Over the last twenty years, many political philosophers have rejected the idea that justice is fundamentally about distribution. Rather, justice is about social relations, and the so-called distributive paradigm should be replaced by a new relational paradigm. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen seeks to describe, refine, and assess these thoughts and to propose a comprehensive form of egalitarianism which includes central elements from both relational and distributive paradigms. He shows why many of the challenges that luck egalitarianism faces reappear, once we try (...) to specify relational egalitarianism more fully. His discussion advances understanding of the nature of the relational ideal, and introduces new conceptual tools for understanding it and for exploring the important question of why it is desirable in the first place to relate as equals. Even severe critics of the distributive understanding of justice will find that this book casts important new light on the ideal to which they subscribe. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that blamees can dismiss hypocritical blame on the ground that the hypocrite has no standing to blame their target. Many believe that the feature of hypocritical blame that undermines standing to blame is that it involves an implicit denial of the moral equality of persons. After all, the hypocrite treats herself better than her blamee for no good reason. In the light of the complement to hypocrites and a comparison of hypocritical and non-hypocritical blamers subscribing to (...) hierarchical moral norms, I show why we must reject the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame. (shrink)

This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. (...) He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. (shrink)

The story of the greatest of all philosophical friendships—and how it influenced modern thought David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as “the Great Infidel” for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. Remarkably, the two were best friends for (...) most of their adult lives, sharing what Dennis Rasmussen calls the greatest of all philosophical friendships. The Infidel and the Professor is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the friendship of these towering Enlightenment thinkers—and how it influenced their world-changing ideas. The book follows Hume and Smith’s relationship from their first meeting in 1749 until Hume’s death in 1776. It describes how they commented on each other’s writings, supported each other’s careers and literary ambitions, and advised each other on personal matters, most notably after Hume’s quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Members of a vibrant intellectual scene in Enlightenment Scotland, Hume and Smith made many of the same friends, joined the same clubs, and were interested in many of the same subjects well beyond philosophy and economics—from psychology and history to politics and Britain’s conflict with the American colonies. The book reveals that Smith’s private religious views were considerably closer to Hume’s public ones than is usually believed. It also shows that Hume contributed more to economics—and Smith contributed more to philosophy—than is generally recognized. Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship that had great consequences for modern thought. (shrink)

In a recent JME article, Joona Räsänen makes the case for allowing legal age change. We identify three problems with his argument and, on that basis, propose an improved version thereof. Unfortunately, even the improved argument is vulnerable to the objection that chronological age is a better proxy for justice in health than both legal and what we shall call official age.

If “perfectionism” in ethics refers to those normative theories that treat the fulfillment or realization of human nature as central to an account of both goodness and moral obligation, in what sense is “human flourishing” a perfectionist notion? How much of what we take “human flourishing” to signify is the result of our understanding of human nature? Is the content of this concept simply read off an examination of our nature? Is there no place for diversity and individuality? Is the (...) belief that the content of such a normative concept can be determined by an appeal to human nature merely the result of epistemological naiveté? What is the exact character of the connection between human flourishing and human nature? These questions are the ultimate concern of this essay, but to appreciate the answers that will be offered it is necessary to understand what is meant by “human flourishing.” “Human flourishing” is a relatively recent term in ethics. It seems to have developed in the last two decades because the traditional translation of the Greek term eudaimonia as “happiness” failed to communicate clearly that eudaimonia was an objective good, not merely a subjective good. (shrink)

This book has been accepted at the University of Copenhagen for a public defence as a Dr Phil dissertation.

How can we establish a political/legal order that in principle does not require the human flourishing of any person or group to be given structured preference over that of any other? Addressing this question as the central problem of political philosophy,_ Norms of Liberty_ offers a new conceptual foundation for political liberalism that takes protecting liberty, understood in terms of individual negative rights, as the primary aim of the political/legal order. Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue for construing individual rights (...) as metanormative principles, directly tied to politics, that are used to establish the political/ legal conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. These they distinguish from normative principles, used to provide guidance for moral conduct within the ambit of normative ethics. This crucial distinction allows them to develop liberalism as a metanormative theory, not a guide for moral conduct. The moral universe need not be minimized or morality grounded in sentiment or contracts to support liberalism, they show. Rather, liberalism can be supported, and many of its internal tensions avoided, with an ethical framework of Aristotelian inspiration—one that understands human flourishing to be an objective, inclusive, individualized, agent-relative, social, and self-directed activity. (shrink)

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen tackles all the major questions concerning luck egalitarianism, providing deep, penetrating and original discussion of recent academic discourses on distributive justice as well as responses to some of the main objections in the literature. It offers a new answer to the “Why equality?” and “Equality of what?” questions, and provides a robust luck egalitarian response to the recent criticisms of luck egalitarianism by social relations egalitarians. This systematic, theoretical introduction illustrates the broader picture of distributive justice and (...) enables the reader to understand the core intuitions underlying, or conflicting with, luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

A policy indirectly discriminates against a group, G, if, and only if: it does not reflect an objectionable mental state regarding the members of G; it disadvantages members of G; the disadvantages are disproportionate; and G is a socially salient group. I argue that indirect discrimination is not non-instrumentally morally wrong. Clearly, if it were, that would be because it harms members of G disproportionately, i.e., in virtue of features and. Harming members of a group disproportionately does appear non-instrumentally wrong. (...) But it is not easy to provide a plausible explanation for the kind of harm and disproportionality involved here that vindicates this initial appearance. This does not mean the concept of indirect discrimination should be jettisoned. It was originally a legal concept, and in closing I briefly suggest that in law it plays a valuable role, even if it is not a genuine moral category. Legal prohibition is an unreliable guide to what is morally wrong, but it is not supposed to be that anyway. (shrink)

According to an influential account of standing, hypocritical blamers lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norm etc. which they invoke. Nevertheless, the commitment account has the wrong shape for it to explain why hypocrites lack standing to blame. Building on the lessons of that critique I propose a novel account of what undermines standing to blame – the comparative fairness account. This differs from the commitment account and the other prominent account of why (...) hypocrites lack standing to blame offered in the literature: the moral equality account. Finally, I observe that, intuitively, lack of commitment undermines standing to blame and that many hypocrites might lack standing for that reason also. Moreover, typically the hypocrite's failure to address their own faults is a feature in virtue of which, other things being equal, the hypocrite is less committed to the norm in question. These two observations provide the basis for an error theory of the commitment account's appeal, despite its inability to explain why, qua hypocritical blamer, one lacks standing to blame. (shrink)

When collective decisions should be made democratically, which people form the relevant demos? Many theorists think this question is an embarrassment to democratic theory: because any decision about who forms the demos must be made democratically by the right demos, which itself must be democratically constituted and so on ad infinitum; and because neither the concept of democracy, nor our reasons for caring about democracy, determine who should form the demos. Having distinguished between these three versions of the demos problem, (...) we argue that each of them can be solved. (shrink)

In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith's sympathy with Rousseau's concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend ...

While many philosophers have agreed that evidence of disagreement is a kind of higher-order evidence, this has not yet resulted in formally precise higher-order approaches to the problem of disagreement. In this paper, we outline a simple formal framework for determining the epistemic significance of a body of higher-order evidence, and use this framework to motivate a novel interpretation of the popular “equal weight view” of peer disagreement—we call it the Variably Equal Weight View (VEW). We show that VEW differs (...) from the standard Split the Difference (SD) interpretation of the equal weight view in almost all cases of peer disagreement, and use our formal framework to explain why SD has seemed attractive but is in fact misguided. A desirable feature of VEW, we argue, is that it gives rise to plausible instances of synergy—an effect whereby the parties to a disagreement should become more (or less) confident in the disputed proposition than any of them were prior to disagreement. Lastly, we show how VEW may be generalized to cases of non-peer disagreement. (shrink)

In recent years, neuroscience has been making dramatic progress. The discipline holds great promise but also raises a number of important ethical concerns. Among these is the concern that, some day in the distant future, we will have brain scanners capable of reading our minds, thus making our inner thoughts transparent to others. There are at least two reasons why we might regret our resulting loss of privacy. One is, so the argument goes, that this would undermine our ability to (...) form intimate relations. Another is that the omnipresent gaze of others would render an authentic inner life impossible. I argue that both of these concerns are exaggerated. First, intimacy might flourish through the differential acknowledgement of knowledge as common knowledge; for example, even if I know that both a friend and my taxi driver know that I have kinky sexual fantasies, I might only acknowledge this as common knowledge and, thus, an admissible piece of conversation with my friend, and this differential acknowledgement might be enforced by norms of social interaction. Second, the gaze of others would become much less oppressive if everyone’s inner lives were transparent to everyone else. I also argue that our minds are already partly transparent to others through the use of non-neuroscience-assisted mindreading techniques and, thus, that the latter offer no distinct threat to mind privacy. I offer an additional argument for this conclusion; to wit, that our minds extend beyond our brains. (shrink)

This is an interview by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Xavier Ramos, and Dirk Van de gaer, conducted as part of a roundtable on the philosophy and economics of discrimination and inequality. The interview covers the concepts of discrimination and inequality; the current state of the literature on measuring discrimination and inequality; the relevance of measuring discrimination and inequality for policymaking; and the future of measuring discrimination and inequality.

In this book Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen address the complexities of his question "Is affirmative action morally justifiable?" by analyzing the prevailing contemporary arguments both for and against affirmative action. The book applies current political philosophy to demonstrate that arguments on both sides justify different conclusions given different specific cases, though it ultimately does argue in favor of affirmative action based on the relative strength and significance of the anti-discrimination- and equality of opportunity-based positions.

In the US context, critics of court use of algorithmic risk prediction algorithms have argued that COMPAS involves unfair machine bias because it generates higher false positive rates of predicted recidivism for black offenders than for white offenders. In response, some have argued that algorithmic fairness concerns, either also or only, calibration across groups–roughly, that a score assigned to different individuals by the algorithm involves the same probability of the individual having the target property across different groups of individuals–and that, (...) for mathematical reasons, it is virtually impossible to equalize false positive rates without impairing the calibration. I argue that in standard non-algorithmic contexts, such as hirings, we do not think that lack of calibration entails unfair bias, and that it is difficult to see why algorithmic contexts, as it were, should differ fairness-wise from non-algorithmic ones in this respect. Hence, we should reject the view that calibration is necessary for fairness in an algorithmic context. (shrink)

This book addresses these three issues: What is discrimination?; What makes it wrong?; What should be done about wrongful discrimination? It argues: that there are different concepts of discrimination; that discrimination is not always morally wrong and that when it is, it is so primarily because of its harmful effects.

A major obstacle to broad support of clinical ethics consultation is suspicion regarding the nature of the moral expertise it claims to offer. The suspicion seems to be confirmed when the field fails to make its moral expertise explicit. In this vacuum, critics suggest the following:Clinical ethics consultation's legitimacy depends on its ability to offer an expertise in moral matters.Expertise in moral matters is knowledge of a singular moral truth which applies to everyone.The claim that a clinical ethics consultant can (...) offer knowledge of a singular moral truth in virtue of her professional training is absurd, false, or gravely immoral.Therefore,The field is illegitimate. (shrink)

Many philosophers analyzing standing to blame have argued that a hypocrite can lack standing to blame someone even if what that person did is blameworthy, and that standingless, hypocritical blame is _pro tanto_ morally wrongful. Philosophers have yet to address the issue of standing to forgive. In this article, I defend two main claims. I argue first that _if_ these two claims about blame are true, _then_ so are the two corresponding claims about forgiveness: a hypocritical forgiver can lack standing (...) to forgive someone for an act even if there are reasons to hold that this act is forgivable, and standingless, hypocritical forgiveness is _pro tanto_ morally wrongful. I then argue, separately, that these two claims about forgiveness _are_ true. (shrink)

In a series of excellent, recent papers, Deborah Hellman expounds the intuitively appealing idea that we have a duty not to compound injustice. Roughly, one compounds injustice when facts that obtain as a result of prior injustice form part of one’s reason for imposing further disadvantages on the victims of this prior injustice. This article identifies several complexities and problems motivating various amendments to Hellman’s formulation of the duty not to compound injustice. Critically, it argues that the intuitions she and (...) others have sought to explain in terms of the duty not to compound injustice are better explained by the duty not to cause additional harm to people who are already unjustly worse off – perhaps in conjunction with a duty not to implicate ourselves in injustice. (shrink)

This essay is a comparative analysis of results reported in this volume from studies in mainland China, the United States, Iran, and Hong Kong regarding organ donation incentives. They reveal widespread (but not unanimous) support for honorary incentives (such as notes or ceremonies of gratitude) and significant support for familist incentives (offering a donor’s family members priority should they need an organ transplant in the future). Opinions on financial incentives were much more mixed, with significant worries expressed regarding potential exploitation (...) and unfairness. These interviews also reinforce the importance of culturally appropriate constructions of any steps to increase organ donation rates. And, in addition to their comments on various types of incentive, interviewees in these chapters also offer insight into other measures that could be taken to increase organ donation. (shrink)

If archaic symbolism can be regarded as representative of a dimension of consciousness, the question of interpretation is primary. This chapter debates this question by reference to a hermeneutic developed by the historian of religions and phenomenologist, Mircea Eliade. It outlines Eliade's structural hermeneutic, and suggests its potential as a program for philosophical interpretation. There is a polemic in Eliade's thought which provides the negative foundation for his hermeneutic, namely, the polemic against reductionism. The attempt to understand the sacred as (...) an irreducible form is accompanied by the technical attempt to capture its intentional mode. Eliade has suggested that encounter with the myths and symbols of non‐Western and archaic cultures may “lead to a renewal in the philosophic field, in the same way that the discovery of exotic and primitive arts half a century ago opened up new perspectives in European art”. (shrink)

My extended project, for which this study of Machiavelli is the beginning, is to examine early modern constitutionalism in order to understand the modes of pluralism that were advocated either intentionally or unintentionally in the construction of the idea of the political that was bequeathed to us. I will consider the thought of two major figures in this historical section of the project, namely, Niccolò Machiavelli and James Madison. The first section will be focused on Machiavelli exclusively. This section will (...) consider Machiavelli’s work in the context of three major interpreters: J. G. A. Pocock, Anthony J. Parel, and Isaiah Berlin. The topics will be: time and the construction of the political, nature and prescriptive normativity, and the plurality of values. (shrink)

Philosophers analyzing standing to blame have argued that in view of a blamer’s own fault she can lack standing to blame another for an act even if the act is blameworthy and that standingless, hypocritical blame is pro tanto morally wrongful. The bearing of these conclusions on standing to praise is yet to receive the attention it deserves. I defend two claims. The first is the conditional claim that if and are true, so are and. The latter are: a praiser (...) can lack the standing to praise herself for an act even if that act is praiseworthy and standingless, hypocritical praise is pro tanto morally wrongful. So I am suggesting that facts about standing to blame reflect more general facts about standing to hold responsible. The second is the claim that and are true. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 8, Page W1-W3, August 2012.

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 395-408, September 2022.

On Pogge’s view, we —people living in rich countries— do not just allow the global poor to die. Rather, we interfere with them in such a way that we make them die on a massive scale. If we did the same through military aggression against them, surely, it would be permissible for these people to wage war on us to prevent this. Suppose Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, and assume the moral permissibility of self-defence by (...) poor people in the hypothetical military action scenario just mentioned. If these assumptions are correct, poor countries could start just and, even possibly, morally permissible redistributive wars against us provided various additional conditions are met. To avoid misunderstanding, I should stress that my main claim is the conditional equivalence claim, namely that if Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, our relation to poor countries is morally equivalent to one in which we each year killed many of the global poor by military means. I do not claim (i) that Pogge’s analysis is correct; (ii) that, as a matter of fact, it is morally permissible for poor countries to wage redistributive wars against rich countries; (iii) that it is not the case that anything that is impermissible for poor countries to do in the latter situation involving military aggression —e. g. deliberately targeting rich civilians— is impermissible in redistributive wars as well. (shrink)