitarians think that luck and relational egalitarianism each articulates a component in a pluralist account of egalitarian justice. However, this ecumenical view appears problematic in the light of Elizabeth Andersons claim that the divide arises because two incompatible views of justification are in play, which in turn generates derivative disagreements – e.g. about the proper currency of egalitarian justice. In support of pluralist egalitarianism I argue that two of Andersons derivative disagreements are not rooted in the disagreement over justification she identifies, and that the disagreement over justification cuts across standard disagreements between luck and relational egalitarian justice.