NATO enlargement is not to blame for Russia’s war in Ukraine

Is NATO enlargement partly responsible for the Russia-Ukraine war? Zofia Stemplowska argues that rather than blaming countries in eastern Europe for their desire to join NATO, we would be better served by examining the role Russian energy exports to western Europe have played in propping up Vladimir Putin’s regime

Algorithmic Fairness from a Non-ideal Perspective

Inspired by recent breakthroughs in predictive modeling, practitioners in both industry and government have turned to machine learning with hopes of operationalizing predictions to drive automated decisions. Unfortunately, many social desiderata concerning consequential decisions, such as justice or fairness, have no natural formulation within a purely predictive framework. In efforts to mitigate these problems, researchers have proposed a variety of metrics for quantifying deviations from various statistical parities that we might expect to observe in a fair world and offered a variety of algorithms in attempts to satisfy subsets of these parities or to trade o the degree to which they are satised against utility. In this paper, we connect this approach to fair machine learning to the literature on ideal and non-ideal methodological approaches in political philosophy. The ideal approach requires positing the principles according to which a just world would operate. In the most straightforward application of ideal theory, one supports a proposed policy by arguing that it closes a discrepancy between the real and the perfectly just world. However, by failing to account for the mechanisms by which our non-ideal world arose, the responsibilities of various decision-makers, and the impacts of proposed policies, naive applications of ideal thinking can lead to misguided interventions. In this paper, we demonstrate a connection between the fair machine learning literature and the ideal approach in political philosophy, and argue that the increasingly apparent shortcomings of proposed fair machine learning algorithms reflect broader troubles faced by the ideal approach. We conclude with a critical discussion of the harms of misguided solutions, a reinterpretation of impossibility results, and directions for future researc

Partial Compliance Theory

People often fail to comply with the demands of morality. Partial compliance theory takes this noncompliance or its possibility into account in the formulation of moral requirements for people to comply with, or in the evaluation of people’s actions against those requirements. This chapter critically engages with recent work on partial compliance theory. It examines the relationship between noncompliance and injustice, assesses different ways of doing partial compliance theory, sketches the relationship between partial compliance theory and other central methodological debates in moral and political philosophy, and considers whether it is reasonable to issue moral requirements without examining what would happen if everyone did their part

Symposium : Joseph Raz on value, reasons, and respect : introduction

Joseph Raz’s seminal work in legal and political philosophy and practical reason theory has been complemented in recent years by his writings on the nature of value. His account of value combines a commitment to the universality of values with an appreciation that evaluative properties depend on historically contingent social practices. This fact of dependence makes values contingent, diverse, and legitimately differentially attractive—three features that Raz shows to be compatible with universality. Importantly for the arguments contained in this symposium, Raz’s account of the nature of value has implications, which he himself develops, for what it means to show respect for persons. The essays in the symposium each engage in different ways with this topic and with the more general issue of how values provide reasons. They focus on such questions as whether the duty to respect persons is a distinct type of duty or, as Raz has argued, an instance of the more general duty to respect value; how respect for persons, respect for value, and value pluralism bear on state neutrality; and how respect for persons as addressees of claims and demands bears on the limits of practical authority

Citizens with benefits

Can states permissibly enforce mandatory participation in the provision of public goods? Usual justifications of state action here appeal to the fact that such goods are very good for people. Ripstein argues that states can compel provision of public goods but that the best explanation of this is grounded not in the costs and benefits of the provision to the compelled parties but in the parties’ moral status as independent agents. I argue that Ripstein’s alternative account poses more problems than it solves. Our best hope in grounding mandatory cooperation is to do so with reference to the duties that we have to serve people’s interests, including interests in autonomy, welfare and being respected on account of one’s moral status

Dethroning democratic legitimacy

The chapter considers the contributions made by democratic legitimacy and social justice to the question of what may permissibly be enforced. According to the conventional view, democratic decisions forfeit their claim to permissible enforceability only when they are gravely unjust. That view is rejected here as unduly restrictive, with a “balancing” view proposed instead, according to which the two considerations need to be balanced on a case-by-case basis. Both the provenance and the content of decisions yield pro tanto reasons: which determines the permissibility of enforcement depends on whether we have greater reason in any given case to advance legitimacy or justice. A democratically legitimate law or policy need not be gravely unjust for it to be wrong to enforce it