9 found
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  1. Aggregation, Balancing, and Respect for the Claims of Individuals.Bastian Steuwer - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (1):17-34.
    Most non-consequentialists “let the numbers count” when one can save either a lesser or greater number from equal or similar harm. But they are wary of doing so when one can save either a small number from grave harm or instead a very large number from minor harm. Limited aggregation is an approach that reconciles these two commitments. It is motivated by a powerful idea: our decision whom to save should respect each person who has a claim to our help, (...)
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  2. Contractualism, Complaints, and Risk.Bastian Steuwer - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (2).
    How should contractualists assess the permissibility of risky actions? Both main views on the question, ex ante and ex post, fail to distinguish between different kinds of risk. In this article, I argue that this overlooks a third alternative that I call “objective ex ante contractualism”. Objective ex ante substitutes discounting complaints by epistemic risk in favor of discounting by objective risk. I further argue in favor of this new view. Objective ex ante contractualism provides the best model of justifiability (...)
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  3. The Poverty Discrimination Puzzle.Bastian Steuwer & Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - 2024 - Political Philosophy 1 (2):292-320.
    Discrimination laws usually prohibit discrimination based on some traits, like race, caste, and sex, and not on others, like sports team allegiance. Should socioeconomic class be included among the protected traits? We examine an argument for the view that it should which leads to the conclusion that both direct and indirect socioeconomic discrimination should be prohibited by the state. The argument has three premises: (1) direct paradigmatic discrimination should be prohibited by law; (2) if direct paradigmatic discrimination should be prohibited (...)
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  4. Equal and ashamed? Egalitarianism, anti-discrimination, and redistribution.Bastian Steuwer - forthcoming - Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
    One prominent criticism of luck egalitarianism is that it requires either shameful revelations or otherwise problematic declarations by the state toward those who have had bad brute luck. Relational egalitarianism, by contrast, is portrayed as an alternative that requires no such revelations or declarations. I argue that this is false. Relational equality requires the state to draft anti-discrimination laws for both state and private action. The ideal of relational egalitarianism requires these laws to be asymmetric, that is to allow affirmative (...)
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  5. Limits to Aggregation and Uncertain Rescues.Bastian Steuwer - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (1):70-83.
    Limited aggregation holds that we are only sometimes, not always, permitted to aggregate. Aggregation is permissible only when the harms and benefits are relevant to one another. But how should limited aggregation be extended to cases in which we are uncertain about what will happen? In this article, I provide a challenge to ex post limited aggregation. I reconstruct a precise version of ex post limited aggregation that relies on the notion of ex post claims. However, building a theory of (...)
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    The Challenge for Coronavirus Vaccine Testing.Bastian Steuwer - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 28 (1).
    Can we permissibly accelerate vaccine testing even if this increases risk to study participants? During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers, policymakers, and bioethicists debated ways in which vaccine development could be expedited. One suggestion were human challenge trials which only started after safe and efficacious vaccine had already been developed. Was this hesitation justified? Can challenge trials play a role in future pandemics? I defend both a version of challenge trials – a low-dosage challenge trial – and a faster option for (...)
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  7. Better vaguely right than precisely wrong in effective altruism: the problem of marginalism.Nicolas Côté & Bastian Steuwer - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (1):152-169.
    Effective altruism (EA) requires that when we donate to charity, we maximize the beneficial impact of our donations. While we are in broad sympathy with EA, we raise a practical problem for EA, which is that there is a crucial empirical presupposition implicit in its charity assessment methods which is false in many contexts. This is the presupposition that the magnitude of the benefits (or harms) generated by some charity vary continuously in the scale of the intervention performed. We characterize (...)
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  8. Why It Does Not Matter What Matters: Relation R, Personal Identity, and Moral Theory.Bastian Steuwer - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (278):178-198.
    Derek Parfit famously argued that personal identity is not what matters for prudential concern about the future. Instead, he argues what matters is Relation R, a combination of psychological connectedness and continuity with any cause. This revisionary conclusion, Parfit argued, has profound implications for moral theory. It should lead us, among other things, to deny the importance of the separateness of persons as an important fact of morality. Instead, we should adopt impersonal consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that Parfit (...)
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  9. Ethical and legal race‐responsive vaccine allocation.Bastian Steuwer & Nir Eyal - 2023 - Bioethics 37 (8):814-821.
    In many countries, the COVID‐19 pandemic varied starkly between different racial and ethnic groups. Before vaccines were approved, some considered assigning priority access to worse‐hit racial groups. That debate can inform rationing in future pandemics and in some of the many areas outside COVID‐19 that admit of racial health disparities. However, concerns were raised that “race‐responsive” prioritizations would be ruled unlawful for allegedly constituting wrongful discrimination. This legal argument relies on an understanding of discrimination law as demanding color‐blindness. We argue (...)
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