Research

Abstract: Equality of opportunity is a complex and contested ideal. There is disagreement about what the most plausible account of equal opportunity is, why equal opportunity matters, and how much it matters relative to other considerations that bear on how we ought to act. Over and above those disagreements about the general ideal of equal opportunity, there are further disagreements about what equal educational opportunity requires, why equal educational opportunity matters, and how much it matters relative to other considerations that bear on what educational policies we ought to enact. Much of the literature on equal opportunity and education focuses on equal opportunity and K-12 (i.e., primary- or secondary-level) education. But there is now also a sizeable literature that focuses on distinctive questions about equal opportunity and higher (i.e., tertiary-level) education. That latter set of questions – how the ideal of equal opportunity bears on higher education – is the primary topic of this chapter. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part of the chapter focuses on more theoretical issues in normative ethics and foundational political philosophy. It first surveys some disagreements about the nature, scope, grounds, and stringency of equal opportunity requirements; in light of those disagreements, it then surveys a variety of views about how the ideal of equal opportunity bears on higher education. The second part of the chapter focuses on more practical issues in applied ethics and applied political philosophy. It surveys some contemporary controversies in higher education that implicate concerns about equal opportunity. 

Abstract: Only women can bear the burdens of gestating fetuses. That fact, I suggest, bears on the morality of abortion. To illustrate and explain this point, I frame my discussion around Judith Jarvis Thomson's classic defense of abortion and Gina Schouten's recent feminist challenge to Thomson's defense. Thomson argued that, even assuming that fetuses are morally equivalent to persons, abortions are typically morally permissible. According to Schouten's feminist challenge to Thomson, however, if fetuses are morally equivalent to persons, then abortions are typically morally impermissible because there is a collective moral obligation to care for the vulnerable. The consideration that is my topic, however, poses a problem for that feminist challenge to Thomson. There is reason to believe, I argue, that it is unfair that only women can bear the burdens of gestating fetuses. And, if that is unfair, it would undermine that feminist challenge to Thomson. I show, in other words, that there is a plausible and well-motivated basis for believing that, even if fetuses are morally equivalent to persons and there is a collective obligation to care for the vulnerable, then abortions are nevertheless typically morally permissible. That is how fairness bears on the morality of abortion. 

Abstract: Prediction-based decisions, which are often made by utilizing the tools of machine learning, influence nearly all facets of modern life. Ethical concerns about this widespread practice have given rise to the field of fair machine learning and a number of fairness measures, mathematically precise definitions of fairness that purport to determine whether a given prediction-based decision system is fair. Following Reuben Binns (2017), we take “fairness” in this context to be a placeholder for a variety of normative egalitarian considerations. We explore a few fairness measures to suss out their egalitarian roots and evaluate them, both as formalizations of egalitarian ideas and as assertions of what fairness demands of predictive systems. We pay special attention to a recent and popular fairness measure, counterfactual fairness, which holds that a prediction about an individual is fair if it is the same in the actual world and any counterfactual world where the individual belongs to a different demographic group (cf. Kusner et al. 2018).

Abstract: Permissions of parental partiality are apparently a fixed point of commonsense morality. But it is not obvious how such permissions are to be reconciled with more general principles of justice, which seem to require impartial concern for others. I focus on this reconciliation problem as it arises for one kind of liberal egalitarian theory of justice. Given its robust commitment to an ideal of equality, this theory faces special difficulties in accommodating the commonsense permissions of parental partiality (§2). Nevertheless, the literature contains a variety of proposals that purport to effect such a reconciliation by ‘putting partiality first’—i.e., by subordinating a concern for equality to a concern for parental partiality. I criticize these proposals (§3) and suggest a different direction for reconciliation by ‘putting equality first’—i.e., by subordinating a concern for partiality to a concern for equality (§4-5). This alternative reconciliation strategy, I argue, deserves to be taken seriously by liberal egalitarians. Whether it is the most plausible way to reconcile equality and parental partiality depends both on the relative moral weight of people’s interest in parenting and people’s interest in equal opportunity and on how to measure the disvalue of unequal opportunity.

Abstract: Many writers on educational policy and educational ethics believe that justice requires significant alterations to higher-education arrangements in the United States. On this standard picture, the higher-education sector fails to live up to its promise as an 'engine of social mobility' that helps to equalize opportunity and benefit badly-off social groups. I argue that, if political liberalism is correct, then the standard picture cannot be fully vindicated. A range of higher-education reforms favored by those who accept the standard picture cannot find support within political liberalism. After canvassing the standard picture (section 2), I explain why political liberalism entails that some institutions in a society's basic structure have a special status that prohibits certain kinds of intervention on them (section 3), and I argue that the university is one such institution (section 4). Finally, I respond to various objections concerning the implications of the special status of the university within political liberalism, and to the objection that, in our non-ideal social conditions, political liberalism places more stringent requirements on higher education (section 5). 

Abstract: G. A. Cohen has argued that there is a surprising truth in conservatism—namely, that there is a reason for some valuable things to be preserved, even if they could be replaced with other, more valuable things. This conservative thesis is motivated, Cohen suggests, by our judgments about a range of hypothetical cases. After reconstructing Cohen’s conservative thesis (§2), I argue that the relevant judgments about these cases do not favor the conservative thesis over standard, non-conservative axiological views (§3). But I then argue that there is a Mirrored Histories case which is such that, if one shares Cohen’s conservative attitude, judgments about this case favor Cohen’s conservative thesis over a wide range of non-conservative axiological views (§4-5). Reflection on this case also suggests a different explanation of apparently conservative judgments that merits consideration in its own right.  

Abstract: In this paper, we raise and discuss a puzzle about the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status. Suppose you have it within your power to give someone something they would enjoy. The following claims seem platitudinous: (1) you can use this power to reward whatever kind of option you want, thereby making that option better and generating a reason for that person to perform it; (2) this reason is then weighed alongside and against the other reasons at play; and (3) altogether, the reasons determine the deontic statuses of that person’s options. We show, however, that in a certain class of cases at least one of these apparent platitudes must be false. In particular, we show that in a certain kind of case wrongfulness cannot be rewarded. In some cases, if one tries to reward wrongfulness, something surprising must go awry: either what you attempt to give as a reward would not, in fact, be good, or it would not generate a reason, or it would have a surprising effect (or non-effect) on the deontic status of the relevant options. The upshot is that the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status are complicated in ways that have not previously been remarked. 

Abstract: Many egalitarians incorporate a concern for interpersonal welfare inequality as part of their favored axiology – that is, they take it to be a bad-making feature of outcomes. It is natural to think that, if inequality is in this sense a bad, it is an impersonal bad. This natural thought has been challenged. Some writers claim that egalitarian judgments can be accommodated by adopting an expanded view of a person's good, according to which being worse off than others is one of the factors that, in itself, makes one's life go worse. The putatively impersonal bad of inequality is thereby “dispersed” among individuals. I argue that this dispersion strategy fails. In a slogan: if you care about inequality, do not disperse it. 

Abstract: Standardly, telic egalitarianism is formulated as the view that it is, in one respect, bad if some people are unfairly worse off than others. This paper concerns two ambiguities in this standard statement of the view. The first ambiguity concerns the so-called temporal unit of egalitarian concern. This is the question of whether inequality during whole lives, inequality during certain segments of lives, or some combination of these, is what generates egalitarian concern. The second ambiguity concerns the so-called currency of egalitarian concern. In the present context, this is the question of whether inequality in overall welfare, inequality in some of the goods that contribute to welfare, or some combination of these, is what generates egalitarian concern. In this paper I argue that the debates about these two ambiguities are not unrelated. The same reasons that, according to some telic egalitarians, support rejecting the whole-lives-only view about the temporal unit of egalitarian concern also support rejecting the overall-welfare-only view about the currency of egalitarian concern.

Abstract: Telic egalitarianism is famously threatened by the levelling down objection. In its canonical form, the objection purports to show that it is not, in itself, an improvement if inequality is reduced. In a variant that is less often discussed, the objection is that telic egalitarians are committed to believing that sometimes one ought to reduce inequality, even when doing so makes no one better off. The standard egalitarian response to this ‘all things considered’ variant of the levelling down objection is to embed egalitarianism in a pluralist consequentialist moral theory. In section I, I briefly recapitulate this familiar strategy. In section II, I argue that this standard pluralist consequentialist response is inadequate. The inadequacy of the standard response, I argue, stems from the fact that the following are jointly inconsistent: (1) a commitment to levelling down’s impermissibility; (2) standard pluralist egalitarian consequentialism; (3) inequality being of non-trivial importance; and (4) the most plausible measures of inequality’s badness. In section III, I show that egalitarians can better respond to the all-things-considered levelling down objection by embedding egalitarianism in a nonconsequentialist moral theory.

Abstract: Many egalitarians believe that there is a pro tanto reason to remedy inequalities of opportunity in access to higher education. This consensus, I argue, masks practical disagreement among egalitarians: in many real-world choice contexts, egalitarians will disagree about which policies are to be endorsed, both from the point of view of equality and all things considered. I focus my discussion on a real-world case (the ‘big squeeze’ – so-called because the children of well-off families ‘squeeze out’ the children of less well-off families from access to highly selective US universities) that has recently been discussed by Amy Gutmann. I argue that while (a) the ‘big squeeze’ is condemned by the ideal of equal opportunity, nevertheless (b) different egalitarians will favor different policies in response to the ‘big squeeze’, and (c) one intuitive, and apparently egalitarian, response lacks support from most plausible egalitarian views. 

Description: Luck egalitarianism is the view that it is non-instrumentally bad—unjust and unfair—if some are worse off than others through no responsible choice of their own. In criticizing luck egalitarianism, some writers have pointed to the fact that, in some cases, luck egalitarianism entails that there is a reason to level down (i.e., to make some worse off and no one better off) even when the welfare inequality in question has an apparently morally innocent origin. In this short paper, I show that such criticism cannot be consistently pressed against luck egalitarianism by someone who accepts any plausible substantive equal-opportunity principle. Any such principle, I show, will also sometimes entail that there is a reason to level down. 

Description: Some egalitarians are concerned about differences in the qualities of lives that are not the result of people's responsible choices (i.e., unlucky inequality of welfare). Others are concerned about differences in the qualities of people's option sets (i.e., inequality of opportunity for welfare). These views are widely thought to be extensionally equivalent. I argue that they are not, and that egalitarians ought to be concerned about unlucky inequality of welfare, not inequality of opportunity for welfare. I further argue that, when egalitarians accept the more extensionally adequate view, they also--somewhat inconveniently--acquire an explanatory burden that is more difficult to discharge.

Description: Egalitarianism is famously threatened by the levelling down objection. The objection is that, in some cases, egalitarianism entails—implausibly, according to critics—that there is something to be said for someone who levels down. The standard egalitarian response to the objection attempts to undermine the intuitive judgment that there is nothing to be said for someone who levels down. I develop and defend a new egalitarian response to the levelling down objection, which I call the character defense. It is distinctive in that it allows egalitarians to accommodate, rather than having to try to undermine, the intuitive judgment that there is nothing to be said for someone who levels down. In particular, I show how, by adopting a global version of egalitarianism, egalitarians can accommodate the intuitive judgment in question in their moral evaluation of the character of someone who is disposed to level down.