Ethics, Equality and Public Policy (Weeks 1–12)

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key philosophical arguments, thinkers, conceptual definitions, and policy examples for Ethics, Equality and Public Policy (Weeks 1–12).

Philanthropy

The voluntary contribution of money, goods or other resources for broadly public purposes.

Distributive criticism of philanthropy

The criticism that philanthropy can entrench economic inequality because wealthy donors tend to fund causes that benefit or appeal to wealthy communities.

Democratic criticism of philanthropy

The criticism that wealthier donors have greater influence over public resources because tax deductions let them direct foregone tax revenue.

Ryan Pevnick – central argument

Tax-deductible philanthropy violates political equality because wealthy donors have more power to direct public funds. He proposes giving every voting-age citizen an equal nonprofit-funding voucher.

Pevnick's response to distributive criticism

He argues that distributive justice is a system-wide responsibility; inequality need not be corrected by making every individual sector distributive.

Pevnick's voucher system

An alternative system that gives each voting-age citizen an equal amount of nonprofit funding to direct to eligible organisations, preserving choice while equalising influence over public contributions.

Saunders-Hastings – central argument

Philanthropy can convert private wealth into political influence more broadly than through tax deductions alone. It should also be judged by the social and political relationships it creates.

Paternalism

Restricting, manipulating or bypassing another person's choices on the assumption that the intervener knows what is best for them.

Jennifer C. Rubenstein – central argument

EA usefully compares charitable effectiveness, but can neglect structural injustice, political change and the knowledge of recipient communities when it focuses on measurable individual interventions.

Population ethics

The area of ethics concerned with how the number and identity of people who exist affect what makes outcomes better or worse.

Longtermism

The view that improving the long-term future is a major moral priority because future people matter, there may be very many of them, and present choices affect their wellbeing.

Strong longtermism

The view that the best options overall are those that are best for the far future.

Pure time preference

Discounting future wellbeing simply because it occurs later in time, rather than because of uncertainty or other relevant factors.

John Narveson – neutrality formulation

“We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people”: improving existing lives matters, but creating an additional happy person is not automatically a moral benefit.

John Broome – neutrality debate

Broome examines the tension between the claim that benefiting an existing person makes things better and the claim that creating an additional happy person does not make things better or worse.

Distributive equality

Justice understood as a fair distribution of some good, such as wealth, wellbeing, basic goods or opportunity.

Relational equality

Justice understood as people standing in relations of equality and treating one another as equals, without domination, marginalisation, oppression or deference.

Juliana Bidadanure – central argument

Intergenerational equality needs both distributive fairness across whole lives and relational equality between age groups at each point in time.

Complete lives egalitarianism

The view that inequalities between age groups at a particular time can be acceptable because each birth cohort passes through all stages of life.

Birth cohort

A group of people born around the same time who move through age groups together; unlike an age group, it is defined by shared birth timing.

Diachronic equality

Fairness assessed across time or across a person's whole life.

Synchronic equality

Fairness between people or age groups at the same point in time.

Swapping castes example

A hypothetical case where two groups take turns dominating one another. Even if lifetime advantages balance, the society still involves objectionable domination at every stage.

Unequal City example

Older people live in miserable, overcrowded and segregated conditions while younger people enjoy affluence, showing that lifetime equality does not remove present marginalisation.

McKerlie – simultaneous segments

An approach that combines whole-life distributive equality with distributive equality within each time segment; a difficulty is deciding where the segment boundaries should begin and end.

Norman Daniels – prudential planning

Accepts age-based differences that a prudent person would choose when planning resource use across a lifetime, using a veil-of-ignorance style perspective.

Veil of ignorance

A hypothetical decision-making position in which people choose fair institutions without knowing which social position they will occupy.

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA)

A method for comparing the costs of healthcare interventions with the health benefits they produce.

Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY)

A measure combining length of life with health-related quality of life. One year in full health equals one QALY; years in lower health states receive lower weights.

Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER)

The additional cost of a new treatment divided by the additional health benefit it produces compared with an alternative: $ICER = \frac{\text{Cost A} - \text{Cost B}}{\text{QALYs from A} - \text{QALYs from B}}$.

Standard gamble method

A method for estimating preferences for health states by asking people to choose between a certain health state and a gamble involving possible outcomes.

Time trade-off method

A method for estimating the value of a health state by asking how much length of life someone would trade for a period in better health.

QALY trap

If quality-of-life improvements are valued, saving the lives of people with lower health baselines may receive less weight; if all life-saving is valued equally, quality-of-life improvements may be undervalued.

Prioritarianism

The view that benefits matter more morally when they go to people who are worse off.

Moderate prioritarianism

Weights a healthcare benefit more heavily when its recipient has lower lifetime health-related wellbeing without that benefit, considering both benefit size and lifetime disadvantage.

John, Millum and Wasserman – central argument

Moderate prioritarianism can address the QALY trap by giving extra moral weight to benefits for people who are worse off while retaining the value of quality-of-life improvements.

Bognar and Hirose – QALY defence

They argue that QALYs rank treatments rather than patients; the lecture tests whether this fully answers concerns that life lived with disability is assigned a lower value.

Fair innings

The idea that people are entitled to a fair share of a normal lifespan; the lecture uses 70 years as an illustrative threshold.

Anti-ageist argument

The view that having one's remaining life cut short is unjust regardless of age.

Oregon Medicaid example

A cost-effectiveness ranking of treatments illustrating a conflict: many low-cost tooth-capping procedures could produce more total QALYs than one appendectomy, although saving a life may seem morally more important.

Aggregation

Choosing the option that satisfies the set of individual claims with the greatest combined strength.

Non-aggregation

Choosing the option that satisfies the strongest individual claim rather than adding together all claims.

Lexicographic view

A view that separates harms by a threshold: first minimise above-threshold harms, then below-threshold harms; minor harms do not count against more serious harms.

Individual claim

A person's claim for the option under which their wellbeing is higher; its strength increases with the size of the difference and is greater at a lower baseline wellbeing.

Relevant claim

A claim strong enough in comparison with each competing claim to be included in aggregation.

Aggregate Relevant Claims (ARC)

Alex Voorhoeve's principle: select the option that maximises the sum of satisfied relevant claims, excluding claims too weak in comparison with competing claims.

Permissible self-priority

A test for relevance: one person's claim is relevant to another's if the first person would be permitted to prioritise their own claim over the second person's from a personal perspective.

Basic Contraction Consistency

A consistency principle used by Voorhoeve: if an option is permissible from a feasible set, it should remain permissible from a subset that still contains it.

Reparation

A response intended to correct a prior injustice, commonly through transferring property or resources and acknowledging wrongdoing.

Counterfactual rectification

Restoring people to the position they would have occupied if the original injustice had not occurred.

Nozick's 'rewind the film' analogy

Imagine reversing history to the moment of injustice, replacing the wrong with a just event, and replaying events to establish what people would now hold.

Indeterminacy objection

An objection to counterfactual rectification stating that we cannot reliably know how descendants would have acted, what choices they would have made or what they would have inherited in the counterfactual world.

Contagion objection

Historic injustice can affect market prices and later transactions, making it difficult to isolate which present holdings are unjustly affected.

Non-identity problem

The philosophical complication that descendants may owe their existence to the historical injustice and might not have existed in the counterfactual world without it.

Inheritance argument (Boxill)

The claim that unjustly transferred property or benefits can remain owed to descendants of the original victims, even when current holders did not commit the original wrong.

Fading entitlement

A property claim can weaken over time as the resource becomes less connected to the original owner's descendants and their present life plans.

Supersession

An injustice is superseded when changed circumstances transform what would otherwise be an unjust ongoing arrangement into a just present arrangement.

Waldron's waterhole example

An exclusive claim to a waterhole may cease to be legitimate if drought makes it the only available water source and others urgently need access, illustrating supersession.

Forward-looking reparations (Wenar)

Reparations are justified because they can improve future relationships, trust and the prospects of a more just society by repairing damaged relations.

Racial profiling by police

Subjecting people from particular racial or ethnic groups to increased scrutiny or intrusion because officers expect that group to be overrepresented in certain kinds of crime.

Statistical discrimination

Treating members of a socially salient group differently or worse because statistics suggest group differences in a relevant dimension.

Unalloyed racial profiling

Profiling based on accurate statistical regularities, without prejudice, using otherwise acceptable police tactics to enforce justified laws and reduce crime.

Pro tanto wrong

Wrong in a particular respect, even if other considerations may also matter to the overall judgement.

Andreas Mogensen – central argument

Racial profiling is wrong because it treats people unfairly on the basis of unchosen traits, and especially serious because individual acts reinforce cumulative racial oppression.

Mogensen's Principle 1

It is pro tanto wrong to treat someone worse based on a merit-relevant feature they are not responsible for having or for being judged by.

Harmless torturers thought experiment

A thousand people each make a tiny adjustment to a torture machine; no single adjustment is perceptible, but together they produce extreme pain.

Cumulative injustice

Many individual actions combine to produce a serious harmful outcome, even when each action seems minor or harmless alone.

Mogensen's Principle 2

There is greater reason not to perform an action when one has reason to believe it will contribute to a pattern of similar actions producing a very bad or catastrophic outcome.

Structural oppression

A pattern of injustice embedded across social life and produced by many individual actions that collectively restrict and subordinate a group.

Marilyn Frye's birdcage analogy

One wire may not trap a bird, but a network of related wires forms a cage; similarly, many separate discriminatory practices can collectively oppress a group.

Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT)

An evaluation in which participants, institutions or places are randomly assigned to an intervention group and a control group to estimate causal impact.

Power calculation

A calculation used to estimate the sample size needed for a trial to produce statistically robust results.

Selection bias

A distortion that occurs when intervention and comparison groups differ because of how participants select into them.

Confounding factor

Another variable that affects an outcome and makes it difficult to isolate the effect of the policy being evaluated.

Test, Learn, Adapt

Haynes et al.'s nine-step RCT framework: identify options, define outcomes, choose the randomisation unit, calculate sample size, randomise, implement, measure impact, adapt policy and repeat.

Rational disinvestment

Stopping or reducing support for policies shown to be ineffective or harmful instead of continuing them because they are already established.

Cartwright and Hardie – central argument

An RCT can show that a policy worked in the setting tested, but does not by itself prove it will work elsewhere; transfer requires the right causal role and support factors.

Support factors

Other causal conditions that must be present for an intervention to produce its intended effect in a particular setting.

INUS condition

An insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient combination of causes; an intervention may work only as one ingredient in a larger causal 'cake'.

Horizontal search

Identify other support factors and alternative causal combinations, including combinations in which the intervention may have negative effects.

Vertical search

Check whether the causal principle identified in the original setting also applies in the new setting, at the appropriate level of generality.

Internal validity

Whether the trial provides a sound estimate of the intervention's effect in the setting where it was conducted.

External validity / transferability

Whether evidence from a trial can support the prediction that the intervention will work in a different setting.

Jeanette Kennett – central argument

Poverty should not be treated as an individual moral failure: sustained self-control and long-term planning depend on social and material security.

Mutual obligation

Conditions attached to social-security payments, such as job-search, appointments, referrals or approved activities, with possible payment penalties for non-compliance.

Punishment (Kennett's definition)

Intentionally unwelcome, burdensome or harsh treatment imposed in response to actions for which the target is thought to be blameworthy.

Synchronic self-control

The capacity to resist temptation in the moment by giving up a smaller, sooner reward for a larger, later one through willpower.

Diachronic self-control

The capacity to exercise planning agency across one's life by adopting and prioritising goals, values and responsibilities over time.

Possibility condition

For diachronic self-control, a person must believe they can act on the world so their plans can be realised, at least approximately.

Identity condition

For diachronic self-control, a person must feel that the imagined future is theirs and that their future interests and welfare matter.

Moral security

Confidence that one's interests and welfare are morally important and that one's standing is protected by social, political and legal institutions.

Australian Public Service (APS)

An unelected public service that administers government policy and services, retaining expertise across changes of government and remaining accountable to Parliament.

Separation of powers

The institutional division between Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary; explaining the respective roles of ministers, departments and courts.

Public-service impartiality

The obligation to serve the elected government professionally without allowing personal political views to compromise official duties or perceived impartiality.

Michaela Banerji case

A public servant's critical social-media comments about government policy illustrating the tension between employees' freedom of expression and obligations to uphold APS values and reputation.

Integrity (Williams / Week 11)

Congruence between who a person is and what they do: decisions and actions should align with their values and projects.

Robodebt

A government debt-recovery scheme that used annual tax-office income averaged across 26 fortnights to estimate fortnightly income, even though entitlements were based on actual fortnightly income.

Income averaging

Dividing annual income by 26 to estimate average fortnightly income, which could not establish what someone actually earned in a particular fortnight.

Frank and fearless advice

The expectation that public servants give candid, professionally independent advice, including unwelcome or critical advice to ministers and senior officials.

Administrative evil

Serious harm produced within organisations when bureaucratic norms and technical routines distance staff from consequences and make harmful actions seem routine.