Justice and Well‐Orderedness: Saving Rawls from Luck Egalitarianism

This paper develops a full account of Rawls's notion of a well‐ordered society and uses it to address two luck egalitarian objections to his principles of justice. The first is an internal criticism which claims that Rawls's account of justice is better captured by a responsibility‐sensitive egalitarian account. The second is an external objection according to which, regardless of the alleged inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his account of justice, we should reject those principles in favour of a responsibility‐sensitive criterion because it better captures our moral intuitions about distributive justice. The argument presented answers both objections by defending the value of well‐orderedness and showing the difficulties of responsibility‐sensitive egalitarian conceptions in realizing this ideal.     

Political Liberties and Social Equality

This paper examines the link between political liberties and social equality, and contends that the former are constitutive of, i.e. necessary to secure, the latter. Although this constitutive link is often assumed in the literature on political liberties, the reasons why it holds true remain largely unexplored. Three such reasons are examined here. First, political liberties are constitutive of social equality because they bestow political power on their holders, leaving disenfranchised individuals excluded from decisions that are particularly pervasive, coercively enforced, hard to avoid, monopolistic, and final. Second, they are constitutive of social equality due to their positional value, such that those who are denied such liberties are socially downgraded because and to the extent that others enjoy them. Third, they are constitutive of social equality due to their expressive value, in the sense that, by disenfranchising some individuals, the state publicly fails to recognize their equal moral agency. While unpacking these reasons, we address some criticisms of this constitutive link recently raised by Steven Wall and Jason Brennan.     

Economic voting in multi-tiered polities

This paper assesses whether economic voting plays any role in a parliamentary, decentralized polity. Decentralization is argued to blur lines of responsibility and confuse voters about whom to blame for poor economic performance at the national and regional levels. National and Regional Economic Voting (NEV and REV, respectively) are tested in Catalonia (Spain). The initial empirical test suggests that only NEV takes place in this region. Four hypotheses are considered to explain REV’s absence: blame-shifting, blinding nationalism, coalition government, and misinformation regarding Policy Responsibility Distribution across tiers of government. Using reasonable counterfactuals and Bayesian techniques, the first three hypotheses are dismissed, whereas the last is confirmed. The results emphasize the informational requirements behind the economic voting theory.