Matthew Clayton

Should the voting age be lowered to sixteen? Normative and empirical considerations

This article is an examination of the issue of whether the age of electoral majority should be lowered to sixteen. We consider and reject several arguments raised by both sides of the voting age debate. The key issue, we claim, is the political maturity of young people. Drawing on empirical data collected in nationally representative surveys, we argue that the weight of such evidence suggests that young people are, to a significant degree, politically less mature than older people, and that the voting age should not be lowered to sixteen.

School Choice and the Burdens of Justice

This paper takes issue with Swift’s argument for the claim that parents who affirm equality of opportunity can justifiably buy advantageous private schooling if it is necessary to ensure educational adequacy for their children. We advance a number of reasons of justice and morality that support the view that egalitarian parents ought to accept a degree of educational inadequacy: parents have a pro tanto reason to share the burdens of injustice; it is not obvious that the legitimacy of parental partiality is as extensive in unjust circumstances as it is under just arrangements; we have some duty of justice to accept inadequacy for our children in the fight for the realization of educational justice; and we might be morally required to accept more than a fair share of the burden of establishing just educational institutions.

Egalitarian justice and interpersonal comparison

This paper surveys the strengths and weaknesses of three widely-discussed egalitarian standards of interpersonal comparison: welfare, resource, and capability. We argue that welfare egalitarianism is beset by numerous serious problems, and should be rejected. Capability and resourcist standards conform with egalitarian convictions more closely, but each faces distinctive problems. We itemise a set of desiderata which a fully adequate account of interpersonal comparison would satisfy. We conclude that the choice between capability and resourcist standards turns on the relative importance of such an account being able to accommodate reasonable pluralism and identify inequality in a publicly verifiable manner.

Liberal Equality and Ethics

Dworkin’s conception of distributive justice, equality of resources, requires equality in the distribution of impersonal resources and compensation for personal resource deficits, or their consequences, to be determined by a fair hypothetical insurance scheme. Among other things, that conception offers a recognizably liberal account of interpersonal comparison for the purposes of justice. Consider the envy test, for example. Dworkin cites the envy test as a test for equality in the distribution of impersonal resources, such as wealth, land, occupation, and material goods. The test is satisfied if no one prefers anyone else’s bundle of impersonal resources to her own. The attractions of the envy test within a liberal conception of equality are evident. First, it conforms to a widely held egalitarian view that an individual is disadvantaged if she enjoys less wealth than others because of the circumstances in which she lives (e.g., living in an area with less fertile land than others enjoy), rather than because of her ambitions. If Alice and Biff both hold the same goals but Alice faces a more propitious material environment in which to pursue hers, then both would prefer to be in her position. The envy test highlights those kinds of inequality as unjust.

Equality, Justice and Legitimacy in Selection*

The claim that the ideal of equality has a role to play in the critique of discrimination in employment and education has been rejected by a number of philosophers. Certain anti-egalitarians argue that the appeal to equality is redundant; others that egalitarianism misdirects us or fails to explain our special hostility towards discrimination. This article sketches an egalitarian conception of justice in selection and explains what is distinctive about such conceptions. Thereafter, it attempts to rebut the important objections that have been raised against egalitarian accounts of discrimination.

What is the point of religious education

Some liberal societies continue to require their schools to offer non-directive but, specifically, religious education as part of the curriculum. This article challenges that practice. It does so by articulating and defending the moral requirement that education policy must be regulated by principles that are acceptable to reasonable people. Thereafter, we argue that the leading arguments for prioritizing the study of religion in schools – arguments that claim that religion is special or that assert that the majority or parents are morally permitted to prioritize religion in schooling – are incompatible with the acceptability requirement.

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.

Liberal equality: political not erinaceous

Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs defends liberal political morality on the basis of a rich account of dignity as constitutive of living well. This article raises the Rawlsian concern that making political morality dependent on ethics threatens citizens’ political autonomy. Thereafter, it addresses whether the abandonment of (erinaceous) ethical foundations signals the demise of Dworkin’s liberalism and explores the possibility of laundering his conception so as to facilitate a marriage between the political philosophies of Rawls and Dworkin. The article finishes by rebutting some objections Dworkin raises against Rawls’s account of public reason.

Anti-perfectionist Childrearing

This paper defends a reasonably controversial view about how we should understand the morally appropriate relationship between parent and child, which I call parental anti-perfectionism. On this view, parents act illegitimately if they enroll their child into religious practices that are controversial in society. The paper clarifies and sketches an argument for parental anti-perfectionism, and defends it against the charges that the ideal is too vague, provides for only an insipid upbringing, or that it requires parents to neglect their children.

Rawls and Dworkin on hypothetical reasoning

It is a striking fact that the two leading egalitarian liberals of recent times, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, deploy hypothetical reasoning in their somewhat different conceptions of justice. As is well known, Rawls uses the device of the original position in which representatives must choose between candidate principles of social justice – in the first instance, between the principles Rawls favors, the two principles of justice, and utilitarianism. Principles of justice, he argues, are those that would be chosen by representatives charged with the duty of securing their clients’ enjoyment of primary social goods while lacking particular information about their clients’ characteristics, including their socioeconomic class, natural talent, sex, race, and conception of what it means to live well. True, Rawls nests what I shall call the original position argument within a more general moral methodology of “reflective equilibrium” in which we reason about political morality by seeking consistency between our abstract and concrete considered judgments about justice in the light of the leading alternative moral theories available to us. However, the original position argument plays a central role in Rawlss distinctive conception of justice, justice as fairness . He recommends the original position as a thought experiment to be used when theorizing the demands of justice. Just terms of cooperation should be viewed as if they stemmed from an agreement between citizens, but the agreement must be one not reached out of fear or because of ones poor bargaining position. The agreement we are after is a hypothetical agreement: an agreement that would be made by representatives in the original position who were deprived of certain kinds of information the use of which would tend to render the agreement unfair. Dworkin also uses hypothetical reasoning in his account of justice, equality of resources , in the device of the hypothetical insurance scheme. Resources should be distributed equally between citizens, he insists, and once we have an egalitarian distribution of external resources – land and the goods produced from it – we are faced with the question of how we ought to compensate individuals who suffer misfortune in the distribution of internal resources – disability, ill health, or a lack of marketable skills, for example.