In recent decades, activists and leaders of government and nongovernment organizations have increasingly and explicitly called for greater attention to human dignity in their efforts to promote pro-social relations. In this study, we investigate whether appeals to this core human value actually influence how individuals act with regard to those who might be otherwise ignored or neglected. Using the digital advertising platform on Facebook, we randomly assign ads to over 90,000 adult American users to estimate the effects of dignity appeals on their likelihood of engaging with content concerning people facing homelessness or incarceration. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses and specifications, we find that adding dignity appeals increases the likelihood of positive reactions to such ads, but only when the vulnerable are considered less “blameworthy” for their situation.

Democracies may be defined as civic arrangements wherein all citizens have equal political standing. The problem is that no real-world democracy has successfully achieved this arrangement. Are they really democracies, then? For that matter, are there any democracies at all? Aikin and Talisse propose that ‘democracy’ is an aspirational concept, one that holds those who strive to achieve particular ends to exceedingly high standards. This makes democracies intelligible as democracies in their collective aspirations, but it also makes their failures instructive parts of what they are as democracies.

Our contemporary understanding of political corruption draws from two different sources, a modern view that corruption occurs where officials follow improper procedures and a more ancient view of corruption as a systemic failure to live up to political ideals. The ability to shift between these views makes it easy for political partisans to locate corruption where it suits their political interests. Since accusations of corruption easily become challenges to the legitimacy of officeholders and institutions, there is danger in carelessness with the language of corruption. Awareness of these circumstances should lead us to be cautious with the language of corruption and to resist its slide toward becoming a mere means of political struggle.

This essay offers a framework for analyzing whether government may justifiably intervene to contain the spread of disease. Nonconsensual transmission of dangerous pathogens is an inherently violent act. This framework therefore justifies government public health activities for the same reasons and only to the same extent as other government activities. Government public health interventions are legitimate only to the extent they minimize the amount of violence in society. Violence-minimization is a more egalitarian and welfare-enhancing rule than, for example, a rule prescribing that government public health activities should minimize loss of life.

This article contributes to our understanding of women in the Epicurean school. Focussing on the second- and first-century b.c.e. philosophers Zeno of Sidon and Philodemus of Gadara, it examines some neglected textual evidence and argues that a misogynist position can be traced back to Zeno. While Epicureanism contains many progressive ideas on women and early Epicureans admitted women in their communities, Zeno was much more dismissive of women than other Epicureans. This points to a significant doctrinal development in the Epicurean school.

Bioethics is taking an institutional turn, where organizations are being taken seriously as moral agents. Within US healthcare, this is difficult to do without confronting “the market” as a highly influential context for organizational behavior. In the 1990s, pioneering thinkers such as David Mechanic,1 Brad Gray, and Mark Schlesinger2 undertook a first round of organizational ethics scholarship focused on how market forces influence health insurer behavior — motivated by a particular concern for health maintenance organizations (HMOs).3 And more recently, owing partly to a transfer of financial risk4 to healthcare delivery organizations,5 rapid consolidation within health system markets,6 and the pronounced uptick in physician employment,7 the behavior of healthcare delivery organizations is also being assessed in relation to market forces.

This essay explores what can be learned from understanding EU law as a language in the literary sense of being a set of resources for manifold ethical and political expression and social action. As a contribution to new methodological approaches to studying EU law, it will propose a method highlighting how EU law can be studied in such a way by paying attention to the various linguistic and structural features of a legal text while, at the same time, diversifying the rationales through which we understand and make sense of such textual features. The Sayn–Wittgenstein decision will serve as point of reference in order to illustrate the value-added of this new theoretical and methodological insight to understanding EU law. This essay will conclude that it is not only worth taking the language of EU law seriously because it allows us to ’see’ more in the law, but also because it enables us to elevate the deeper ideas about Europe to the surface of the language we use when writing and speaking about EU law and to thereby contribute to a more productive dialogue about the foundations and future of the EU polity.

John Stuart Mill is central to parallel debates in mainstream contemporary political epistemology and philosophy of federalism concerning the epistemic dimension(s) of legitimate authority. Many scholars invoke Mill to support epistemic arguments for democratic decision-making and decentralized federalism as a means of conferring democratic legitimacy. This article argues that Millian considerations instead provide reason to reject common epistemic arguments for decentralized federalism. Combining Mill's own insights about the epistemic costs of decentralization and recent work in philosophy, politics, and economics undermines purportedly Millian arguments for federalism focused on political experimentation, diversity and participation. Contrary to many interpretations, Millian considerations weaken, rather than strengthen, arguments for federalism. Any valid justification for federalism must instead rest on non-epistemic considerations. This conclusion is notable regardless of how one interprets Mill. But it also supports Mill's stated preference for local decisions subject to central oversight.

I argue that the use of elected political representatives undermines the political equality of citizens. Having elected representatives politically stand-in for individual constituents makes ordinary citizens the political inferiors of their representatives. This in turn creates democratically problematic social inequality between elected politicians and their constituents. I then offer an alternative to representative politicians that does not face the avatar of the people problem: representative mini-publics. Through these bodies, we can achieve a representative system without a class of political elites, where citizens share the responsibilities and powers of government as equals.

Les instruments auxquels un État peut avoir recours pour atténuer les risques que font peser les inégalités économiques sur la démocratie sont nombreux et peuvent prendre différentes formes. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à mettre en lumière la dimension normative des trois principaux instruments auxquels on a généralement recours pour mitiger l'influence de l'argent dans la compétition électorale, ainsi que le contexte dans lequel ils furent institués, remodelés – et parfois démantelés – au Canada. Ces trois mécanismes sont la limitation des dépenses électorales, le plafonnement des contributions privées et le financement public des partis. Il ne s'agit toutefois pas uniquement de décrire ces instruments, mais de réfléchir aux justifications normatives spécifiques à chacun, et d'en comprendre leur complémentarité. Plus largement, il s'agit d'offrir un cadre pour penser les enjeux de financement électoral en philosophie politique, un sujet trop souvent laissé dans l'ombre par la théorie démocratique.

In this introduction, I briefly summarize Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality. I situate her monograph within two highly contemporary bodies of literature — relational egalitarianism and discrimination theory — to show how it provides important insights for understanding both what it means to treat others as equals in society and how to define wrongful discrimination. Moreau's work on discrimination is of great relevance for philosophers and socio-legal theorists alike as the commentaries from the symposium contributors demonstrate, including Dale Smith, Pablo Gilabert, Andrea Sangiovanni, Daniel Viehoff, Jessica Eisen, Alysia Blackham, and Iyiola Solanke.