36 found
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  1. Civil Liberties in a Lockdown: The Case of COVID-19.Samuel Director & Christopher Freiman - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 1 (6):1-24.
    In response to the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have, with very few exceptions, enacted sweeping restrictive lockdown policies that impede citizens’ freedom to move, work, and assemble. This paper critically responds to the central arguments for restrictive lockdown legislation. We build our critique on the following assumption: public policy that enjoys virtually unanimous support worldwide should be justified by uncontroversial moral principles. We argue that that the virtually unanimous support in favor of restrictive lockdowns is not adequately (...)
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  2.  82
    Wealth Without Limits: in Defense of Billionaires.Jessica Flanigan & Christopher Freiman - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (5):755-775.
    In this essay we argue against preventing people from amassing extreme wealth via increased taxation. The first argument in favor of such a proposal, recently advanced by Ingrid Robeyns (2018), states that billionaires’ resources would be better spent addressing morally important goals such as meeting disadvantaged people’s needs and solving collective action problems. In response to this claim, we argue that billionaires are typically in a better position to benefit the poor and to solve collective action problems than public officials. (...)
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  3. Liberalism or Immigration Restrictions, But Not Both.Javier Hidalgo & Christopher Freiman - 2016 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10 (2):1-22.
    This paper argues for a dilemma: you can accept liberalism or immigration restrictions, but not both. More specifically, the standard arguments for restricting freedom of movement apply equally to textbook liberal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, religion, occupation and reproductive choice. We begin with a sketch of liberalism’s core principles and an argument for why freedom of movement is plausibly on a par with other liberal freedoms. Next we argue that, if a state’s right to self-determination grounds a prima (...)
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  4.  10
    Unequivocal Justice.Christopher Freiman - 2017 - New York: Routledge.
    _Unequivocal Justice_ challenges the prevailing view within political philosophy that broadly free market regimes are inconsistent with the basic principles of liberal egalitarian justice. Freiman argues that the liberal egalitarian rejection of free market regimes rests on a crucial methodological mistake. Liberal egalitarians regularly assume an ideal "public interest" model of political behavior and a nonideal "private interest" model of behavior in the market and civil society. Freiman argues that this asymmetrical application of behavioral assumptions biases the analysis and undercuts (...)
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  5.  31
    Why It’s Ok to Ignore Politics.Christopher Freiman - 2020 - Routledge.
    Do you feel like you're the only person at your office without an "I Voted " sticker on Election Day? It turns out that you're far from alone - 100 million eligible U.S. voters never went to the polls in 2016. That's about 35 million more than voted for the winning presidential candidate. In this book, Christopher Freiman explains why these 100 million need not feel guilty. Why It's OK to Ignore Politics argues that you're under no obligation to be (...)
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  6. Moral philosophy's moral risk.Jason Brennan & Christopher Freiman - 2020 - Ratio 33 (3):191-201.
    Commonsense moral thinking holds that people have doxastic, contemplative, and expressive duties, that is, duties to or not to believe, seriously consider, and express certain ideas. This paper argues that moral and political philosophers face a high risk of violating any such duties, both because of the sensitivity and difficult of the subject matter, and because of various pernicious biases and influences philosophers face. We argue this leads to a dilemma, which we will not try to solve. Either philosophers should (...)
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  7. Vote Markets.Christopher Freiman - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4):759-774.
    This paper argues for the legalization of vote markets. I contend that the state should not prohibit the sale of votes under certain institutional conditions. Jason Brennan has recently argued for the moral permissibility of vote selling; yet, thus far, no philosopher has argued for the legal permissibility of vote selling. I begin by giving four prima facie reasons in favour of legalizing vote markets. First, vote markets benefit both buyers and sellers. Second, citizens already enjoy significant discretion in their (...)
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  8.  96
    Against parental licensing.Christopher Freiman - 2022 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (1):113-126.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 113-126, Spring 2022.
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  9.  62
    Is Desert in the Details?1.Christopher Freiman & Shaun Nichols - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1):121-133.
    Modern political philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to recognize desert in their theories of distributive justice.2 A large measure of the philosophical resistance to desert can be attributed to the fact that much of what people possess ultimately derives from brute luck. If a person’s assets come from brute luck, then she cannot be said truly to deserve those assets. John Rawls suggests that this idea is “one of the fixed points of our considered judgments;”3 Eric Rakowski calls it “uncontroversial;”4 (...)
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  10. Why Poverty Matters Most: Towards a Humanitarian Theory of Social Justice.Christopher Freiman - 2012 - Utilitas 24 (1):26-40.
    Sufficientarians claim that what matters most is that people have enough. I develop and defend a revised sufficientarian conception of justice. I claim that it furnishes the best specification of a general humanitarian ideal of social justice: our main moral concern should be helping those who are badly off in absolute terms. Rival humanitarian views such as egalitarianism, prioritarianism and the difference principle face serious objections from which sufficientarianism is exempt. Moreover, a revised conception of sufficientarianism can meet the most (...)
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  11.  75
    Public Reason Illiberalism and Ideology.Jason Brennan, Jessica Flanigan & Christopher Freiman - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
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  12. Priority and position.Christopher Freiman - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (2):341-360.
    Positional goods are goods whose relative amount determines their absolute value. Many goods appear to have positional aspects. For example, one’s relative standing in the distribution of education and wealth may determine one’s absolute condition with respect to goods like employment opportunities, self-respect, and social inclusion. Positional goods feature in recent arguments from T.M. Scanlon, Brian Barry, and Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift that assert that we should favor egalitarian distributions of positional goods even if we reject equality as a (...)
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  13.  51
    Drug War Reparations.Jessica Flanigan & Christopher Freiman - 2020 - Res Philosophica 97 (2):141-168.
    Public officials should compensate the victims of wrongful conviction and enforcement. The same considerations in favor of compensating people for wrongful conviction and enforcement in other cases support officials’ payment of reparations to the victims of unjust enforcement practices related to the drug war. First, we defend the claim that people who are convicted and incarcerated because of an unjust law are wrongfully convicted. Although their convictions do not currently qualify as wrongful convictions in the legal sense, we argue that (...)
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  14. Why not anarchism?Jason Brennan & Christopher Freiman - 2022 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (4):415-436.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 415-436, November 2022. Recent debates over ideal theory have reinvigorated interest in the question of anarchy. Would a perfectly just society need—or even permit—a state? Ideal anarchists such as Jason Brennan, G.A. Cohen, Christopher Freiman, and Jacob Levy argue that strict compliance with justice obviates the need for a state. Ideal statists such as David Estlund, Gregory Kavka, and John Rawls think that coercive political institutions serve indispensable functions even in ideal (...)
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  15. Goodness and Moral Twin Earth.Christopher Freiman - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (2):445-460.
    Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’s “Moral Twin Earth” thought experiment allegedly undercuts virtually any form of naturalist moral realism. I argue that a neo-Aristotelian conception of moral properties defeats Moral Twin Earth. Developing themes in the work of Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, and Rosalind Hursthouse, I sketch an Aristotelian moral semantics that is unique in construing terms like ‘right’ and ‘good’ exclusively as attributive adjectives that denote relational properties. On this view, moral goodness is a relational property predicated of those (...)
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  16.  59
    Why Swing‐State Voting Is Not Effective Altruism: The Bad News about the Good News about Voting.Jason Brennan & Christopher Freiman - 2022 - Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (1):60-79.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  17.  41
    Why Paternalists Must Endorse Epistocracy.Jason Brennan & Christopher Freiman - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3).
    Recent findings from psychology and behavioral economics suggest that we are “predictably irrational” in the pursuit of our interests. Paternalists from both the social sciences and philosophy use these findings to defend interfering with people's consumption choices for their own good. We should tax soda, ban cigarettes, and mandate retirement savings to make people healthier and wealthier than they’d be on their own. Our thesis is that the standard arguments offered in support of restricting people’s consumption choices for their own (...)
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  18. If You’re an Egalitarian, You Shouldn’t be so Rich.Jason Brennan & Christopher Freiman - 2021 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (3):323-337.
    G.A. Cohen famously claims that egalitarians shouldn’t be so rich. If you possess excess income and there is little chance that the state will redistribute it to the poor, you are obligated to donate it yourself. We argue that this conclusion is correct, but that the case against the rich egalitarian is significantly stronger than the one Cohen offers. In particular, the standard arguments against donating one’s excess income face two critical, unrecognized problems. First, we show that these arguments imply (...)
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  19.  26
    How not to argue for the presumption of liberty.Jason Brennan & Christopher Freiman - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many liberal philosophers claim that people are free to do as they will by default; any interference must be justified. This supposed presumption of liberty does a significant amount of theoretical work for public reason liberals such as Gerald Gaus and John Rawls. This paper shows that Gaus’s explicit defense of a presumption of liberty fails. Gausa and his many followers repeatedly appeal to a particular thought experiment from Stanley Benn. We argue that this thought experiment fails to show that (...)
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  20.  43
    Poverty, partiality, and the purchase of expensive education.Christopher Freiman - 2017 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (1):25-46.
    Prioritarianism doesn’t value equality as such – any reason to equalize is due to the benefits for the worse off. But some argue that prioritarianism and egalitarianism coincide in their implications for the distribution of education: Equalizing educational opportunities improves the socioeconomic opportunities of the worse off. More specifically, a system that prohibits parents from making differential private educational expenditures would result in greater gains to the worse off than a system that permits these expenditures, all else equal. This article (...)
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  21. Self-ownership and disgust: why compulsory body part redistribution gets under our skin.Christopher Freiman & Adam Lerner - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (12):3167-3190.
    The self-ownership thesis asserts, roughly, that agents own their minds and bodies in the same way that they can own extra-personal property. One common strategy for defending the self-ownership thesis is to show that it accords with our intuitions about the wrongness of various acts involving the expropriation of body parts. We challenge this line of defense. We argue that disgust explains our resistance to these sorts of cases and present results from an original psychological experiment in support of this (...)
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  22.  24
    Picking Our Poison: A Conditional Defense of Geoengineering.Christopher Freiman - 2021 - Social Philosophy and Policy 38 (2):11-28.
    Geoengineering involves intentionally modifying the environment on a massive scale and is typically proposed as a last resort to prevent catastrophic harms caused by climate change. Critics argue that there are powerful moral reasons against researching, let alone undertaking, geoengineering. Perhaps most notably, Stephen Gardiner argues that even if we are forced to choose between allowing a climate catastrophe or geoengineering—and geoengineering is the less harmful option—it could still be the case that we ought not to geoengineer. This essay argues (...)
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  23.  17
    The Marginal Cases Argument for Open Immigration.Christopher Freiman - 2015 - Public Affairs Quarterly 29 (3):257-75.
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  24.  37
    Cosmopolitanism Within Borders: On Behalf of Charter Cities.Christopher Freiman - 2013 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 30 (1):40-52.
    Economist Paul Romer proposes the establishment of charter cities. Charter cities would resemble special economic zones; that is, small regions that experiment with economic rules that differ from those governing their larger ‘host’ countries. Yet unlike a special economic zone, a charter city would also experiment with its own legal and political rules. The rules, in turn, can be enforced by a third-party coalition of representatives of foreign countries that enforce these rules at home. Host countries that face problems of (...)
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  25.  56
    Utilitarianism and Public Justification.Christopher Freiman - 2013 - Journal of Social Philosophy 44 (3):250-269.
  26.  38
    Equal political liberties.Christopher Freiman - 2012 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (2):158-174.
    Formal guarantees of political equality are compatible with inequalities in the value of political liberties, as individuals may convert their socioeconomic advantages into political advantages. Perhaps the predominant strategy for limiting substantive political inequalities recommends limiting inequalities in the means of acquiring political power for private gain – most notably, economic means. I express a worry that measures instituted to restrict economic inequalities may do more to frustrate the cause of political equality than to further it. I argue that attempts (...)
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  27.  32
    The Case for Markets in Citizenship.Christopher Freiman - 2017 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (1):124-136.
    A number of countries sell citizenship rights to foreign buyers. Gary Becker makes an economic case for the state's sale of citizenship; more recently, Javier Hidalgo has offered a moral defence. However, the private sale of citizenship on a market remains largely unexplored and undefended. This article argues that under certain conditions states ought to permit their citizens to swap citizenship rights with foreigners in exchange for payment. I begin by offering two defeasible reasons to legalize citizenship markets: they would (...)
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  28.  74
    Analogical Arguments for Egalitarianism.Christopher Freiman - 2013 - Ratio 27 (2):222-237.
    Egalitarians sometimes analogize socioeconomic opportunities to starting gates, playing fields, and the results of a lottery. A fair game is one in which all have an equal opportunity to succeed; egalitarians propose that the same is true of a fair society. A second type of argument for egalitarianism appeals to intuitions about the distribution of found resources. A just division of manna discovered on a strange planet seems to be an equal one. Both types of argument share a crucial feature: (...)
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  29.  32
    (1 other version)Only libertarianism can provide a robust justification for open borders.Christopher Freiman & Javier Hidalgo - 2022 - Sage Publications: Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (3):269-290.
    Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 269-290, August 2022. This paper argues that libertarianism—and only libertarianism—can vindicate immigration's status as a human right whose protection is morally required in nearly all circumstances. Competing political theories such as liberal egalitarianism fail to rule out significant immigration restrictions in a range of realistic conditions. We begin by outlining the core tenets of libertarianism and their implications for immigration policy. Next, we explain why arguments that appeal to alternative principles are (...)
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  30.  45
    A Defense of Open Borders.Christopher Freiman - 2018 - In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 161-171.
    This chapter defends open borders on the grounds that people have a right to immigrate and that increased immigration would enrich the world significantly, with large gains going to the global poor. I consider three major objections: immigration can create economic and social costs for citizens of destination countries, citizens ought to prioritize the interests of their compatriots over those of immigrants, and nations possess rights of self-determination that permit them to restrict immigration. I argue that these objections fail to (...)
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  31. Does equality matter for its own sake? : an experimental examination of the leveling down objection.Christopher Freiman & Adam Lerner - 2023 - In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury.
     
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  32.  95
    How Neuroscience Can Vindicate Moral Intuition.Christopher Freiman - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5):1011-1025.
    Imagine that an anthropologist returns from her study of a group of people and reports the following:They refuse to kill one person even to avert the death of all involved—including that one person;They won’t directly push someone to his death to save the lives of five others, but they will push a lever to kill him to save five others;They punish transgressors because it feels right, even when they expect the punishment to cause far more harm than good—and even when (...)
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  33.  33
    David Schmidtz and Christopher Freiman.Christopher Freiman - 2012 - In David Estlund (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press USA. pp. 411.
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  34.  37
    Why Be Immoral?Christopher Freiman - 2010 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2):191-205.
    Developing themes in the work of Thomas Hill, I argue that servility is an underappreciated but pervasive reason for moral transgression. Recognizing servility as a basic cause of immorality obliges us to reconsider questions about the rationality of morality. Traditional answers to the problem of the immoralist, which tend to be stated in terms of enlightened self-interest, fail to properly engage the problems posed by 'servile immorality.' In response to these problems, I develop a Humean version of a traditionally Kantian (...)
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  35.  19
    (2 other versions)Book review: Edited by Ronald Sandler and Philip Cafaro. Environmental virtue ethics. New York and oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. [REVIEW]Christopher Freiman - 2006 - Ethics and the Environment 11 (1):133-138.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Environmental Virtue EthicsChristopher Freiman (bio)Environmental Virtue Ethics, edited by Ronald Sandler and Philip Cafaro. New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, pp. 240. ISBN 0-7425-3389-1 (hardback), $75.00; ISBN 0-7425-3390-5 (paperback) $28.95.For most of its life, environmental ethics has been the province of consequentialism and deontology. But a growing number of environmental ethicists have found these act-centered theories too thin and limited to attend to the complexity of (...)
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  36.  32
    Julia Maskivker, The Duty to Vote, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780190066062, $39.95 Hbk. [REVIEW]Christopher Freiman - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (3):517-524.
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