Ethics, Politics & Society

Putting Yourself on the Line: The Harms of Competition

Yvette Drissen — 2025-01-17

Competition is a key element in the design of social institutions in contemporary liberal democracies. Competitive procedures for jobs, grants and university admissions can be considered ‘substantially engulfing’ since they provide access to important goods that everyone has reasons to want, such as financial security, the social bases of self-respect and education. While competition can have beneficial outcomes and can be a fair way of selecting meritorious candidates, this paper aims to identify the distinctive moral problems it raises by developing what we call a ‘Harm Account’ of competition. We argue that substantially engulfing competitions predictably lead to three types of harm: (1) substantial psychological and emotional costs; (2) substantial opportunity costs; and (3) estrangement. These harms provide strong pro tanto reasons against organizing substantially engulfing competitions for important goods. The weight of these reasons depends on the stakes and scope of the competition at hand.

What (if anything) Is Egalitarian about Luck Egalitarianism?

Jonas Franzen — 2025-01-17

This paper offers a novel taxonomy of luck egalitarianism with reference to the specific kinds of distributive arbitrariness a luck egalitarian might object to, namely ‘arbitrary disadvantage’, ‘arbitrary advantage’, and ‘arbitrary equality’. In doing so, it provides an instance of ‘conceptual clearance’, i.e., an attempt to restructure and reduce the vast number of accounts now accumulated under the label ‘egalitarianism’. By scrutinizing the three sets of luck egalitarianism identified beforehand, i.e., ‘simple’, ‘asymmetrical’, and ‘symmetrical’, it develops a novel minimal condition for a theory to qualify as genuinely egalitarian. While ‘asymmetrical luck egalitarianism’ satisfies this condition, ‘symmetrical luck egalitarianism’ does not. Both accounts are, for that reason, affected very differently by the (in)famous levelling down objection to egalitarianism and thus face distinct argumentative challenges and justificatory burdens. Therefore, the paper identifies an important structural divide within luck egalitarian thinking. As a matter of conceptual clearance, it proposes to view symmetrical luck egalitarianism as a form of ‘responsibilitarianism’ instead.

The Invisible Hand of Partisan Irrationality

Jimmy Licon — 2025-01-17

Why do we vote, protest, and boycott? Economists explain partisan actions, despite their costs, by arguing political irrationality by a single partisan isn’t costly to them as an individual - they can afford the political irrationality, despite the social costs. And some philosophers worry about the moral and epistemic costs of political irrationality. Here I argue that political irrationality has some benefits: it encourages partisans to engage in virtue signaling and rationalization in politics. And while virtue signaling and rationalization are often epistemically and morally bad, they can nonetheless confer benefits too, like facilitating societal and moral progress.

Life’s Journeys: MacIntyre’s Idea of Life as Enacted Narrative

Lia Mela — 2025-01-17

The starting point for this work is MacIntyre’s idea of life as an enacted narrative. MacIntyre introduces the idea of narrative in After Virtue, as part of his theory of virtue, after the concept of practice and before the concept of tradition. The representation of human life in narrative terms brings to the fore the longstanding relationship between philosophy and literature. In the following text I will try to examine the concept of the narrative structure of human life as it was first presented in After Virtue and demonstrate its continuity in MacIntyre’s later work. In this context, I will attempt, first, to examine whether MacIntyre’s idea of narrative can provide a basis for the unity of human life and action and, second, to identify its main differences from theories that emphasize fragmentation and see life as a series of disconnected events and interpretations challenging the notions of coherence and unity.

Trust, Trustworthiness and the Moral Dimension in human-AI Interactions

Donatella Donati — 2025-01-17

The growing use of Autonomous Agents (AAs) in both private and public sectors raises crucial questions about trust. As AI systems take on increasingly complex tasks and decisions, their interactions with human agents (HAs) raise questions about the relevance and applicability of traditional philosophical concepts of trust and trustworthiness (sections 1 and 2). In this paper, I will explore the nuances of trust in AAs, arguing against both the complete dismissal of trust as misplaced (section 4) and the application of “genuine” trust frameworks (section 5). My aim is to lay the groundwork for the understanding that the moral complexity of interactions with AAs goes beyond the mere reliance we place on inanimate objects (section 6).