Tom Parr

There’s a great deal of anxiety about the current state of the labour market, and especially the employment opportunities available to less advantaged members of society. The post-war growth in wages has stagnated and, in some places, reversed. More workers than ever are employed on precarious contracts, working shifts on demand and with no guarantee of future employment. In this paper, I propose a novel way of theorizing about the demands of justice in the labour market that is capable of shedding light on these trends and the injustices with which they are associated. More specifically, my aim is to explicate and defend the deceptively simple sounding claim that, within limits, the goal of labour market policymakers should be to secure individuals’ equal bargaining power or, when this is unwise, to protect them against the disadvantages to which their lack of equal bargaining power might otherwise give rise. I call this the empowerment model.

My aim in this article is to contribute to defences of working time policies by attempting to meet an objection that comes from those who condemn these measures on the alleged grounds that they reduce economic output. What’s more, as I emphasize throughout, it’s possible to rebut such a concern in a fashion that’s consistent with the demands of liberal anti-perfectionism. In itself, this is a philosophically striking and politically significant result. However, beyond this, much of the value of my discussion lies in the details of how to meet the relevant objection, and perhaps especially in my novel liberal defence of the ideal of the stationary state.

Many individuals have miserable work lives, in which they must toil away at mind-numbing yet exhausting tasks for hours on end, being ordered about by their superiors, perhaps with few guarantees that this source of income will persist for very long. However, this is only half of the story: what’s centrally important is that many of those who endure these conditions are denied a fair wage in return for the burdens that they bear. In this paper, I reflect on the significance of this fact in order to argue for the evaporation thesis, which holds that individuals’ claims to particular employment-related protections from their government disappear as their earnings increase. In the course of defending this position, I explore the moral difference an employee’s wage offer makes to the work conditions that we can expect her to accept, including why there are limits to the role that cash can play here.

How should policymakers respond to the risk of technological unemployment that automation brings? I develop a procedure for answering this question that consults, rather than usurps, individuals' own attitudes and ambitions towards that risk. I call this the insurance argument. A distinctive virtue of this view is that it dispenses with the need to appeal to a class of controversial reasons about the value of employment, and so is consistent with the demands of liberal political morality. Second, I appeal to the insurance argument to show that governments ought not simply to provide those who are displaced by machines with unemployment benefits. Instead, it must offer retraining programmes, as well as enact more general macroeconomic policies that create new opportunities for employment. My contribution is important not only because it helps us to resolve a series of urgent policy disputes-disputes that have been discussed extensively by labour market economists and policymakers, but less so by political philosophers-but also because my analysis sheds light on more general philosophical controversies relating to risk.

In recent years, much public attention has been devoted to the existence of pay discrepancies between men and women at the upper end of the income scale. For example, there has been considerable discussion of the "Hollywood gender pay gap". We can refer to such discrepancies as cases of millionaire inequality. These cases generate conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the unequal remuneration involved looks like a troubling case of gender injustice. On the other, it's natural to feel uneasy when confronted with the suggestion that multi-millionaires are somehow being paid inadequately. In this paper, we consider two arguments for rectifying millionaire inequality, clarifying their appeal but also identifying the obstacles that each will have to surmount in order to succeed.

What level and kind of protection against relative misfortune should our community provide, and how should it distribute the costs of provision amongst its members? According to the answer this paper explores, within bounds we shall later discuss, the willingness of fairly situated individuals to pay for protection against the risk of misfortune plays an essential, though limited, role in answering these questions. We call this approach fair insurance. Our aim is to identify the appeal of this position compared to its rivals and to outline an amended variant of the most familiar version of the view. We then explain how that variant survives several influential objections that some have thought decisive. We conclude by showing that the fair insurance approach can contribute to recent debates about how best to develop a contractualist account of distributive decision-making in the face of risk.

COVID-19 has provided new opportunities for public shaming, with social media becoming flooded with posts excoriating those who are deemed to breach the rules of ‘social distancing’. This chapter explores the morality this kind of public shaming, concluding that we have weighty reasons to oppose its widespread use. The analysis is important not only because it sheds light on the particular practice of shaming those who violate social distance guidelines, but also because it contributes to debates about the justifiability of public shaming more generally.

Automation can bring the risk of technological unemployment, as employees are replaced by machines that can carry out the same or similar work at a fraction of the cost. Some believe that the appropriate response is to tax automation. In this paper, I explore the justifiability of view, maintaining that we can embrace automation so long as we compensate those employees whose livelihoods are destroyed by this process by creating new opportunities for employment. My contribution in this paper is important not only because I develop a theoretical framework that we can use to resolve this urgent policy dispute-a dispute that have been discussed extensively by labour economists and policymakers, but largely neglected by political philosophers-but also because my analysis sheds lights on a wider range of controversies relating to the moral and political importance of unemployment.

Ronald Dworkin was one of the twentieth century's leading legal and political philosophers, having published extensively on justice, rights, the nature of the law, abortion and euthanasia, freedom of speech, and democracy. In this entry, I focus on the core aspect of Dworkin's contribution to debates about social justice, specifically his account of equality of resources.

In a co-authored piece with Adam Slavny, I argued that any promising account of the wrongness of discrimination must focus not only on the harmful outcomes of discriminatory acts but also on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action. In this brief paper, I defend this conclusion against an objection that has recently been pressed against our view by Richard Arneson. This task is important not only because Arneson's objection is an intriguing one, but also -- and more importantly -- because my response sheds further light on the content and structure of an attractive theory of wrongful discrimination, as well as on more fundamental ideas in moral philosophy.

This Symposium brings together a series of thought-provoking papers that explore Julie L. Rose's Free Time in further detail in order to advance the debate around the equitable distribution of free time, as well as a range of related issues concerning the regulation of the labour market.

It is common to focus on the duties of the wrongdoer in cases that involve injustice. Presumably, the wrongdoer owes her victim an apology for having wronged her and perhaps compensation for having harmed her. But, these are not the only duties that may arise. Are other beneficiaries of an injustice permitted to retain the fruits of the injustice? If not, who becomes entitled to those funds? In recent years, the Connection Account has emerged as an influential account that purports to explain cases such as Embezzlement. This account holds that benefiting from injustice can give rise to a corrective duty - that is, a duty of compensation - owed specifically to the victim of the injustice from which the recipient benefits. This duty is grounded in the connection between the victim and the beneficiary of a given injustice. This paper has two aims. First, I show that we must reject the Connection Account on the grounds that it risks failing correctly to identify those who become entitled to the fruits of injustice. I achieve this by developing and defending the fairness objection. Second, I offer an alternative account: the Moral Taintedness Account. This account states that, when identifying who is entitled to the fruits of injustice, the cause and the degree of the harm suffered by a victim are both relevant considerations, though it does not matter whether the victim is the victim of the injustice that gave rise to the fruits in question. This account avoids the problem associated with the Connection Account, and yields intuitive conclusions in an important range of test cases.

In this paper, I am concerned exclusively with the kind of comparative disadvantage an individual suffers in having less valuable opportunities than another individual, and that may entitle her to corrective action, such that we ought to regulate the risk of this disadvantage and/or consider compensating her if she suffers disadvantage. The dominant approach in both political philosophy and public policy proceeds by identifying a metric by which to determine whether an individual’s opportunities are less valuable than another’s. Let’s call this the Metric Test. However, there is another way in which to proceed. Rather than appealing to a metric by which to determine disadvantage, we could instead allow an individual to determine for herself whether or not she is disadvantaged. On the version of this view that I shall defend, we should treat an individual as disadvantaged if and only if that individual envies another’s opportunities. Let’s call this the Envy Test. My overall aim in this paper is to illuminate the appeal of the Envy Test and, in particular, to explain its superiority over the Metric Test.

In Born Free and Equal: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen defends the harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination, which explains the wrongness of discrimination with reference to the harmfulness of discriminatory acts. Against this view, we offer two objections. The conditions objection states that the harm-based account implausibly fails to recognize that harmless discrimination can be wrong. The explanation objection states that the harm-based account fails adequately to identify all of the wrong-making properties of discriminatory acts. We argue that the structure of a satisfactory view cannot be outcome-focused. A more promising family of views focuses on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action.