Epistemic democrats indirectly evaluate democratic decisions by directly evaluating the inputs into the election. However, the fundamental problem of measurement in the philosophy of science shows that procedures are often as difficult to evaluate as outcomes. This paper brings this highly refined framework into political philosophy to show that epistemic democrats face an analogous ‘fundamental problem of evaluation’. This cross-fertilization of political philosophy with the philosophy of science shows that the quality of democratic mechanisms and their inputs regarding their ability to track the truths of justice is as difficult to evaluate as the quality of the resulting decisions themselves.

We present a philosophically motivated framework for modelling moral agency. In addition to choosing strategies, agents in this framework choose among an appropriate exogenous set of moralities that depends on the context of the game. Further, agents can use mixed strategies to choose their degree of morality. We present two models to demonstrate the framework. In the first model, agents choose between empathy and selfishness while playing prisoner’s dilemma. In the second, agents choose between Kantian universalizing and selfishness while playing a public goods game. For both models, the degree of morality gets determined endogenously rather than assigned parametrically.

This paper uses the link between markets and the meeting of needs to argue the ostensible tension between market exchange and community can be overcome. It argues this can occur within a market economy with the following features, and that these features can be stable. First, individuals use as their motivation to act competitively in response to market signals the very social benefits that this behaviour brings about. And second, market control and regulation turn market competition from a high stakes into a low stakes (but still serious) friendly competition.

In this paper we study the idea of consequentialism in dynamic games by considering two versions: A commonly used utility-based version stating that the player’s preferences are governed by a utility function on consequences, and a preference-based version which faithfully translates the original idea of consequentialism to restrictions on the player’s preferences. Utility-based consequentialism always implies preference-based consequentialism, but the other direction is not necessarily true, as is shown by means of a counterexample. In this paper we offer conditions under which the two notions are equivalent.

This paper offers a formal analysis of continuity, welfarism, value satiability, lifeboat cases, along with their interconnectedness with sufficientarianism, with particular attention to the recent defences of sufficientarianism by Ben Davies and Lasse Nielsen in response to Hun Chung’s Prospect Utilitarianism (PU). It demonstrates how precise formal definitions help resolve conceptual ambiguities and sharpen philosophical argumentation in distributive ethics. Without such precision, one risks misidentifying or mischaracterizing important normative concepts and theories, leading to confusion or strawman critiques. By highlighting these risks, the paper underscores the methodological importance of precise definitions and formal analysis in ensuring clarity, consistency, and rigor in ethical theorizing.

Joseph Raz’s service conception of legitimacy says citizens must obey the state when its directives allow them to comply with reason better than they would by deciding independently. Yet citizens’ capacity to decide for themselves is endogenous to state authority: the more they defer, the less competent they might become. Consequently, a state might secure its legitimacy through a self-fulfilling dynamic whereby citizens need state authority only because they have grown dependent upon it. This article diagnoses the problem and explains how the service conception can guard against it. Besides Raz's account, its argument applies to any theory of legitimacy with a “service” component.

In the social sciences and policymaking, life satisfaction surveys are increasingly taken as the best measure of wellbeing. However, the life satisfaction theory of wellbeing (LST) barely features in philosophers’ discussions of wellbeing. This prompts two questions. First, is LST distinct from the three standard accounts of wellbeing (hedonism, desire theories, the objective list)? I argue LST is a type of desire theory. Second, is LST a plausible theory of wellbeing? I raise two serious, underappreciated objections and argue it is not. Life satisfaction surveys are useful, but we should not conclude they are the ideal measure of wellbeing.

Imprecise Bayesianism has been proposed as an alternative to Standard Bayesianism, partly because of its tools for representing ambiguity. Instead of representing credences via precise probabilities, a set of probability distributions is used to model belief states. However, there are criticisms of Imprecise Bayesianism’s update rule. A recent alternative update rule is Alpha Cut, which evades some of the primary criticisms of Imprecise Bayesian updating. We compare Alpha Cut with Imprecise Bayesianism and another alternative update approach called Calibration. We find that Alpha Cut has problems with respect to ambiguity, coherence, and performance qualities, whereas there are more promising alternatives.

While the idea of predistribution is gaining traction, it may seem inherently elusive. The source of confusion is the prefix ‘pre’, which denotes priority or prevention. This paper proposes a new functional definition of predistribution that is practically useful and unifies different predistributive policies. Through defending predistribution as policies of ex ante distribution, I offer a philosophically robust notion of priority (‘procedural priority’) and different functions of prevention that help make sense of predistribution. I also develop typologies of different predistributive policies and explore justificatory grounds and strengths of predistribution. I emphasize instrumental reasons for supporting predistribution.

Legal systems often suffer from what may be called legal inflation: an excess of laws that erodes legal compliance. The difficulty lies in identifyng which laws are responsible for this erosion. Democratic deliberation is poorly suited to the task. This paper advances an identification criterion: laws that generate both widespread non-compliance and inconsistent enforcement should be regarded as defective, because they fail to function as laws. I propose a new version of the rule of obsolescence to repeal defective laws. This framework clarifies the mechanisms by which legal inflation undermines institutional stability and offers guidance for legal reform.