In institutional design, public policy and for society as a whole, securing freedom of choice for individuals is important. But how much choice should we aim for? Various theorists argue that above some level more choice improves neither wellbeing nor autonomy. Worse still, psychology research seems to suggest that too much choice even makes us worse off. Such reasons suggest the Sufficiency View: increasing choice is only important up to some sufficiency level, a level that is not too far from the level enjoyed by well-off citizens in rich liberal countries today. I argue that we should reject the Sufficiency View and accept Liberal Optimism instead: expanding freedom of choice should remain an important priority even far beyond levels enjoyed in rich liberal countries today. I argue that none of the arguments given for the Sufficiency View work. Neither psychological evidence nor any broader social trends support it. If anything, they support Liberal Optimism instead. I also show why further increases are possible and desirable, and sketch some implications for debates around immigration, economic growth, markets and the value of community.

This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Michael Otsuka’s book, How to Pool Risk Across Generations. Following Otsuka, one may distinguish three distinct systems of cooperation within a standard pension arrangement: the retirement system, the longevity risk pool and the investment risk pool. It is important to observe, however, that only the retirement system constitutes a genuine system of intergenerational cooperation, the other two are essentially intragenerational, in that they pool risks among members of a cohort. Otsuka is faulted for being occasionally less than clear on these distinctions.

I agree that a good pensions system should embody some form of collective risk pooling and that this would be to the advantage of everyone. There are some difficult issues of adverse selection to be solved, however. Moreover, egalitarian concerns are of crucial importance in most countries and they require to go further than collective risk pooling and to take into account that society is more than a system of self-interested monetary transfers between and within cohorts.

What follows is a sketch of three of the main claims of How to Pool Risks across Generations: The Case for Collective Pensions (Otsuka 2023) with which my symposium commentators critically engage: namely, that (1) by efficiently pooling risks across as well as within generations, (2) collective pensions can realize a form of Rawlsian reciprocity involving fair terms of cooperation for mutual advantage, (3) through the voluntary binding agreements of individuals to join a mutual association that provides social insurance. I respond to their challenges to these claims in my replies that follow their contributions.

A response to pressures on pension finance caused by population ageing and economic turbulence has been a substantial move from traditional defined-benefit plans in which, at least in principle, all risk falls on the contributions side, to defined-contribution plans in which risk during accumulation all falls on the benefits side. This paper argues that both designs are ‘corner solutions’ and hence generally suboptimal, and goes on to set out a range of designs that offer different ways of sharing risk among workers, employers, future pensioners and current pensioners.

Michael Otsuka argues that collective pension schemes are forms of social cooperation on equal terms for mutual advantage and thus, matters of social justice. In this way Otsuka wants to understand collectively funded pensions in Rawlsian terms. I argue that not all forms of social cooperation are the same and that the specific kind of social cooperation Rawls has in mind is, in at least three central respects, different from the kind of social cooperation involved in the collective pension schemes Otsuka describes.

This contribution discusses the central thesis in Michael Otsuka’s book that collective pensions can be organized on a voluntary basis from the recent experience with pension reform in the Netherlands. Despite a long tradition of collective-funded pensions organized in a decentralized way by social partners, basis reform was necessary as population ageing made it increasingly harder to maintain the intergenerational solidarity implicit in these pensions. Although it is well-established that risk sharing between generations can be beneficial and welfare improving to all, it is far from certain that new generations will enter existing pension arrangements on a voluntary basis. First, there is a considerable ‘discontinuity risk’ if deficits in pension funding – caused by bad shocks – deter younger generations from entering the scheme. Second, even if it is to their own interest most people do not voluntarily engage in pension schemes due to several kinds of behavioural and psychological barriers.

Which implications follow for the value of freedom on a hybrid account of wellbeing that appeals to endorsement? On the basis of Olsaretti’s empirical claim that one is unlikely to endorse wellbeing when one is forced to achieve it, I show that standardly on the hybrid account there is a reason to protect people’s freedom to dysfunction, and hence that the freedoms to dysfunction are valuable. I also discuss whether freedom is non-specifically valuable on grounds of endorsement. I advance an epistemic version of freedom’s non-specific value that is especially relevant for a theory of justice that appeals to publicity.

Lara Buchak defends a Weight-Ranked Utilitarianism (WRU) that she says avoids the critique of Rawls’s that is sometimes thought fatal: utilitarianism unjustifiably blurs the distinction between persons. Buchak’s defence depends upon (i) a version of Harsanyi’s assumption that parties to a social contract should reason as if they have an equal chance of being anyone and (ii) a hypothesis she explores in a recent article. I argue that her assumption and hypothesis are untenable. WRU fails of the generality to which Buchak aspires because it fails for one of her most important cases: the distributive question posed by Rawls.

Recently, convergence liberals, such as Kevin Vallier, argue that the principle of social insurance could be publicly justified. Our paper challenges this marriage of convergence liberalism and welfare state. We begin by examining Vallier’s three reasons for the principle of social insurance: risk aversion, injustice and the promotion of political trust. We then argue that all these reasons are intelligibly objectionable. After examining five possible responses that convergence liberals may offer, this paper concludes that the principle of social insurance is not conclusively justified in the convergence conception of public justification.

It has been shown that the Mere Addition Paradox occurs in a choice-functional approach with Path Independence (Stewart R.T., 2021, Path independence and a persistent paradox of population ethics, Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming). The present study is a three-part response to this finding. First, I show that Path Independence is not an essential property leading to this paradox and that logically weaker properties can get the same result. Second, I present a rationalizable choice function that does not yield the paradox. And third, I argue that menu-dependent relations are nicely examined if Path Independence is relaxed to Property $\alpha $ (or equivalently, Contraction Consistency).

We study original position arguments in the context of social choice under ignorance. First, we present a general formal framework for such arguments. Next, we provide an axiomatic characterization of social choice rules that can be supported by original position arguments. We illustrate this characterization in terms of various well-known social choice rules, some of which do and some of which do not satisfy the axioms in question. Depending on the perspective one takes, our results can be used to argue against certain rules, against Rawlsian theories of procedural fairness, or in support of richer, multidimensional models of individual choice.

Nozick’s ‘utility monster’ is often regarded as impossible, because one life cannot be better than a large number of other lives. Against that view, I propose a purely marginalist account of utility monster defining the monster by a higher sensitivity of well-being to resources (instead of a larger total well-being), and I introduce the concept of collective utility monster to account for resource predation by a group. Since longevity strengthens the sensitivity of well-being to resources, large groups of long-lived persons may, if their longevity advantage is sufficiently strong, fall under the concept of collective utility monster, against moral intuition.

Standard accounts of what makes exploitation wrong ground its wrong in distributive unfairness: when A exploits B he wrongs her by taking a greater share of the benefits from their interaction than he ought. I argue that this standard account does not succeed; distributive unfairness is neither the sole, nor the primary wrong of exploitation. I assume that distributive unfairness is pro tanto wrong. However, I argue that in situations where transactors’ consent to a transaction is morally valid, it is also morally transformative and overrides distributive unfairness’s pro tanto wrong. Thus, wrongful exploitation requires morally invalid consent.

Philosophical arguments about government contracting either categorically oppose it on legitimacy grounds or see it as largely anodyne. I argue for a normatively distinct kind of contracting – the advance market commitment, or AMC – and show that it is justified by the same liberal values that justify the welfare state.

When organizations solve collective action problems or realize values, they do so by means of institutions. These are commonly regarded as self-stabilizing. Yet, they can also be subject to endogenous processes of decay, or so we argue. We explain this in terms of psychological and cultural processes, which can change even if the formal structures remain unchanged. One key implication is that the extent to which norms, values and ideals motivate individuals to comply with institutions is limited.

A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within the context of economic exchange more generally, there are natural principles concerning such exchanges which generate puzzles for that view. The puzzles, I argue, are especially acute for meritocrats who conceive of justice in wages in terms of desert. Additionally, I argue that appealing to dignity (rather than desert) offers better hope of explaining the kinds of injustices in wages that motivate the appeal to desert. In that case, no explanatory gap is left by abandoning the idea that wages can be deserved either, and so, I argue, we have good reason to doubt it.

In a recent article in this journal, James Christensen, Tom Parr and David Axelsen argue that millionaire salaries are unjust and women have no grounds of fairness to unjust salaries in parity with men. They accept that disrespect is expressed toward women when they are paid less than men because of their gender. Their argument largely replicates a similar argument developed earlier by Anca Gheaus. By drawing on the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory, we argue that Christensen et al. and Gheaus hold women to unacceptably high standards of justice and arguably higher standards than men are held to.