I develop a conception of voluntary exchange and its value that helps us understand the fundamental source of difficulty with voluntary exchange. We can make a great deal of progress in understanding the promise and the perils of voluntary exchange by elaborating an analogy between voluntary exchange and democracy. To be sure, this is a hazardous activity since there are many differences between these areas. But a careful effort here will illuminate the domain of voluntary exchange in both normative and (...) descriptive dimensions. I argue that there is a fundamental tension between the normative principle that applies to voluntary exchange and the basic mechanism by which voluntary exchange operates. The fundamental normative principle, I will argue, is the principle that power over the making of an agreement with another ought to be proportioned among the persons to the interests each person has at stake in the making of the agreement. The fundamental mechanism of voluntary exchange, on the other hand, is that power is inversely proportioned to the stakes someone has in making the agreement. The more interests I have at stake in making an agreement, the more say over the content of the agreement I should have, and, yet, the more my interests hang on an agreement, the less bargaining power I have and so the less say I have in the making of the agreement. Hence, the inherent tendency of voluntary exchange is to work against the realization of the fundamental normative principle that regulates voluntary exchange. Hence, we have a deep and pervasive opposition between fact and norm in the very nature of voluntary exchange. All is not entirely hopeless, however, since there is a unique point where this opposition does not appear and that is in equality in the background conditions of exchange. (shrink)

Nicole Hassoun’s book Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines has three parts. Part 1 is about the right to health, Part 2 offers a concrete proposal for how to promote the ability of people in the developing world to live minimally good lives and Part 3 is concerned with consumer responsibility as it relates to global health. I argue that there is a philosophical tension between the respective projects of Parts 1 and 2. The project of Part 1 (...) reflects a sufficientarian ideal, namely ensuring that each person in our global community has the ability to live a minimally good life. But, the concrete proposal offered in Part 2 reflects a different ideal, namely maximizing global health benefit. While these two ideals may often converge on a set of feasible health outcomes that we should aim to bring about, they can also diverge. The extent to which they diverge depends on our specification of the minimally good life. It is therefore crucial that we have a criterion for distinguishing lives that are at least minimally good from those that are not. Unfortunately, Hassoun’s proposed criterion is problematic in that no life satisfies it. (shrink)

The core aims of the Global Health Impact Project include incentivizing pharmaceutical companies for socially conscious production and promoting socially conscious consumption among consumers. Its backbone is a metric that computes the amount of illness burden alleviated by a pharmaceutical drug. This essay aims to assess the connection between values and numbers in the Global Health Impact Project. Specifically, I concentrate on two issues, the anonymity of illness burden and the distribution of health benefits. The former issue asks whether we (...) should treat the illness burden of every person the same. The latter issue asks among whom health benefits should be fairly distributed. Examination of these issues begs for clarification of some of the key concepts of the Global Health Impact Project, such as the definition of essential medicines and the significance of national borders. Although this essay focuses on the two particular metric issues in the Global Health Impact Project, its core argument is applicable to other metrics for ethically motivated initiatives—to construct a metric for an ethically motivated initiative, it is not only important to articulate underlying concepts and values, but it is also important to operationalize them, so they are consistently reflected in the metric. (shrink)

Hassoun argues that the poor in the world have a right to health and that the Global Health Impact Index provides consumers in well-off countries with the opportunity to ensure that more people have access to essential medicines. Because of this, these consumers would be ethically obliged to purchase Global Health Impact Index-labeled products in the face of existing global inequalities. In presenting her argument, Hassoun rejects the so-called democratic account of ethical consumption in favor of the positive change account. (...) Two versions of the democratic change account are relevant. One underscores the importance of democratic procedures and institutions, while the other stresses our fundamental moral equality. While at least one prominent institutionalist account has problems, revised versions would be less vulnerable to Hassoun’s counterexamples. Furthermore, institutionalist accounts come with the epistemological gains from democratic procedures and deliberations, which may be especially important under uncertainty. Finally, and perhaps more challenging for the Global Health Impact index project, this measure may place the burden unfairly on those who need to buy medicines. This is a pivotal insight from the non-institutionalist version of the democratic account of ethical consumption. (shrink)

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Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

What, if anything, do we owe others as a basic minimum? Sufficiency theorists claim that we must provide everyone with enough – but, to date, few well-worked-out accounts of the sufficiency threshold exist, so it is difficult to evaluate this proposition. Previous theories do not provide plausible, independent accounts of resources, capabilities, or welfare that might play the requisite role. Moreover, I believe existing accounts do not provide nearly enough guidance for policymakers. So, this article sketches a mechanism for arriving (...) at an account of the minimally good life that can help locate the sufficiency threshold. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What kind of basic minimum do we owe to others? This paper defends a new procedure for answering this question. It argues that its minimally good life account has some advantages over the main alternatives and that neither the first-, nor third-, person perspective can help us to arrive at an adequate account. Rather, it employs the second-person perspective of free, reasonable, care. There might be other conditions for distributive justice, and morality certainly requires more than helping everyone to (...) secure a basic minimum. Still, if the minimally good life account is correct, and we owe everyone a basic minimum, we must ensure that everyone lives well enough. (shrink)

There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? (...) While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making. (shrink)