Social science inquiries of American agriculture have long recognized the inextricability of farm households and farm businesses. Efforts to train and support farmers, however, often privilege business realm indicators over social issues. Such framings implicitly position households as disconnected from farm stress or farm success. This article argues that systematically tracing the pathways between farm households and farm operations represents a potentially powerful inroad towards identifying effective support interventions. We argue childcare arrangements are an underrecognized challenge through which farm household (...) dynamics directly influence agricultural production. We draw on interviews and focus group data with farmers in the Northeastern United States to understand how farmer–parents access and negotiate childcare. Farmer–parents value raising children on farms, but express reluctance to expect current or future labor from them. Years with young children thus represent an especially vulnerable phase during a farm’s trajectory. We identify and analyze social, economic, and cognitive pathways through which childcare impacts farm operations. Social pathways include relationship tensions and gendered on-farm divisions of labor; economic pathways include farm layout and structure; cognitive pathways include how farmers think about and plan for their operations. Explicitly acknowledging such issues can better equip farmer–parents to anticipate and plan for conflicting demands on their time. (shrink)

The grounds of justice -- "Un pouvoir ordinaire": shared membership in a state as a ground of -- Justice -- Internationalism versus statism and globalism: contemporary debates -- What follows from our common humanity? : the institutional stance, human rights, and nonrelationism -- Hugo Grotius revisited : collective ownership of the Earth and global public reason -- "Our sole habitation" : a contemporary approach to collective ownership of the earth -- Toward a contingent derivation of human rights -- Proportionate use (...) : immigration and original ownership of the Earth -- "But the earth abideth for ever" : obligations to future generations -- Climate change and ownership of the atmosphere -- Human rights as membership rights in the global order -- Arguing for human rights : essential pharmaceuticals -- Arguing for human rights : labor rights as human rights -- Justice and trade -- The way we live now -- "Imagine there's no countries" : a reply to John Lennon -- Justice and accountability : the state -- Justice and accountability : the World Trade Organization. (shrink)

This essay defends an account of the duties to the global poor that is informed by the empirical question of what makes countries rich or poor, and that tends to be broadly in agreement with John Rawlss account in The Law of Peoples. I begin by introducing the debate about the sources of growth and explore its implications for duties towards the poor. Next I explore whether (and deny that) there are any further-reaching duties towards the poor. Finally, I ask (...) about the moral foundations for the duties to the poor of the sort that earlier parts argue there are. (shrink)

Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently most of their reach is limited to pornography, and they are also used to discredit people. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers. Our goal is to help set an agenda around these matters, to make sure this technology can help realize (...) epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. Our project is exploratory in nature, and we do not aim to offer conclusive answers at this early stage. There is a need to remain vigilant to make sure the downsides do not outweigh the upsides, and that will be a tall order. (shrink)

This study explores Nietzsche's views on selfishness and its role within his envisaged “revaluation of values”. Nietzsche advocates selfishness only for the “higher men” those characters who embody human excellence and whom he hopes will replace the person of guilt and ressentiment. Important parts of Nietzsche's mature work can be read as offering approaches to traditional philosophical problems in the spirit of the emerging biological sciences of his day, in particular physiology and evolutionary biology. Particularly striking in this context is (...) his effort to offer explanations in the spirit of these sciences for the emergence of norms of conduct commonly seen as moral. (shrink)

With the rise of far-reaching technological innovation, from artificial intelligence to Big Data, human life is increasingly unfolding in digital lifeworlds. While such developments have made unprecedented changes to the ways we live, our political practices have failed to evolve at pace with these profound changes. In this path-breaking work, Mathias Risse establishes a foundation for the philosophy of technology, allowing us to investigate how the digital century might alter our most basic political practices and ideas. Risse engages major concepts (...) in political philosophy and extends them to account for problems that arise in digital lifeworlds including AI and democracy, synthetic media and surveillance capitalism and how AI might alter our thinking about the meaning of life. Proactive and profound, Political Theory of the Digital Age offers a systemic way of evaluating the effect of AI, allowing us to anticipate and understand how technological developments impact our political lives - before it's too late. Mathias Risse is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs, and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of On Global Justice (2012), On Justice (2020), and Global Political Philosophy (2020), as well as the co-author of On Trade Justice (2019) and Holding Together: The Hijacking of Rights in America and How to Reclaim Them For Everyone (2022). (shrink)

Risse is concerned with humanity's common ownership of the earth, which has implications for a range of global problems. In particular, it helps illuminate the moral claims to international aid of small island nations whose existence is threatened by global climate change--such as Kiribati.

This paper considers the trend towards megaregionalism that became prominent in the trade domain in the last years of the Obama administration. While megaregionalism has fallen by the wayside since Trump’s inauguration, the underlying rationale for such treaties will most likely reassert itself rather soon. So there are structural issues that need to be discussed from a standpoint of global justice. In all likelihood, megaregionalism is detrimental to global justice. TTIP in particular, or anything like it, might derail any possibility (...) for a trade organization to aid the pursuit of justice at the global level, and any possibility that trade will be used to that end. From the standpoint of global justice one must hope that megaregionalism does not replace WTO multilateralism. The global-justice framework used here is the grounds-of-justice approach offered in the author’s 2012 On Global Justice. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Though much attention has been paid to different principles of justice, far less has been done reflecting on what the larger concern behind the notion is. In this work, Mathias Risse proposes that the perennial quest for justice is about ensuring that each individual has an appropriate place in what our uniquely human capacities permit us to build, produce, and maintain, and is appropriately respected for the capacity to hold such a place to begin with. Risse begins by investigating the (...) role of political philosophers and exploring how to think about the global context where philosophical inquiry occurs. Next, he offers a quasi-historical narrative about how the notion of distributive justice identifies a genuinely human concern that arises independently of cultural context and has developed into the one we should adopt now. Finally, he investigates the core terms of this view, including stringency, moral value, ground and duties of justice. (shrink)

In contrast to China’s efforts to upgrade its system of governance around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism. It is vital for the survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. This paper aims to contribute to that goal. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles and characterize digital lifeworlds (...) and what matters about them both in terms of how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinctions among stages of life and in terms of how they generate their own episteme, the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower. Epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of rights – are needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles. In the long run, we might well need a new kind of right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence. (shrink)

We have benefited from conversations with Archon Fung, Brian Jacob, Todd Pittinsky, Peter Schuck, Ani Satz, Andrew Williams, and students in a joint class on statistics and ethics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in October 2002. We are also grateful to our audience at the conference “The Priority of Practice,” organized by Jonathan Wolff at University College London in September 2003, and to Arthur Applbaum, Miriam Avins, Frances Kamm, Simon Keller, Frederick Schauer, Alan Wertheimer, and the Editors (...) of Phi- losophy & Public Affairs for insightful comments. We have benefited from prepublication reading of Schauer’s work on profiling, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). We thank Avedis Koutoujian for research assistance. (shrink)

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreakingWorld Poverty and Human Rightsis that the global political and economic orderharmspeople in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but torectify injustice. But does the global orderharmthe poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only (...) does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false. (shrink)

(2013). Critical notice of Aaron James, Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 382-401.

1.1 In 1955, John Harsanyi proved a remarkable theorem:1 Suppose n agents satisfy the assumptions of von Neumann/Morgenstern (1947) expected utility theory, and so does the group as a whole (or an observer). Suppose that, if each member of the group prefers option a to b, then so does the group, or the observer (Pareto condition). Then the group’s utility function is a weighted sum of the individual utility functions. Despite Harsanyi’s insistence that what he calls the Utilitarian Theorem embeds (...) utilitarianism into a theory of rationality, the theorem has fallen short of having the kind of impact on the discussion of utilitarianism for which Harsanyi hoped. Yet how could the theorem influence this discussion? Utilitarianism is as attractive to some as it is appalling to others. The prospects for this dispute to be affected by a theorem seem dim. Yet a closer look shows how the theorem could make a contribution. To fix ideas, I understand by utilitarianism the following claims: (1) Consequentialism: Actions are evaluated in terms of their consequences only. (2) Bayesianism: An agent's beliefs about possible outcomes are captured probabilistically. (3) Welfarism: The judgement of the relative goodness of states of affairs is based.. (shrink)

This essay makes a plea for the relevance of moral considerations in debates about immigration. It offers a standpoint that demonstrates why one should think of immigration as a moral problem that must be considered in the context of global justice.

On a postcard to Franz Overbeck from January 4, 1888, Nietzsche makes some illuminating remarks with respect to the three treatises in his book On the Genealogy of Morality.2 Nietzsche says that, ‘for the sake of clarity, it was necessary artificially to isolate the different roots of that complex structure that is called morality. Each of these three treatises expresses a single primum mobile; a fourth and fifth are missing, as is even the most essential (‘the herd instinct’) – for (...) the time being, the latter had to be ignored, as too comprehensive, and the same holds for the ultimate summation of all those different elements and thus a final account of morality.’ Nietzsche also points out that each treatise makes a contribution to the genesis of Christianity and rejects an explanation of Christianity in terms of only one psychological category. The topics of the treatises are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (first treatise), the ‘bad conscience’ (second), and the ‘ascetic ideal’ (third). The postcard suggests that Nietzsche discusses these topics separately because a joint treatment is too complicated, but that in reality, these ideas are inextricably intertwined, both with each other and with others that Nietzsche omits. Therefore, the three treatises should be regarded as parts of a unified theory and critique of morality. Nietzsche’s remarks on that postcard are important because in the Genealogy itself, he makes little effort to show the unity among the treatises. We shall return to this postcard repeatedly.3 The first treatise has attracted most scholarly attention, but much less work has been done on the second treatise, ‘ “Debts”, “Bad Conscience”, and Related Matters’. This is unfortunate, since it seems that, in Nietzsche’s own view, the central notion of the second treatise, namely, the bad conscience as a feeling of guilt, is a key element of Christian morality. Therefore, understanding Nietzsche’s treatment of this notion is essential to understanding his views on Christianity and the impact of the Christian heritage on non-religious moral philosophy.. (shrink)

In July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charged with a reexamination of the scope and nature of human rights–based claims. From his statements, it seems that Pompeo hopes the commission will substantiate—by appeal to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and to natural law theory—three key conservative ideas: (1) that there is too much human rights proliferation, and once we get things right, social and economic rights as well as gender emancipation and reproductive rights (...) will no longer register as human rights; (2) that religious liberties should be strengthened under the human rights umbrella; and (3) that the unalienable rights that should guide American foreign policy neither need nor benefit from any international oversight. I aim to show that despite Pompeo's framing, the Declaration of Independence, per se, is of no help with any of this, whereas evoking natural law is only helpful in ways that reveal its own limitations as a foundation for both human rights and foreign policy in our interconnected age. (shrink)

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, USA, mathias_risse{at}ksg.harvard.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> It is a widespread view that support for Fair Trade is called for, whereas agricultural subsidies are pegged as unjustifiable. Though one supports farmers in developing countries while the other does the same for those in already developed ones, there are, nonetheless, similarities between both scenarios. Both are economically `inefficient', upholding production beyond what the market would sustain. In both cases, supportive arguments (...) can assume two forms. First, such arguments might draw on normative claims made by producers. In the case of agricultural subsidies, farmers in developed countries assert claims against their fellow citizens, who ought to accept redistributive measures to keep them in business. In the case of Fair Trade, the claim can be made by farmers in developing nations against consumers, who ought to pay higher prices to keep them in business (under conditions deemed acceptable). Second, arguments to keep producers in business might be presented as the prerogative of both groups: even if farmers in developed countries did not have a claim to be kept in business, these countries would have the right to take measures to do so because they value their products. In the case of Fair Trade, even if farmers in developing nations had no claim against consumers, it is a consumer prerogative to pay more to keep them in business because they value their product or the process of producing it. There are, of course, differences between these scenarios as well, but in light of these parallels in the moral cases for subsidies and Fair Trade, it will be illuminating to examine the arguments for and against subsidies and Fair Trade together. Key Words: trade • subsidies • fairness • markets • development. (shrink)

This study is concerned with john R0emer’s Equality of Opportunity} I argue that his theory is committed to compatibilism but that one of its central claims is plausible only within a libertarian view on the free-will problem. Thus Roemer’s theory is troubled by a deep structural inco— herence and should be rejected as an account of equality of opportunity? Let me briefly introduce some background to Roemer’s theory. Contemporary egalitarians face two major challenges: first, they need..

1. Let me begin by distinguishing two conceptions of guilt. The first conceives of guilt as an experience of reprehensible failure in response to specific actions. I feel guilty if I break a promise for reasons that cannot justify this transgression. This conception of guilt as a responsive attitude, which I call locally- reactive guilt, captures a tension in one’s agency that arises from a local failure. The second conception understands guilt as a condition that shapes one’s whole existence. Guilt, (...) on this view, is a persistent feeling of imperfection. Such guilt, existential guilt, presupposes a reference point vis-à-vis which one’s life is so experienced. This reference is most plausibly a shared understanding of moral perfection within a community that is so demanding as to make it hard or impossible to live up to its standards. While the adoption of the Christian God offers one explanation for the emergence of such a shared understanding, other explanations of existential guilt are possible (see section 5 below). Existential guilt manifests itself especially in locally-reactive guilt, but there can be locallyreactive guilt without existential guilt. I submit that Nietzsche is not particularly interested in locally-reactive guilt, and that his vision of the future of humanity can accommodate such guilt. That conception of guilt, at any rate, is not tied to the Christian sittliche Weltordnung that Nietzsche attacks, or to other thick metaphysical or ethical views. Locallyreactive guilt merely presupposes that some set of expectations is in place and perceived as binding. What Nietzsche is interested in is existential guilt. As far as the Genealogy is concerned, this is to some extent a hermeneutical preconception based on my understanding of the German-speaking or otherwise European culture in which Nietzsche operated—a culture in which religious diversity generally amounted merely to the joint presence of Catholics and Lutherans (or, in some places, other Protestants) in the same area, interspersed with relatively small groups of Jews, and in which the Christian legacy was prevalent across all sections of culture.. (shrink)

Nash Equilibrium is a central concept ingame theory. It has been argued that playing NashEquilibrium strategies is rational advice for agentsinvolved in one-time strategic interactions capturedby non-cooperative game theory. This essaydiscusses arguments for that position: vonNeumann–Morgenstern's argument for their minimaxsolution, the argument from self-enforcingagreements, the argument from the absence ofprobabilities, the transparency-of-reasons argument,the argument from regret, and the argument fromcorrelated equilibrium. All of these argumentseither fail entirely or have a very limited scope.Whatever the use of Nash Equilibrium is, therefore,it is (...) not useful as a rational recommendation inone-time strategic interactions. This is good newsfor Bayesians: although this discussion does notargue directly for the Bayesian idea of rationalityas expected utility maximization, it argues againsta position that has been regarded as a contender insituations of strategic interaction. (shrink)

Although championed by the Marquis the Condorcet and many others, majority rule has often been rejected as indeterminate, incoherent, or implausible. Majority rule’s arch competitor is the Borda count, proposed by the Count de Borda, and there has long been a dispute between the two approaches. In several..

Collective rationality has attracted much attention by formal theorists, but philosophically, much of it is still poorly understood. The difficulties are easily motivated. As long as we only aggregate preferences (as we do in the case of majoritarian decision-making), there are different proposals for how to do so, and arguments on their behalves can be developed. However, there are voting methods that use rankings other than ordinal ones, and arguments for specific preference-based methods fail to be effective against such methods. (...) For example, no such argument can address a proposal that, say, a committee should make a hiring decision by using a 100-point system. On this proposal, each committee member assigns between 0 and 100 points to each applicant, and then these assignments are aggregated by, for example, averaging. Would that system be as reasonable as purely preference-based methods? Or can we distinguish conditions under which ordinal rankings are appropriate from conditions under which other rankings are appropriate? Such questions call for a theory of voting methods that assesses, first, the conditions under which particular kinds of rankings are appropriate (e.g., ordinal or point systems); second, what specific voting method(s) is (are) appropriate for the specific kinds of rankings; and third, what the criteria for appropriateness are in both cases. Recall that I explained at the start that my most of my research could be understood as interrogating notions of justice and fairness: it is through this search for criteria of appropriateness that considerations of fairness enter here. We are far from having such a theory, and it is precisely this point that keeps me fascinated with this area. (shrink)

This study explores Nietzsche's views on selfishness and its role within his envisaged “revaluation of values”. Nietzsche advocates selfishness only for the “higher men” those characters who embody human excellence and whom he hopes will replace the person of guilt and ressentiment. Important parts of Nietzsche's mature work can be read as offering approaches to traditional philosophical problems in the spirit of the emerging biological sciences of his day, in particular physiology and evolutionary biology. Particularly striking in this context is (...) his effort to offer explanations in the spirit of these sciences for the emergence of norms of conduct commonly seen as moral. (shrink)

Suppose we have a group of Bayesian agents, and suppose that theywould like for their group as a whole to be a Bayesian agent as well. Moreover, suppose that thoseagents want the probabilities and utilities attached to this group agent to be aggregated from theindividual probabilities and utilities in reasonable ways. Two ways of aggregating their individual data areavailable to them, viz., ex ante aggregation and ex post aggregation. The former aggregatesexpected utilities directly, whereas the latter aggregates probabilities and utilities (...) separately.A number of recent formal results show that both approaches have problematic implications. This studydiscusses the philosophical issues arising from those results. In this process, I hope to convincethe reader that these results about Bayesian aggregation are highly significant to decision theorists, butalso of immense interest to theorists working in areas such as ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

Over the last four decades computers and the internet have become an intrinsic part of all our lives, but this speed of development has left related philosophical enquiry behind. Featuring the work of computer scientists and philosophers, these essays provide an overview of an exciting new area of philosophy that is still taking shape.

Labor rights are the first to come up for criticism when accounts of human rights are offered in response to philosophical questions about them, and notoriously so Article 24, which talks about `rest and leisure' and `period holidays with pay.' This study first tries to make it plausible why labor rights would appear on the Universal Declaration, and next articulates some philosophical objections to their presence there. The interesting question then is not so much how one could respond to the (...) objections, but to explore what commitments one needs to make to answer our question in a satisfactory manner. To make progress, we can contrast the idea of human rights with conceptions of them. Such conceptions offer answers to a set of philosophical questions about human rights. It would be rather unlikely for any such conception to emerge as the uniquely best philosophical account of human rights since disagreements among different conceptions are complex. What is sensible to ask then is what a conception of human rights would have to be like to count labor rights as human rights, and whether there is a conception of that sort. I offer one conception that I take to be plausible overall, and that does count labor rights as human rights. Or, that is: it does count a right to work as a human right, alas not in the strong interpretation according to which states must create jobs but in the weaker sense that states need to make sure people are not systematically excluded from employment, and are treated in certain ways at their place of work, and it does count a right to leisure as a human right, alas not a right to paid vacations. (shrink)

Suppose n Bayesian agents need to make a decision as a group. The groupas a whole is also supposed to be a Bayesian agent whose probabilities andutilities are derived or aggregated in reasonable ways from the probabilitiesand utilities of the group members. The aggregation could beex ante, i.e., interms of expected utilities, or it could be ex post, i.e., in terms of utilitiesonly, or in terms of utilities and probabilities separately. This study exploresthe ex post approach. Using the Bolker/Jeffrey framework, (...) we show thatex post aggregation is subject to an instability phenomenon. That is, it mayhappen that the group preference between actions ``flips back and forth'''' dependingon the level of detail in which the decision problem is described. Structurally verysimilar phenomena also occur elsewhere in social choice theory, in statistics (Simpson''sParadox), and in voting theory (Ostrogorski''s Paradox). (shrink)

The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either limit the applicability of justice to states—the only distributions that can be just or unjust, strictly speaking, are within the state—or else extend it to all human beings. The view I defend in On Global Justice rejects both of these approaches. Instead, my view, and thus my attempt at meeting the aforementioned challenge, acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. My purpose here is to explain what (...) my view has to say about responsibility. First of all, I explain what my view implies about the responsibilities of the state for the realization of justice. Then I explain that in addition to obligations of justice, my view also gives rise to obligations of account-giving. I end by sketching what all this implies for institutional reform at the global level. (shrink)