The Challenge of Measuring Well-Being as Philosophers Conceive of It

Many philosophers find the prospect of working with researchers in the social and behavioral sciences exciting, in part because they hope that these researchers might be able to measure well-being as the philosopher conceives of it. In this chapter, the author considers how the measurement of well-being, as it is conceived of by philosophers, might be facilitated. She proposes that existing scales can be employed for this purpose, and she supports this conclusion through an in-depth discussion of an example. The author explains how a scale of psychological well-being validated in more than 750 empirical studies may be employed to measure the extent to which a person has realized an ostensible basic good. This discussion is illustrative of the general method that may be employed to bring empirical researchers and philosophers into contact in a way that will facilitate the measurement of well-being as philosophers conceive of it.

“There are only two genders – male and female…” An Analysis of Online Responses to Tasmania Removing ‘Gender’ from Birth Certificates

<p><br />This article details and analyses some of the public online response to the Tasmanian Government’s decision to make the recording of gender on birth certificates an opt-in process. Tasmania is the first jurisdiction in Australia to make such a change, which aims to simplify the legal processes involved in affirming a person’s gender identity (including agender and non-binary status). The data set is comprised of comments posted on Facebook in response to The Australian newspaper’s coverage of this event; The Australian is Australia’s only truly national daily broadsheet. This article argues that the effect of this overwhelmingly negative ciscentric response, as revealed by the aesthetic of this digital social space, is the generation of an impression of Australians as trans- (and intersex-) averse. This risks undermining the basic good of assurance that transgender and intersex people ought to have: an assurance that they can inhabit public spaces and be treated with dignity and respect (cf. Waldron). To prevent this kind of hostile response in the future, we must find a way to communicate and make resonant to the general public what queer and feminist theorists have been arguing for quite some time: that sex and gender are not synonymous and that both gender and sex are social constructs.</p>

The Duty to Treat Others as Equals: Who Stands Under It?

Chapter Seven, “The Duty to Treat Others as Equals: Who Stands Under It?,” focuses on the obligations of governments and private individuals to treat people as equals. The author considers several arguments for the claim that governments owe those whom they govern a duty to treat them as equals. The author then turns to the duties of individuals. The author argues that we do not acquire a duty to treat others as equals only when we occupy certain institutional roles. Rather, we always have an obligation to treat others as equals, in the specific senses discussed in this book: we must not unfairly subordinate some to others, or infringe their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or deny them access to a basic good when it is in our power to give it to them. The author argues that this obligation is not too demanding, and distinguishes it from the duty to give equal concern to everyone’s interests in one’s deliberations. The author tries to show that this duty is consistent with recognizing the importance of a variety of individual freedoms, and that there are often good reasons for the state not to use anti-discrimination law to regulate decisions made in more personal contexts. The author also explains why, nevertheless, the state has an obligation to help us fulfil our obligations in these more personal context, by creating the conditions under which we can relate to others as equals.

Access to Basic Goods

Chapter Four, “Access to Basic Goods,” turns to a third way in which discriminatory practices can wrong people: they can leave them without access to resources or social institutions that are “basic” in the sense that access to them is necessary for these people if they are to participate fully and equally in their society. The author explains that to identify a good as “basic” in this sense is not to claim that it is objectively good or that it is necessary for all groups in that society. The author argues that certain goods can be seen as basic only from the perspective of the person or group who lacks that good, and that it is therefore very important to look to the discriminatee’s particular situation, needs, and values. The chapter then explains the importance of this form of wrongful discrimination and gives examples of cases that are best understood in this way, including the fight for same sex marriage and for women’s freedom to breastfeed in public. The author also argues that there is a distinctive kind of wrongness involved when discrimination leaves someone without access to a basic good, different from the wrongs explored in other chapters of the book.

Faces of Inequality

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people. Sophia Moreau argues that although all cases of wrongful discrimination involve a failure to treat some people as the equals of others, these failures are importantly different. The first four chapters of the book explore different ways of failing to treat people as equals: through unfairly subordinating some to others, through violating someone’s right to a particular deliberative freedom, and through denying some people access to a basic good. Chapter Five explains why these different wrongs can be seen as parts of a coherent theory of wrongful discrimination, and it presents some of the explanatory advantages of that this theory has over others. Chapter Six argues that the theory enables us to see indirect discrimination as wrongful for many of the same reasons as direct discrimination, and that both should be seen as forms of negligence. Finally Chapter Seven argues that the duty to treat others as equals is a duty held not just by the state, but also by each individual member of society.

Conclusion

In the book’s Conclusion, the author summarizes three ways in which discrimination wrongs people: by unfairly subordinating them to others, by infringing their right to a particular deliberative freedom, and by denying them access to a basic good. She identifies a number of advantages of this theory. She relates the theory to the serigraph on the cover of the book, discussing the wrongful discrimination faced by indigenous peoples in Canada.

Indirect Discrimination

Chapter Six, “Indirect Discrimination,” makes explicit the implications that the author’s pluralist theory of wrongful discrimination has for our understanding of indirect discrimination. The author argues that the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination is not always morally significant. Indirect discrimination, like direct discrimination, can subordinate people; it can infringe their right to deliberative freedom; and it can deny them access to a basic good. The author also considers questions of responsibility and culpability. The author distinguishes between “responsibility for cost” and “responsibility as culpability.” Agents of indirect discrimination are, in many cases, both responsible for the costs of rectifying discrimination and also responsible in the sense of “culpable.” The author explains how we can see both indirect and direct discrimination as involving negligence on the part of the discriminator.

Disability, Basic Justice, and Habilitation into Basic Good Health

Focusing on the human necessity of habilitation leads to a more inclusive and adequate account of the circumstances of justice. Such an account involves paying persistent attention to similarities and differences in the physical and psychological abilities of actual human agents. That in turn leads to equally persistent attention to the basic good health (or lack of it) in such agents, and to their inabilities (disabilities) and abilities. Such attention to basic good health then yields a disability-friendly starting point for the construction of normative theories of basic justice generally. It does this by providing a constant undercurrent of attention to the crucial problems of human habilitation and rehabilitation that any plausible normative theory of justice must address. Those problems of justice, moreover, are framed as part of the inescapable project of working around human disabilities, or through them, toward situations in which their salience for basic justice is minimized.

Luxury consumption, precautionary savings and wealth inequality

Most macroeconomic models are based on the assumption of a single homogeneous consumption good. In the present paper we consider a model with two goods: a basic good and a luxury good. We then apply this assumption to a standard general equilibrium heterogeneous agent model. We find a substantial reduction in precautionary savings compared to a standard model. The effect on wealth inequality turns out to be ambiguous and to depend on the size of the assumed earnings risk.