PLCY 340 Midterm

Facts and Values

Facts: descriptive statements, describing what is the case/what will likely be the case

Values: evaluative/normative statements about what ought to be the case (what is good, what is just, etc).

Hume’s Law

• you can’t derive an evauative/normative statement from a factual statement → facts/science will tell you what is the case, but not what you should do

• Good public policy analysis requires god social science skills (facts) and good ethical reasoning (normative judgements)

Public policy and role of ethics

• The study of government institutions and activities; primarily concerned with making recommendations and determining what the government should do

• Role of ethics: 

  • make value commitments clear

  • provide tools for analyzing evaluative statements and balancing values and principles when conflicts arise

Pareto optimality/efficiency

a pattern of production and consumption where it’s not posible to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off

• perfectly competetive markets lead to pareto efficient patterns

Pareto improvements

at least one person is made better off without making anyone else worse off

Reflective equilibrium/justification of moral

• considered judgements: judgements regarding the justice or injustice of actions/laws/institutions/policies made under favoriable circumstances and with confidence

• goal of moral theory is to achieve an equilibrium between moral principles and considered judgements, where principles explain considered judgements formed through the process of reflection on possible principles and arguments (back and forth process of adjusting considered judgements)

  • defend moral principles by showing how they support considered judgements

  • criticize moral principles by showing that they don’t support considered judgements

principles

when evaluating moral principles, ask yourself whether they explain and justify considered judgements, or whether they imply counterexamples (reflective equilibrium) 

• considered judgements are our intuitions about a certain situation; moral principles explain and justify why we make those judgement

Intrinsic/instrumental value

• Intrinsic: when something is valuable for its own sake (e.g., justice)

• Instriumental: when something is valuabel as a means to an end (e.g., cash)

Efficiency is instrumentally valuable becuase it promotes wellbeing, which is intrinsically valuable

Market failures

• commonly occuring circumstances of private cooperation where there is not perfect competition, resulting in an inefficient pattern of production

• governments must establish markets and address market failures

Negative externality

• negative impacts of production/consumption one non-consenting individuals (win-win-loss) (ex: pollution, carbon emissions)

• results in market failure becuase price does not incorporate costs to bystanders, so costs are greater than benefits and there is an inefficient use of resources

Function of Pigouvian tax

• use tax system to raise the price of goods to the level that they would be at under perfect competition (ex: alcohol tax, soda tax)

• corrects market failures by having the producer/consumer bear the full cost of their actions→ accounts for externalities

Wellbeing

• the “good life”, happiness, utility → the degree to which a person’s life is going well for them

Subjective vs. objective theories of wellbeing

• Subjective: wellbeing is dependent on subjective staes (ex: experiences, preferences, judgements of satisfaction

  • includes preference satisfaction and hedonism

• Objective: wellbeing is dependent on objective factors (ex: income, capabilities, health)

  • includes objective goods theories and capabilities appraoch

Preference satisfaction

wellbeing depends exclusively on people’s preferences

• better off when their preferences are satisfied, worse off if not

• refelctive equilibrium: preference satisfaction captures the idea that the “good life” varies from person to person, and explains the judgement that people whose preferences are satisfied live good lives

Objections to preference satisfaction

1. satisfaction of uninformed preferences sometimes make you worse off

2. satisfaction of unendorsed preferences can make people worse off

3. satisfaction of preferences formed under oppresive circumstances can lead to a bad life 

Ideal preference satisfaction and policy

laundering preferences: the satisfaction of preferences that are informed, endorsed, and formed under non-oppressive circumstances make people better off

implications of laundering preferences for preference satisfaction

ensure informational symmetry in markets, informed consent for hard decisions, prevent oppressive circumstances, regulate addictive substances

Hedonism

the good life is the pleasant life; pleasure is intrinsically good and pain is intrinsically bad → evaluate poliices in terms of ability to improve quality of people’s wellbeing

• reflective quilibrium: hedonism explains why we think that a person with a lot of pleasure is living a good life, and explains why satisfaction of uninformed preferences can make people worse offNozick:

Experience sampling

asks people to report moment to moment quality of experiences, as well as conditions and activities (ex: Mappiness Project in UK) —> helps determine which activies contribute to the quality of people’s experiences, useful when evaluating policies

Experience machine

Nozick: do we really want to only experience things that give us the most pleasure? pther things matter for wellbeing, more than just how things feel to us in terms of pleasure/pain (ex: achievement, acquisition of knowledge, etc)

Objective goods view

the goodness of your life is determined by the degree to which you realize listed values (such as friendship, knowledge, productive activity, etc) regardless of your attitude towards them/how you feel about them

• possible objectives include achievement, knowledge, athletic excellence, friendship, pleasure, aesthetic experience

  • these are intrinsically good

• captures the idea that we can be wrong about what makes our life good (explains flaws with preference satisfaction)

• explains public funding of education, art, literature, and national parks → model for liberal arts curricula

Objections to objective goods view

1. endorsement: don’t you need to have a pro-attitude towards some activity/state of being in order for it to contribute to your wellbeing?

2. reasonable pluralism: can’t people reasonably disagree about what makes a life go well?

3. aggregation: how should we prioritize between the different goods on the objectives list?

Capability approach

human beings must be able/have real opportunities to achieve certain functionings if they are to live a dignified, human life

• not everyone has to realize these functionings, but they should be at least have the capabilitiy to do so if they think it would contribute to their wellbeing

• resolves problems with oppressive preferences, avoids endorsement and pluralism problem with objective goods view

Capabilities

the ability to achieve particular functionings

• policy should be intended to secure basic capabilities: lifem bodily health, bodily integrity, senses/imagination/thought, etc. 

Functionings

states of being or doing that are achieved via capabilities (ex: walking, reading, thinking)

Utilitarianism

the right/just actions/laws/policies are those that maximize happiness/wellbeing (utility)

Maximizing consequentialism

conception of fairness: choose the policy option with the greatest net benefits (step 4 of CBA)

• consequentialism: rightness/wrongness of an act depends only on its consequences

seems insufficient as a theory of fairness because it doesn’t care about distribution

Cost-benefit analysis

Process:

1. for all proposed regulations, identify costs and benefits

2. render costs and benefits into quantitative terms and convert into a single currency (money)

3. for each proposed regulation, subtract costs from benefits

4. choose regulation that promises greatest net benefit

*value costs and benefits by analyzing willingness to pay and/or willingness to accept (e.g., preference satisfaction)

Justifications:

1. public accountability/transparency/doesn’t allow policymakers to rely solely on judgement calls

2. enables priority setting

3. flexibility- it’s just one input in the decision-making process, not the whole criterion

• pareto defense: CBA identifies regulations that offer pareto improvements over the status quo

  • not always true actually- regulations that result in the greatest net benefit almost always create losers who are made worse off)

• Kaldor-Hicks defense: b/c CBA promises overall net benefit, it would make winners better off by a amount that’s sufficient enough to compensate losers so no one is worse off

  • problem: purely hypotethical

• Utilitarian defense: both CBA and utilitarianism are committed to maximizing consequentialism, or choosing the policy with greatest net benefit

  • problem: CBA won’t always choose regulation that maximizes wellbeing becuase it evaluates benefits and costs in terms of money as a proxy for wellbeing

Objections to cost-benefit analysis (distribution and wellbeing considerations)

1. CBA should focus on human wellbeing, not montary impacts, when valuing costs and benefits (i.e. become mroe utilitarian)

2. maximizing consequentialism is consistent with significant inequalities in distribution of costs and benefits (i.e. become less utilitarian)

Cost-effectiveness analysis

procedure for identifying and comparing the costs and health benefits of different health interventions

1. identify costs and benefits of each medical treatment (cost=$, benefits=quality adjusted ife years on a scale of 0-1)

2. for each treatment, expres cost-benefit ration (CBR=cost of service/net benefit of service x duration)

3. prioritize treatments promising the most benefits for the least cost

CEA yields cost-benefit ratio, whereas CBA yields single net benefit monetary value → CBA better for aggregating different types of benefits

formula is sometimes problematic because it ranks less consequential, cheaper procedures higher than expensive ones→ violates rule of rescue, or the impulse to save a person’s life when possible

Equal outcomes

because it is in itself bad if some people are worse off than others, agents should act so as to bring about equal levelsof wellbeing/health outcomes/goods

problems:

• equality of outcomes could technically be worse for everyone (ex: an income distribution in which A makes 35, B makes 60, and C makes 80 is less egalitarian than a distribution in which A makes 30, B makes 35, and C makes 50, but it’s worse for everyone)

• levelling down objection

Levelling down objection

there is nothing good about achieving equality through levelling down

• problematic sttaement: if inequality is bad, its removal is always good, even if it is removed by making some worse off without also making others better off

• equality shouldn’t be achieved by bringing people down without also bringing people up in some way

• ex: burning cash to address income inequality rather than enforcing a regressive tax system

Priority to the worse off

when distributing scarce resources, priority should be given to the worse off members of society

goal is not to achieve equal outcomes for everyone, but to address the suffering of those badly off in an absolute sense

ex: charitable giving, healthcare priority setting

Weighted beneficence

relative priority to the worse off

• benefitting people matters more the worse off they are, so benefits to the worse off should be given greater weight but not absolute priority

• basically maximizing consequentialism but giving greater weight to benefits/costs that go to worse off people

weighted CEA: rank health treatments by cost-effectiveness ratio, but then revise the ratio to give greater weight to benefits to the worse off

• the benefits for treatments that treat life-threatening conditions should be weighted much higher because people with these conditions are worse off in terms of expected lifetime health loss

problem: if you can offer a large enough group of people a non-life saving treatment, the formula will eventually promote this option over providing life-saving treatment to a smaller proportion of people EVEN WITH weights

Maximin

allocate resources to individuals with the strongest claims to resources (the worse off)

• abolsute priority should be given to the worse off

• ex: save someone with cancer rather than provide tooth capping coverage for a lot of people

problem bottomless pit objection, you end up ignoring the needs of those who also need help

Original position

the right principles to govern basic stuctures of society are those that would be chosen in the original position

• OG position: hypotehtical choice situation that models a fair barganing situation and evaluates differnt principles of justice against each other

• parties are rational actors and mutually disinterested, and have equal bargaiing power (fair)

• they are under a veil of ignorance, meaning they don’t know their class, social status, talents, conception ofgood, religion, gender, race, secual orientation

  • how would you want society to be structured if you didn’t know who you would be and how you would fit within it?

• upshot: you can’t choose your society, but the OG position allows you to determine what society you would choose if given the option

Contractualism

agreement, not consequences, as a right-making property

the right principles to govern basic structures are those that citizens agree to/would agree to

• solves the rights violatons issue of maximizing consequentialism/utilitarianis (rights violations are permissable if necessary to secure a greater good, and if you want to secure the greater good then you will inevitably promote policies that violate certain people’s rights, such as a mandatory kidney donation scheme)

• when you focus on consequentialism, you only care about the outcome of the policy; the ends justify the means from this perspective, but rawls does not think that this is always true

problems with actual agreement: existing undairness/injustive; bias/partiality

Fair equality of opportunity

formal equality of opportunity PLUS fair chance for all at same level of talent/ability to achieve employment positions

• basically, fair equality of opportunity accounts for the social lottery issue with natural equality → people shouldn’t differ in their occupational/income prospects based on who their parents are/the situation they were born into

• would put lots of programs in place to help out lower-income kids, thus reducing the effects of class distinctions

• children who have the same level of talent and ability would otherwise have different prospects of success because of their socioeconomic starting point

ensures FAIR RACE by mitigating inequalities in access to desirable occupations and resulting incomes due to class/social position

Formal equality of opportunity

careers open to talents: no discrimination in the hiring process, jobs go to the most qualified

Difference principle

arrange inequalities so that they are to the advantage of the worse off (redistribution; opposite of principle of efficiency/free market competition with no redistribution)

ensures that there are FAIR OUTCOMES by mitigating inequalities in income due to class/social position (social lottery) and genetic predispositions (natural lottery)

higher incomes incentivize people to gain education and training, provide in-demand services, and work more productively → creates a growing economy that benefits all directly and through transfer payments (redistribution)

Natural lottery

genetic predisposition

the biological potentials each person is born with

*because this is determined entirely by chance and is therefore arbitrary from a moral perspective, it shouldn’t determine/factor into the societal distribution of income/opportunities

Social lottery

influence of family; socioeconomic starting point

the political, social, and economic circumstances into which each person is born

*because this starting position is determined entirely by chance and is therefore arbitrary from a moral perspective, it shouldn’t determine/factor into the societal distribution of income/opportunities

Absolute mobility

in the Equality of Opportunity Project: expected economic outcomes of children born into a family earning $30,000/year

measures if a person’s income has improved compared to their parents, even if their rank in the distribution remains the saem

Relative mobility

in Equality of Opportunity Project: differences in expected outcomes between children of low-income and high-income parents

measures if a person’s position in the economic distribution changes in comparison to others

Individual conscious practices of assessing inequality

descriptive measures and noramtive evaluations of inequality amongst individuals

ex: income inequality, because this doesn’t align with groups that people identify with

Group conscious practices of assessing inequality

descriptive measures and normative evaluations of inequality between groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sex, religion, etc.

ex: median household income by race

challenges:

• political: use of group classification can undermine achievementof race-blind, gender-blind, etc. society and creates zero-sum contest among groups

• philosophical: individuals should be the basic units of moral concern, not groups

Structural inequality

inequalities in life prospects due to structures (the institutions/policies that fundamentally condition people’s life prospects) (ex: gender wage gap)

Young: structural inequalities are injust becuase they reflect morally arbitrary features of one’s identity and are caused by socially created structures

we HAVE to engage in group-conscious assessments of inequality because the identity groups that people belong to lead to disparate outcomes, even if every individual is treated as an equal

• social institutions/structures create inequalities by disproportionately disadvantaging individuals that are members of certain groups 

• group-conscious assessments of inequality are necessary to identify structural inequalities

Racial integration

full inclusion and participation as equals of the members of all races in all aspects of social interaction, especially in societal institutions that define opportunities

stages:

1. formal desegregation (ex: civil rights era laws, end to legalized segregation)

2. spatial integration (common use of public facilities and spaces on terms of equality)

3. formal social integration (interracial cooperation within institutions of society)

4. informal social integration (interracial cooperation, trust, intimacy outside of formal institutional roles)

Anderson: racial integration is necessary for dignity (to repair a dignitary harm), for opportunity (b/c both spatial segregation and formal/informal social segregation undermines socioeconomic opportunity), and for democracy (b/c there can’t have reciprical self-governance when it’s not fully inclusive); also becuase segregation is the result of historic wrongdoing by the state

Egalitarian pluralism

racial justice requires desegregation, social equality, and economicfairness; BUT it neither requires nor forbids residential integration

Shelby: integration is not a requirement of corrective justice, and it’s not a legitimate means for correcting unjust disadvantage 

• residential integration is necessary to foster bridging social capital, but social relationships aren’t a resource for economic advancement and so the state has no right to redistribute them; this idea also treats Black Americans as supplicants; would also destroy bonding captial (existing social networks within black communities)

• would impose significant costs on Black people, who are under no obligation to bear those costs (increased racial conflicts)

should instead work with primarily Black neighborhoods to improve them without changing demographics, while also removing obstacles for integration without enforcing it

Human rights

universally shared basis for criticizing state policies and limiting state sovreignity (central function is to hold governments accountable for how they treat their citizens); universally shared basis for sanctions

they are:

• rights

• plural

• universal (existence of human rights doesn’t depend on legal enactment or state recognition)

• have high priority

rights as trumps: (near) absolute constraints on, and mandates for, government action

Positive rights

right of subject to have done X (duty of object to perform/provide X)

ex: right to health, right to education, right to a fair trial

Negative rights

right of subject to do X (duty of non-interference on object)

ex: freedom of speech, liberty of the person, freedom of religion, right to provate property

Libertarianism

a political theory asserting that persons have absolute (or near absolute) rights to their person, property, and liberty; the legitimate role of the state is limited to protecting the rights of citizens

libertarian rights: liberty and property

role of government: enforcing rghts to liberty and property; adjudicating disputes

• opposes legal paternalism, redistributive social and economic policies, and demands liberty for all (BLM libertarianism)

Historical vs. end-result principles

the entitlement theory: a distribution of holdings in society is just if it is the result of acquisitions that satisfy the principle of acquisition, transfers the satisfay the principle of transfer (voluntary transactions), or rectifications that satisfy the principle of rectification (violations of the first two principles)

• government redistribution of income is only permissible when necessary to correct for past injustices

historical: the justice of a distribution depends on how it came about (like the entitlement theory; you can’t only look at the outcome of a distribution to decide if it’s just)

• includes patterened principles, in which the justice of a distribution depends on the extent to which it is pattered along some other dimension such as moral merit, IQ, effort, etc

end result: the justice of a distribution depends on the degree to which is satisfies a structural principle (such as utility, equality, etc)

Nozick: patterned and end-result theories have counter-intutiive implications

Wilt Chamberlain example

patterend and end-result principles yields judgement that D2 (a distribution that began as a just one that was changed through voluntary transactions) is unjust, which is counterintuitive

upshot: if the initial distribution was just, and all subsequent transfers are voluntary, then the resulting unequal distribution is also just, and any attempt by the government to redistribute this wealth would violate individual liberty