This article provides an introduction to methods for the measurement of economic inequality. It reviews the inequality measures that economists have developed, and explains how one might choose between indices or check whether conclusions about inequality difference can be derived without choosing any specific index. It reviews mobility measurement and some fundamental questions about how the distributions of economic interest are defined.

The conception of social justice presented and defended in Philippe Van Parijs, "Real Freedom for All" entails, among other implication, the justification of an unconditional basic income. It was the subject of seven critical comments that forms issue 22 and part of 23 of ANALYSE & KRITIK. In this article, Van Parijs offers a comprehensive reply.

How is it possible, at the same time, to claim that there is a causal primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production and to recognize that the development of the productive forces causally depends on the nature of the relations of production? This irritating puzzle, which threatens the very core of historical materialism, had never received a satisfactory solution until G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History. The latter asserts that only a functional interpretation of historical (...) materialism can effect the required reconciliation. On one reading of the "primacy puzzle", however, this claim turns out to be trivial, while on the only other plausible reading it turns out to be false. Having delineated this dilemma, the article sketches an alternative solution. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In response to criticism of empirical or “positive” approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR), we defend the importance of these approaches for any CSR theory that seeks to have practical impact. Although we acknowledge limitations to positive approaches, we unpack the neglected but crucial relationships between positive knowledge on the one hand and normative knowledge on the other in the implementation of CSR principles. Using the structure of a practical syllogism, we construct a model that displays the key role of (...) empirical knowledge in fulfilling a firm’s responsibility to society, paying special attention to the implications of the “ought implies can” dictum. We also defend the importance of one particular class of empirical claims; namely, claims from the field of economics. Even positive economic theory, which is often criticized for endorsing profits rather than values, can cooperate in intriguing ways with non-economic concepts in the implementation of CSR goals. (shrink)

A full understanding of emotions and emotion characteristics can only be reached when their dynamic nature is taken into account. As such, a primary objective of the present study is to describe and account for variability in temporal profiles of experienced emotional intensity. Participants were asked to make detailed drawings of intensity profiles of recently experienced episodes of anger, sadness, joy and affection. Functional data analysis revealed three features that together accounted for 84% of the total variability: (i) steepness at (...) onset; (ii) skewness; and (iii) the number of peaks. Emotions differed with regard to the first two features, with the rise at onset being steeper for sadness and joy and affection being the most negatively skewed emotion under study. Individual differences regarding each of the three features were found, however, they did not strongly generalise across emotions. (shrink)

In recent years, to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects, institutions in the USA have begun to set up programmes to monitor ongoing medical research. These programmes provide routine, onsite oversight, and thus go beyond existing oversight such as investigating suspected misconduct or reviewing paperwork provided by investigators. However, because of a lack of guidelines and evidence, institutions have had little guidance in setting up their programmes. To help institutions make the right choices, we used interviews and document (...) analysis to study how and why 11 US institutions have set up their monitoring programmes. Although these programmes varied considerably, we were able to distinguish two general types. ‘Compliance’ programmes on the one hand were part of the institutional review board office and set up to ensure compliance with regulations. Investigators’ participation was mandatory. Monitors focused on documentation. Investigators could be disciplined, and could be obliged to take corrective actions. ‘Quality-improvement’ programmes on the other hand were part of a separate office. Investigators requested to be monitored. Monitors focused more on actual research conduct. Investigators and other parties received feedback on how to improve the research process. Although both types of programmes have their drawbacks and advantages, we argue that if institutions want to set up monitoring programmes, quality improvement is the better choice: it can help foster an atmosphere of trust between investigators and the institutional review board, and can help raise the standards for the protection of human subjects. (shrink)

Capitalist societies are full of unacceptable inequalities. Freedom is of paramount importance. These two convictions, widely shared around the world, seem to be in direct contradiction with each other. Fighting inequality jeopardizes freedom, and taking freedom seriously boosts inequality. Can this conflict be resolved? In this ground-breaking book, Philippe Van Parijs sets a new and compelling case for a just society. Assessing and rejecting the claims of both socialism and conventional capitalism, he presents a clear and compelling alternative vision (...) of the just society: a capitalist society offering a substantial and unconditional basic income to all its members. Not just an exercise in political theory, this book reveals a new ideal of a free society and its meaning in the real world by drawing out its policy implications. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about the just society and the welfare state as we move into the twenty-first century. (shrink)

A compromise is an agreement that involves mutual concessions. Each party gets less than it feels entitled to, but agrees to it because the situation it anticipates under the deal is better than the one it expects in the absence of a deal: conflict, exit or arbitration by a third party. Some compromises, however, are bad, and others are good. This article discusses three conjectures about what it is that makes a compromise good. Is a good compromise an honourable compromise, (...) one that enables each party to save face? Is it rather a fair compromise, one that contributes to the progress of justice independently defined? Or is it a Pareto-improving compromise, one that changes things in such a way that it ends up making everyone better off than under the status quo? A compromise is never as good as a consensus, but it is generally better than nothing, and often achievable when a consensus is not. And when it is, trying to make it as good as possible in each of the three ways described is always worthwhile. © 2012 Government and Opposition Ltd. (shrink)

Emotions are traditionally considered to be brief states that last for seconds or a few minutes at most. However, due to pioneering theoretical work of Frijda and recent empirical studies, it has become clear that the duration of emotions is actually highly variable with durations ranging from a few seconds to several hours, or even longer. We review research on determinants of emotion duration. Three classes of determinants are identified: features related to the (a) emotion-eliciting event (event duration and event (...) appraisal), (b) emotion itself (nature of the emotion component, nature of the emotion, and emotion intensity), and (c) emotion-experiencing person (dispositions and emotion regulatory actions). Initial evidence on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie their effects is discussed. (shrink)

Public announcement logic is an extension of multiagent epistemic logic with dynamic operators to model the informational consequences of announcements to the entire group of agents. We propose an extension of public announcement logic with a dynamic modal operator that expresses what is true after any announcement: after which , does it hold that Kφ? We give various semantic results and show completeness for a Hilbert-style axiomatization of this logic. There is a natural generalization to a logic for arbitrary events.

Models not only represent but may also influence their targets in important ways. While models’ abilities to influence outcomes has been studied in the context of economic models, often under the label ‘performativity’, we argue that this phenomenon also pertains to epidemiological models, such as those used for forecasting the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying three ways in which a model by the Covid-19 Response Team at Imperial College London may have influenced scientific advice, policy, and individual responses, (...) we consider the implications of epidemiological models’ performative capacities. We argue, first, that performativity may impair models’ ability to successfully predict the course of an epidemic; but second, that it may provide an additional sense in which these models can be successful, namely by changing the course of an epidemic. (shrink)

Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, “How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis” (Winsberg et al. 2020). In their paper, Winsberg et al. argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose lockdowns. We focus on (...) Winsberg et al.’s contentions that knowledge about COVID-19 resultant projections were inadequate; that epidemiologists were biased in their estimates of relevant figures; that there was insufficient evidence supporting the efficacy of lockdowns; and that lockdowns cause more harm than good. We argue that none of these claims are sufficiently supported by evidence, thus impairing their case against lockdowns, and leaving open the question of whether lockdowns were justified. (shrink)

Report of the symposium 'Towards a Philosophy of Systems Biology' held at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (VUA), the Netherlands, from 2 to 3 June 2005.

"Entitlement theories of justice: From Nozick to Roemer and beyond", Economics and philosophy 1/1 : 69-81.

A basic income is an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. This article surveys the various forms the basic income proposal has taken and how they relate to kin ideas; synthesizes the central case for basic income, as a strategy against both poverty and unemployment; examines the question of whether and in what sense a universal basic income is affordable; and discusses the most promising next steps (...) towards it, both in the North and in the South. (shrink)

In Europe and throughout the world, competence in English is spreading at a speed never achieved by any language in human history. This growing dominance of English is frequently perceived as being grossly unjust. This book is the first systematic treatment of the of the normative aspects of language policy and how this relates to justice.

How is it possible that models from game theory, which are typically highly idealised, can be harnessed for designing institutions through which we interact? I argue that game theory assumes that social interactions have a specific structure, which is uncovered with the help of directed graphs. The graphs make explicit how game theory encodes counterfactual information in natural collections of its models and can therefore be used to track how model-interventions change model-outcomes. For model-interventions to inform real-world design requires the (...) truth of a causal hypothesis, namely that structural relations specified in a model approximate causal relations in the target interaction; or in other words, that the directed graph can be interpreted causally. In order to increase their confidence in this hypothesis, market designers complement their models with natural and laboratory experiments, and computational methods. Throughout the paper, the reform of a matching market for medical residents provides a case study for my proposed view, which hasn't been previously considered in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this book, he argues that the purpose of democracy should be to promote justice - we need not just democracy (in the sense of unqualified democracy) but a just democracy. Machiavelli and Rawls must be brought together.

With the current refugee crisis showing no sign of abating, a fair and efficient method for distributing people to different countries is urgently needed. In this post, Philippe van Basshuysen looks at matching systems.

In this article we show how the Lacanian theory of the Imaginary , as elaborated in Lacan's earlier texts, is strongly influenced by the Hegelianism of Alexandre Kojève. In the first part we explain how Lacan is giving a fresh interpretation of Freud's theory of Narcissism by making use of the category of the Imaginary. The second part indicates how the Kojèvian interpretation of the dialectics of Self-consciousness serves as a paradigm for imaginary intersubjectivity. Imaginary intersubjectivity, however, leads to an (...) impasse since authentic recognition requires a symbolic context. That is why Lacan's theory of a fundamental desire for recognition is intrinsically linked up with his theory of the Symbolic. According to Lacan this aspect has been neglected by Hegel . Hegel did not see the importance of the symbolic order. This affirmation, however, implies a severe misinterpretation of Hegel's text. In the last part we elaborate the relation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic as a dialectical one. The Lacanian interpretation of Freud's theory, ' Hegelianizes' Freud. We illustrate this in reference to the Freudian concept of 'libido'. (shrink)

Zu Beginn der Pandemie im Frühjahr 2020, und nach einem weitreichenden Lockdown, ruhten große Erwartungen auf Corona-Warn-Apps, um einen erneuten Lockdown zu verhindern. Diese Erwartungen haben sich nicht erfüllt; stattdessen wurden in Deutschland als Reaktion auf erneute Wellen von COVID-19 weitere Kontaktbeschränkungen verordnet. Wie hätte die digitale Kontaktverfolgung wirksamer gestaltet werden können? Wir argumentieren, dass es ein Spannungsfeld zwischen der Datensparsamkeit und einer wirksamen Bekämpfung der Pandemie besteht. Im Gegensatz zur deutschen Corona-Warn-App wäre eine Variante der App, in der pseudonymisierte (...) Kennungen zentral gespeichert werden, in der Lage gewesen, die Effektivität der Kontaktverfolgung entscheidend zu erhöhen. Schließlich argumentieren wir, dass das Spannungsfeld zwischen Datensparsamkeit und einer wirksamen Pandemiebekämpfung sich jedoch nicht in einen Wertekonflikt übersetzt, weil zentrale Systeme uns trotz ihrer erhöhten Wirksamkeit nicht vor deutlich gravierendere Probleme beim Datenschutz stellen als dezentrale Systeme. Zentrale Möglichkeiten der digitalen Kontaktverfolgung wären daher ethisch gerechtfertigt, um auf weitere Wellen von COVID-19 oder auf zukünftige Epidemien effektiv zu reagieren. (shrink)

Non, l'invective et l'exégèse ne sont pas les seuls registres de la philosophie politique. Il n'est pas nécessaire, pour être pertinent, de se faire pamphlétaire, pas plus qu'il n'est requis, pour être respectable, de se muer en interprète. Il existe une autre manière de faire de la philosophie politique, qui répond aux interpellations du monde sans renoncer aux exigences de l'esprit. L'objectif premier de ce livre est de la montrer à l'œuvre. Pour atteindre cet objectif, Philippe Van Parijs présente (...) ici les références incontournables de la philosophie politique anglo-saxonne contemporaine, dont il est lui-même un des protagonistes. Il en situe les classiques, de Rawls et Nozick à Dworkin et Gauthier. Il en décrit les principaux courants de l'utilitarisme ordinal au marxisme analytique. Et il en explique les notions fondamentales, de la Pareto-optimalité au critère de non-envie, du maximum à la cluse lockéenne, du théorème d'impossibilité d'Arrow à la théorie de l'exploitation de Roemer. Mais surtout, il adopte lui-même la démarche pour laquelle il plaide. Il avance des thèses et en critique d'autres, élucide des controverses, résout des paradoxes, réfute des objections - tout cela en adoptant, face aux libertariens comme aux marxistes, aux libéraux comme aux communautariens, une attitude de sympathie critique qui permet le dialogue sans bannir les convictions. Au-delà d'une présentation dense, claire et compétente des théories contemporaines de la justice, ce livre constitue une initiation vivante et engagée à la pratique de la philosophie politique d'aujourd'hui. (shrink)