From “Common Christianity” to “Equal Concern and Respect”

2014 ◽  
pp. 111-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory M. Dickinson ◽  
Nora M. Findlay
Keyword(s):  
Equal Concern

Procedural Fairness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. Scanlon
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Procedural Fairness ◽  
Equality Of Opportunity ◽  
Moral Basis ◽  
Equal Concern ◽  
The Way

Equality of opportunity requires that individuals should be selected for positions of advantage on the basis of relevant qualifications and that the ability to acquire these qualifications should not depend on the economic status of a person’s family. This chapter offers an institutional account of the moral basis of the first of these requirements. This account presupposes that positions of advantage are justified by the benefits they produce when they are held by individuals with the relevant abilities. The notion of ability relevant to considerations of procedural fairness therefore depends on the aims that justify the institution in question and on the way it is organized to promote these aims. The chapter relates this idea of fairness to the ideas of equal concern and non-discrimination and discusses the implications of procedural fairness for affirmative action.

Sidgwick, Concern, and the Good

Utilitas ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Darwall
Keyword(s):  
Equal Concern

Sidgwick maintains, plausibly, that the concept of a person's good is a normative one and takes for granted that it is normative for the agent's own choice and action. I argue that the normativity of a person's good must be understood in relation to concern for someone for that person's own sake. A person's good, I suggest, is what one should (rationally) want for that person in so far as one cares about him, or what one should want for him for his sake. I examine Sidgwick's defence of the axioms of rational prudence and argue that it is powerless to convince anyone who lacks self-concern or thinks he has no reason to care for himself. To the extent that Sidgwick is persuasive, I argue, it is because he insinuates an assumption of self-concern. Similarly, Sidgwick's defence of the axiom of rational benevolence tacitly assumes, not just impersonality, but equal concern.

Discrimination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Equal Concern ◽  
Distributive Injustice

This chapter first defines discrimination. It then argues that discrimination per se is not unjust and, accordingly, that its relation to distributive injustice is considerably more complicated than one might initially think. Specifically, the chapter critically assesses views according to which discrimination is unjust per se, because it i) violates distributive justice; ii) clashes with a norm of treating people with equal concern and respect; iii) reduces the discriminatee’s deliberative freedom; iv) is incompatible with a social relational egalitarian norm to the effect that citizens relate to one another as equals. All of this is compatible with the claim that some instances of discrimination are seriously unjust.

Trading with the Dead

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter T. Leeson
Keyword(s):  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Self Enforcement ◽  
Living Present ◽  
Equal Concern

Abstract Late medieval Englishmen provided for their wellbeing in the hereafter by purchasing intercession for their souls. They traded valuable landed endowments for the promise of posthumous Masses and prayers whose daily observance contractual counterparties agreed to underwrite for decades, centuries, even eternally. Intercessory foundations so contracted were called chantries. Chantry contracts constituted trades with the dead in the sense that the promisees were deceased when the promisors were supposed to perform. I study the special problems that chantry contract promisees faced in enforcing their rights from the grave and analyze the devices they used for that purpose. Chantry founders wary of their fates in the afterlife showed equal concern for the challenges their contracts would encounter in this life long after they were gone. Founders met those challenges by leveraging the economics of incentives to develop a strategy of chantry contract self-enforcement: profit the living, present and future, for monitoring the contractual performance of promisors and promisors’ agents, and for punishing them should they breach. Chantry founders’ strategy was successful, enabling trade with the dead.

Narrow Versus Comprehensive Justification in Humanitarian Aid: A Case Study of the CERF

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Brown
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Response ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
Humanitarian Emergencies ◽  
Equal Concern ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides a more comprehensive justification of the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) by supplementing conventional justifications with one of two fundamental principles of global morality: the Principle of Global Minimal Concern and Respect or the Principle of Global Equal Concern and Respect. Although CERF only accounts for around 4 per cent of total annual humanitarian funding, it represents a significant innovation in the way humanitarian aid is financed. The CERF is a standing fund of $500 million annually that can be called upon by UN frontline agencies and partner organisations to tackle humanitarian emergencies. While it is widely agreed that the CERF has made advances toward the objectives of timeliness, predictability and equity in emergency relief, questions remain unanswered about these objectives.

Temporal Neutrality and the Bias Toward the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Samuel Scheffler
Keyword(s):  
Derek Parfit ◽  
The Future ◽  
Equal Concern

Many philosophers have held that rationality requires one to have an equal concern for all parts of one’s life. In the view of these philosophers, temporal neutrality is a requirement of rationality. Yet Derek Parfit has argued that most of us are not, in fact, temporally neutral. We exhibit a robust bias toward the future. Parfit maintains that this future-bias is bad for us, and that our lives would go better if we were temporally neutral. Like other neutralists, he also believes that the bias is irrational, however widespread and robust it may be. This article assesses these criticisms and offers a qualified defense of the bias toward the future.

Political philosophy, Jewish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam J. Zohar ◽  
Michael Walzer
Keyword(s):  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
The People ◽  
Covenantal Community ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Central Form ◽  
Equal Concern

Jewish ideas about politics are embedded in the traditional genres of Judaic discourse, more often legal or homiletic than systematically philosophical. A defining feature of this tradition is its historical setting, as for most of their history the Jews lacked a state. Still, central issues of political thought were addressed primarily in the context of Judaism’s characteristic political entity, the medieval kahal – the by and large autonomous urban Jewish community. Discussions of issues such as authority, justice, or membership were informed by the Talmudic legal tradition, by biblical memories of Israel’s monarchic period and by dreams of restoration, inspired by ancient prophecies regarding the messianic era. The central form defining political authority and allegiance is the covenant, enacted at Sinai between God and the Israelite people, whom He had elected and liberated from Egypt. The people recognized God’s supreme authority, consenting to live by His teachings, the Torah. The significance and demands of this divine election, and the parameters and requirements of membership of the covenantal community, are much-debated issues in the Jewish political tradition. Of equal concern are the concrete implications of divine sovereignty. On one view, this precludes any institutionalized form of human authority. On other views, divine authority is invested in one or more of various human agents, from kings and priests to prophets and rabbis; strikingly, the latter used their own reason to interpret God’s words, and in their assemblies would take a vote to decide among interpretations. In uneasy co-existence with these, the tradition includes prominent justifications for human political agency, the legitimacy of which derives not from divine authorization but from popular consent. Living as a (sometimes) tolerated minority under non-Jewish rulers, the Jews dreamed of redemption, imagining the messianic king as leading them to triumph. Yet the foundational tale in Genesis is of humankind as one family, and the biblical prophets envisage world peace. Since 1948 the state of Israel has become the locus for re-examination of the Jewish political tradition. A crucial question has been to what extent this tradition, which includes proto-democratic as well as theocratic elements, can inform political discourse in a modern democracy whose citizens are mostly Jewish but include also significant non-Jewish minorities.

Special Concern and Personal Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
David O. Brink
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Compensation Principle ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Equal Concern

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of agent relativity and temporal neutrality. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

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