Three types of objections have been raised against sweatshops. According to their critics, sweatshops are (1) exploitative, (2) coercive, and (3) harmful to workers. In “The Ethical and Economic Case Against Sweatshop Labor: A Critical Assessment,” Powell and Zwolinski critique all three objections and thereby offer what is arguably the most powerful defense of sweatshops in the philosophical literature to date. This article demonstrates that, whether or not unregulated sweatshops are exploitative or coercive, they are, pace Powell and Zwolinski, harmful (...) to workers. (shrink)

To evaluate the overall good/welfare of any action, policy or institutional choice we need some way of comparing the benefits and losses to those affected: we need to make interpersonal comparisons of the good/welfare. Yet sceptics have worried either: that such comparisons are impossible as they involve an impossible introspection across individuals, getting ‘into their minds’; that they are indeterminate as individual-level information is compatible with a range of welfare numbers; or that they are metaphysically mysterious as they assume the (...) existence either of a social mind or of absolute levels of welfare when no such things exist. This article argues that such scepticism can potentially be addressed if we view the problem of interpersonal comparisons as fundamentally an epistemic problem – that is, as a problem of forming justified beliefs about the overall good based on evidence of the individual good. (shrink)

Theories of political legitimacy normally stipulate certain conditions of legitimacy: the features a state must possess in order to be legitimate. Yet there is obviously a second question as to the value of legitimacy: the normative features a state has by virtue of it being legitimate (such as it being owed obedience, having a right to use coercion, or enjoying a general justification in the use of force). I argue that it is difficult to demonstrate that affording these to legitimate (...) states is morally desirable, and that obvious alternative conceptions of the value of legitimacy (notably epistemic and instrumental) are not without problems of their own. The intuitive triviality of establishing the value of normative legitimacy may mask a serious problem. (shrink)

A logical empiricist “baseline statement” can formalize some propositions established by a body of evidence or set of observations. However, it may not necessarily capture, of two propositions it entails, whether all the subsets of the evidence that establish one proposition also establish the other, vice versa, or neither. Yet, according to this paper, which obtains should sometimes matter for confirmation. It illustrates by showing how this “evidential dependence” can be used to address problems with generalizations of grue-like predicates, and (...) do so still within a very simple broadly Hempelian framework. (shrink)

Consequentialism and the moral agent question -- Motivation ethics -- Deontology and the moral agent question -- Moral demandingness and two concepts of evaluation -- The problem of special relationships -- Global duties and the state -- Legitimacy and the good -- Interpersonal comparisons of the good -- On the scope of reason.