No abstract

There is a deep divide among political philosophers of an egalitarian stripe. On the one hand, there are so-called distributive egalitarians, who hold that equality obtains within a political community when each of its members enjoys an equal share of the community’s resources. On the other hand, there are so-called social egalitarians, who instead hold that equality obtains within a political community when each of its members stands in certain relations to other members of the community, such as non-domination and lack of oppression. In this article, we have three aims. Our first aim is to cast doubt on the helpfulness of characterizing the debate in this way. Our second aim is to reconstruct this debate in alternative and more precise terms, so that disagreements between advocates of either side are easier to evaluate. Our third aim is to advance a hybrid account that integrates element from both views.

One of the strongest defences of free speech holds that autonomy requires the protection of speech. In this paper I examine five conditions that autonomy must satisfy. I survey recent research in social psychology regarding automatic behaviour, and a challenge to autonomy is articulated. I argue that a plausible strategy for neutralising some of the autonomy-threatening automatic responses consists in avoiding the exposure to the environmental features that trigger them. If this is so, we can good autonomy-based pro tanto reasons for controlling exposure to certain forms of speech.

Is the political community morally permitted to use neurointerventions to improve the moral conduct of children? Putting aside difficult questions concerning the institutionalization of moral enhancement, the authors address this question, first, by arguing that is not, in itself, always morally impermissible for the community to impose neurointerventions on adults. Although certain ideals, such as the ideal of individual autonomy, limit the permissible employment of neurointerventions, they do not generate a moral constraint that always forbids their use. Thereafter, they argue that because young children lack certain moral capacities that adults possess, the moral limits that pertain to the use of neurointerventions to improve their moral behaviour are, in principle, less restrictive than they are for adults.

Disagreement in politics is ubiquitous. People disagree about what makes a life worthy or well-lived. They disagree about what they owe to each other in terms of justice. They also disagree about the proper manner of dealing with the consequences of disagreement. What is more, they disagree about the normative significance of moral and political disagreement. Disagreement has been, for at least three decades now, the focus of a series of major works in political philosophy. It has been called one of the fundamental 'circumstances of politics' by Waldron (1999). Rawls (1996) took disagreement to be at the heart of the problem of political legitimacy. Gerald Gaus takes it to be the most important task of liberal political theory to justify political institutions in the face of 'evaluative diversity' (Gauss 1996, 2011). For Thomas Christiano, disagreement is part of the basis of the authority of democracy (Christiano 2008). Political institutions make decisions and rules that are binding for everyone and can be coercively enforced against all, whether or not they agree with the content of the decisions. Most political theorists agree that such institutions are necessary in order to achieve justice and secure the fundamental rights of individuals. Therefore, not having political institutions at all is neither empirically plausible nor morally attractive. However, the ubiquity of disagreement about the content of the decisions that political institutions ought to make raises the question of how binding decisions can be legitimately enforced, through the use of coercion if necessary, against morally competent and responsible people who disagree in good faith with those decisions, even after careful reflection and given willingness to consider the reasons offered in their favor. All the political theories that focus centrally on disagreement assume that good faith disagreement on at least some matters survives even if all participants are deliberating in good faith and are motivated to find common grounds. Full consensus is not an option.