In response to a crisis, policymakers face the decision of whether to enumerate specific actions the public must do or, instead, to aim at an overall outcome while leaving room open for choice. This essay evaluates the merits and demerits of crisis response that leaves room open for choice, with a particular focus on pandemic response. I evaluate two approaches: trades and offsets. Trades allow individuals or groups to exchange protection against harm or entitlement to engage in risky activity. Offsets allow the same actors to pay to mitigate the effects of decisions that increase risk for others. Choice-friendly approaches can free people to better align their actions with their values, harness local knowledge for better social outcomes, and act as natural experiments. However, they also are subject to objections, including negative externalities, agency problems, exploitation, and exacerbating inequality.

This essay argues that we have a duty to protect biodiversity hotspots, rooted in an argument about the wrongful imposition of risk and intergenerational justice. State authority over territory and resources is not unlimited; the state has a duty to protect these areas. The essay argues that although biodiversity loss is a global problem, it can be tackled at the domestic level through clear rules. The argument thus challenges the usual view of state sovereignty, which holds that authority over territory, resources, and migration (all of which are connected to the protection of biodiversity hotspots) is unlimited.

My aim in this essay is to argue for a better moral-conceptual framework and for institutional innovation in preparation for the next pandemic. My main conclusions are as follows. (1) The primary moral principle that should guide responses to the next pandemic is the duty to prevent and mitigate serious harms. (2) A proper understanding of the moral foundations and scope of the duty to prevent and mitigate serious harms requires rejecting both Extreme Nationalism and Extreme Cosmopolitanism. (3) A better response to the next pandemic requires transforming the moral landscape through institutional innovation by developing an international institution that can perfect indeterminate duties (i) by identifying duty-bearers, (ii) by specifying their duties to provide medical resources and other forms of aid, (iii) by allocating the specified duties to various public and private entities in such a way as to ensure effective coordination and that the costs of providing aid are fairly distributed, and (iv) by providing effective mechanisms for compliance with the specified duties. (4) Institutional innovation is morally required, regardless of whether the harm prevention and mitigation duties of the better-off are duties of justice or of beneficence, because without institutionalization, some duties of justice, including those requiring the prevention and mitigation of serious harms, suffer some of the same indeterminacies that are present in duties of beneficence.

Liberal political institutions have been an enormous boon for humanity. The free market aspect of liberalism has led to an explosion of innovation, ranging from new kinds of technology and novel forms of entertainment to advances in science and medicine. The emphasis on individual rights at the core of liberalism has increased our ability to explore new ways of living and to construct an identity of our own choosing. But liberal political institutions around the world are facing two crises: low fertility and declining social trust. In particular, liberalism’s focus on individual liberty rather than group cohesion can increase economic productivity by encouraging the free movement of people and capital, but this movement is associated with declines in social cohesion and fertility. In this essay, we highlight some challenges to the long-term evolutionary stability of liberalism. In other words, we raise the question: Can liberalism last?

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about at least two normative challenges on unprecedented scale for liberal democracies. One concerned prioritization decisions when health care resources were constrained. The other, which arguably led to lasting damage to social cohesion and citizens’ trust in government and government public health institutions, concerned policies introduced with the aim of reducing the spread of SARS-CoV2, some of which turned out to be mistaken. I discuss in this essay a few examples of misguided, liberty-limiting public health policies and describe how public health and public health ethics principlism provided cover for such policies. Citizens had reasons to be concerned about the duration of such liberty-infringing policies, the absence of predictable government policies, and the absence of transparent justifications for the policies that were implemented.

We consider the concept of poverty from the asset-accumulation approach and propose an integrated framework, building upon existing theories, to describe how the interconnected factors of trust (or lack thereof) and social distance can reinforce poverty traps. Social distance is influenced by choice, while trust is the symptom that defines the strength of social ties on a group. We look at how an absence of trust influences how households make decisions about the use and accumulation of assets in ways that could perpetuate poverty. Weak trust also affects how groups interact with each other in a society, creating “trust clusters” within homogeneous groups and antagonism across groups, which in turn affects aspirations and leads to an erosion of the basis of a social contract. For more effective and sustainable poverty reduction, we need to understand these linkages and address them systematically.

This essay provides an account of four interrelated ideas. First, a person who is not poor by the standard conception of poverty can still be functionally poor. Second, poverty is a relationship between the poor and their environment (community, local markets, and local institutions). Third, poverty is a determinant of agency and impedes its exercise. Fourth, promoting agency promotes development. I conclude that agency is central to understanding both poverty and development.

In recent years, the psychological causes and consequences of poverty have received renewed attention from scientists and policymakers. In this essay, we summarize new developments in this literature. First, we discuss advances in our understanding of the relationship between income and psychological well-being. There is a robust positive relationship between the two, both within and across countries, and in correlational and causal analyses. Second, we summarize recent work on the impact of “scarcity” and stress on economic preferences and decision-making. Our view of this literature is that the evidence is relatively weak. Third, we summarize evidence on the impact of psychological interventions on economic outcomes. Light-touch psychological interventions, such as videos that aim to raise aspirations, have shown some promise in encouraging investment and improving economic well-being. Similarly, psychotherapy and pharmacological mental health treatments have positive effects on economic outcomes. Relative to the effects of cash transfers, these impacts are small in absolute terms and large in per-dollar terms. We conclude by discussing whether a psychological poverty trap is plausible.

Poverty can be an ephemeral life stage of a young person whose skill sets will become more valuable with training and experience, a personal setback such as losing a job, or a systemic affliction that puts a whole community in danger of widespread famine. A common theme of this volume’s essays is that we cannot understand poverty and famine unless we acknowledge that poor people are not mouths to be fed but agents. Amartya Sen got this right, crediting Adam Smith for the seeds of his insight. What has been enabling people by the billions since Smith’s time to work their way out of poverty?

A free world is one in which human beings can live free, self-directed lives. A great obstacle to such a world is severe poverty, still blighting the lives of half of humankind. We have the resources, technologies, and administrative capacities to eradicate severe poverty, but doing so requires some restructuring of existing social arrangements. We might begin with the current regime governing innovation, which has monopoly markups as its key funding source. Such monopoly rents encourage the quest for innovations, but also greatly impede their diffusion. This headwind harms the poor, who cannot afford monopoly prices and whose specific needs innovators thus tend to ignore. It also works against potential innovations whose benefits would mostly go to third parties whom buyers care little about. Both problems can be much alleviated through a supplementary alternative reward mechanism that would enable innovators to exchange their monopoly privileges on any patentable technology for impact rewards based on the social benefits achieved with it. By promoting innovations and their diffusion together, international impact funds would bring substantial gains in justice and cost-effectiveness, especially in the pharmaceutical and green-technology sectors.

Until recently, economics conceived of poverty solely as a lack of material resources. This view likely captures the reality of poverty experienced by many people around the globe. However, two waves of behavioral economics demonstrate that the narrowing of people’s external environments may change people themselves: poverty lowers the quality of decision-making and poverty and oppression may depress the capacity to aspire. Poverty and a history of oppression also change how individuals are perceived. To overcome these effects may require helping people acquire new mental models. This essay discusses key findings from behavioral economics, the implications for agency, and some interventions with promising outcomes. We hope to inspire scholars and policymakers to think more deeply about the nature of poverty and oppression and to consider policies that target the psychological and sociological factors that create cycles of poverty.

As in other sciences, an economic experiment is an artificial situation created by a researcher for the purpose of answering one or more scientific questions. Experiments of various types are used in economics to understand the causes of poverty and how it might be alleviated. The methods can identify causal relationships between variables and thereby isolate factors that can lead to poverty as well as to document the behavioral consequences of poverty. Experiments can also be used to provide test beds for proposed policies to alleviate poverty. This essay describes a variety of ways in which experiments have been employed to understand and combat poverty. A line of laboratory experiments that considers which economic institutions are conducive to economic growth is discussed in detail. The results show that decentralized markets are conducive to allowing an economy to operate as efficiently as it can. However, in an economy with a theoretical “poverty trap,” the market works more efficiently if accompanied by a democratic voting process and freedom of communication.

Egalitarian commitments have often been thought compatible with practices that are later identified as inegalitarian. Thus, a fundamental task of egalitarianism is to make inequality visible. Making inequality visible requires including marginalized people, questioning what equality requires, and naming inequality. At the same time, egalitarianism is a movement for change: egalitarians want to make things more equal. When egalitarians seek change at the institutional level, the two egalitarian tasks are complementary: making inequality visible is part of campaigning to make things better. However, at the level of social norms there is a dilemma because making inequality visible can make things worse. Making inequality visible can reinforce unequal norms and fail to address intersectionality. The case of gendered pronouns illustrates this dilemma.

There are three distinct forces that conspire to produce a great deal of economic misery. We can refer to them, for convenience, as misfortune, unfairness, and improvidence. Political philosophers have often shown an interest in one or another of these, but seldom all three. Furthermore, those who do acknowledge all three have often felt driven to collapse them into one root cause of inequality. My goal in this essay will be to argue that the three are independent of one another, but more importantly, that they each require distinct remedies. This is important for egalitarians because it defeats any attempt to develop a “one-size-fits-all” policy aimed at creating a more equal society. This analysis helps us to understand several of the tensions that arise in our attempts to combat inequality that are often obscured by an overemphasis on the power of redistributive taxation as well as generalized inattention to the way that successful welfare states achieve meaningful progress in promoting greater equality.

There are various egalitarian moral doctrines. They differ in the requirements they impose on institutions and social practices and on individual conduct. This essay sketches two versions of egalitarian social justice and claims that the requirements they impose should strike us as reasonable, all things considered. One is welfarist egalitarianism, a cousin of classical utilitarianism. This version requires bringing about good quality lives for people and fair (equal) distribution of this good across persons. A notable feature of welfarist egalitarianism is that it accommodates the seemingly antiegalitarian claim that it does not matter in itself how one person’s condition compares to that of another, so a fortiori it does not matter in itself whether or not one person’s condition compares to that of others in the one particular way of being equal. The other version is relational or freedom-oriented egalitarianism, which holds that we should above all ensure that people are free to live as they choose and relate as equals, without social hierarchy. In the latter half of the twentieth century, John Rawls developed a powerful articulation of relational egalitarian justice. This essay sketches the two rival egalitarianisms with a view to showing their respective moral attractiveness and to suggesting that the welfarist version has greater moral attraction.

Ever since the publication of G. A. Cohen’s essay “If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?” the matter of personal responsibility for the amelioration of economic disadvantage has become a question for egalitarian political philosophers to wrestle with both theoretically and personally. This essay examines “the demands of equality” in light of an egalitarian philosophy that focuses on human flourishing. I consider Cohen’s call for personal commitments to the egalitarian project to show both the power and problems of his approach and propose an alternative view, where individuals’ concern for living well involves an engagement with the demands of equality, but also some respite from its strictures.

This essay explains the prevalence of egalitarian beliefs among academic philosophers, individuals who enjoy significant wealth and privilege. I argue that their egalitarianism does not present a “paradox of conviction,” as G. A. Cohen contends, but follows logically from the institutional structure of academic philosophy. This structure creates a “veil of insignificance” wherein philosophy is a moral performance that incentivizes the adoption of egalitarian beliefs. Philosophers also view the world from behind what is termed a “veil of privilege” that incentivizes a public commitment to egalitarianism as a means of distancing themselves from the role of privilege in their life and encourages the hubristic assumption that the practical problems of socialism can be easily overcome with effort or ingenuity. Identity-protective motivated reasoning means that evidence conflicting with egalitarian beliefs is avoided, ignored, or dismissed. These dynamics are reinforced by established actors who gatekeep the profession.

It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what mechanism we should rely on is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which mechanism better promotes distributive justice. We cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of relying on civil society.

G. A. Cohen is justly acclaimed for his penetrating and searching critique of the commanding Rawlsian liberal paradigm in contemporary political philosophy. He is also well known for his fervent advocacy of a radical view of economic equality, namely, that “justice requires (virtually) unqualified equality itself.” This essay focuses on two issues at the heart of Cohen’s critique, namely, his argument that economic equality is a moral as well as a political responsibility, and his interrogatory question: “If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?” I take up critics’ objection that Cohen’s arguments for what economic egalitarianism requires are overly morally demanding. I also present a puzzle about the critical reception of Cohen’s work: Given the amount and quality of engagement with his arguments on what egalitarianism would look like in a future just society, how come there’s been such scant attention to his reflections on the predicament of the “rich egalitarian” in current-day unjust society? The essay culminates in a tentative answer to this question.

I argue for an egalitarian conception of market exchange that places the idea of equal power at the center of a procedural evaluation of markets. I explain the fundamental concept of equal power in markets and show that the egalitarian conception gives us a remedial basis for society shaping markets so that they allow a significant place for worker participation in firms. I use the phrase “worker participation” to mean that workers participate in the authoritative direction of the firm. This can include collective bargaining and worker management to introduce the kind of flexibility that is desirable in regulating market economies. Worker participation is a remedy to the presence of rigidities in markets that strongly favor authoritarian firms and that follow from and maintain unequal power in markets. The argument differs from the traditional argument that draws a parallel between state and firm, and so does not entail a general requirement of worker participation. It allows for some degree of participation of owners of capital also in the governance of firms.