In response to activist movements like Black Lives Matter and global events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, philosophers have shown a renewed interest in the value and practice of solidarity. However, this surge of interest has also highlighted some notable disagreements in the literature. This article proposes a novel understanding of the practice of solidarity and its value. On this approach, solidarity is characterized functionally as the practice that offers a unique way of bringing into greater harmony our moral and our personal reasons. Under social conditions of pervasive injustice, we often face a conflict between pursuing a flourishing life—e.g. by investing time and energy in personal projects and relationships—and doing what is morally required. I suggest that through solidarity commitments, we align our need to advance justice-given causes with our need to pursue personal projects and relationships. Viewing solidarity through the lens of this ‘positive alignment’ idea allows us to better understand its unique characteristics. Moreover, the account can clarify (and potentially resolve) some disagreements that have besieged recent debates. Finally, this approach deepens our grasp of solidarity's value and its deontic status, contributing to its recognition as a central ideal in moral and political theory.

This article reports three empirical studies regarding partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics (total N=417). We begin by documenting the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate partial aggregation views. Thereafter, we advance the literature along two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work by ascertaining which amongst existing versions of partial aggregation (localised vs. global) chimes more fully with moral common sense. Specifically, we document how judgments about ‘irrelevant goods’ (Kamm 1993) in tie-breaking cases are just as robust as the original aggregative/non-aggregative pair of judgments that constitute partial aggregation. Second, we conduct an experiment that pairs laypeople’s moral judgments in standard cases with their intuitions about the limits of permissible self-prioritisation. We investigate whether one prominent explanation of why irrelevant claims may not be aggregated (Voorhoeve’s ‘personal prerogative’ argument) can be said to underpin people’s intuitions about the (ir)relevance relation of claims in conflict cases. We close with a discussion of our findings’ import and highlight avenues for future research.

Complex moral trade-offs are a basic feature of human life: for example, confronted with scarce medical resources, doctors must frequently choose who amongst equally deserving candidates receives medical treatment. But choosing what to do in moral trade-offs is no longer a ‘humans-only’ task, but often falls to AI agents. In this article, we report findings from a series of experiments (N=1029) intended to establish whether agent-type (Human vs. AI) matters for what should be done in moral trade-offs. We find that, relative to a human decision-maker, participants more often judge that AI agents should opt for fairness at the expense of maximizing utility. In our discussion, we explain how the reported differences (we call them agent-type ‘value forks’) matters for the study of moral value alignment, and we hypothesize what could explain these value forks. We close by reflecting on limits of our results and indicate avenues of further research.

This article explores how the widespread adoption of AI in the workplace threatens the value of solidarity—an often overlooked but central feature of valuable work. It distinguishes between two forms of solidarity: productive solidarity, which arises from cooperation and shared creation, and labour solidarity, which emerges from collective resistance within wage labour systems and suggests that the replacement of human colleagues with AI agents erodes both forms. It does so by removing opportunities for mutual recognition and shared struggle, but also by fragmenting worker identity and amplifying managerial control. Despite these risks, I contend that solidarity can be preserved through ethically informed design choices and democratic governance of workplace technology. Strategies include embedding AI in human teams, enabling worker participation in technological decisions, and revitalizing labour institutions.

This article surveys the central normative issues pertaining to the global practice of sovereign-debt-making, the global borrow regime (GBR). Section one clarifies some definitions and organizes the questions that form part of a normative assessment of any borrowing regime, namely its fairness, legitimacy, and resultant overall justifiability. Section two describes the existing GBR’s ground rules of sovereign borrowing. In section three I look at some recent criticisms and suggestions for improvement based on normative arguments. To improve on the normative theorizing we have, section four proposes a general justificatory strategy: the best justification for a GBR in which states are free to incur debt on their citizens’ behalf must appeal directly to the individual interests in autonomy, wellbeing and fairness of these citizens. I then show how this moral grounding imposes a number of important moral constraints on the underlying rules and features of institutional design. One of the most issues in the GBR relates to the issue of poorest-country-debt: Many have demanded an across-the-board cancellation of such sovereign debt. Yet, as this article will show, the problem of poorest-country-debt is but one of the normative issues that arise in the context of reflecting on the fairness and justice of the GBR. Indeed, it will become clear that although debt relief is arguably the most pressing issue, it is, morally speaking, one of the less complex ones given that the moral case for cancellation is multiply overdetermined.

I first propose a two-fold conceptual puzzle: (1) In virtue of which features are some self-sacrifices solidaristic, whilst other are not? (2) In virtue of which features are self-sacrificial and non-self-sacrificial instances of solidarity part of a unified phenomenon? After setting out (1) and (2) with the help of some cases, I criticize two recent motivation-based solutions that start from explaining what unifies sacrificial and non-sacrificial cases of solidarity. Though valuable, I maintain that ‘content-based’ accounts cannot explain why some cases of self-sacrifice do not count as solidaristic (1). To address this, I develop a functionalist alternative. Solidarity is not simply concerned with fostering ‘concern’ or establishing ‘community’, but it serves a specific function. It helps to mitigate a conflict in our outlook between moral duty and living an autonomous life. In solidarity, we build projects and relationships based on morality-given criteria. This suggests a solution to the puzzle of non-solidaristic sacrifice: where the agent’s self-interest diverges drastically from the course of action recommended by the moral cause, there is no way of realizing the described function and, therefore, we do not speak of solidarity.

Should we be worried that the concept of trust is increasingly used when we assess non-human agents and artefacts, say robots and AI systems? Whilst some authors have developed explanations of the concept of trust with a view to accounting for trust in AI systems and other non-agents, others have rejected the idea that we should extend trust in this way. The article advances this debate by bringing insights from conceptual engineering to bear on this issue. After setting up a target concept of trust in terms of four functional desiderata (trust-reliance distinction, explanatory strength, tracking affective responses, and accounting for distrust), I analyze how agential vs. non-agential accounts can satisfy these. A final section investigates how ‘non-ideal’ circumstances—that is, circumstances where the manifest and operative concept use diverge amongst concept users—affect our choice about which rendering of trust is to be preferred. I suggest that some prominent arguments against extending the language of trust to non-agents are not decisive and reflect on an important oversight in the current debate, namely a failure to address how narrower, agent-centred accounts curtail our ability to distrust non-agents.

We test the importance that people attribute to the realization of small gains in outcome value for cases where the decision- maker must competitively distribute significant harm between separate groups. We find that, in line with recent non- consequentialist moral theories, subjects (i) sometimes rank giving those that stand to suffer harm equal chances above maximizing outcome value and (ii) that whether they opt for equal chance procedures (‘coin flips’) depends on the magnitude of the value that can be secured by not offering them. Our findings vindicate the idea that there can be ‘irrelevant utilities’ in cases of competing claims to avoid harm. Our study thus extends existing work on decision- making in conflict of harm cases along several dimensions, and we demonstrate their import for determining which version of ‘partially aggregative’ accounts in normative ethics aligns best with common sense.

We offer a functionalist account of trust. The piece argues that a particular form of trust— Communicated Interpersonal Trust —is paradigmatic and lays out how trust as a social practice in this form helps to satisfy fundamental practical, deliberative and relational human needs in mutually reinforcing ways. We then argue that derivative (non-paradigmatic) forms of trust connect to the paradigm by generating a positive dynamic between trustor and trustee that is geared towards the realisation of these functions. We call this trust’s proleptic potential . Our functionalist approach does not only provide important insights into the practice of trust and its place in the broader web of social life, but also illuminates existing philosophical debates. First, pointing out how opposing theoretical accounts of trust each capitalise on only one of its functions, our paradigm-based approach reveals why they each contain a kernel of truth but are also deficient: the optimal realization of each function is tied to the existence of the other functions as well. Second, we show how a functionalist re-orientation can illuminate two recent disputes regarding (i) the question whether trust is explanatorily two- or three-place and (ii) whether (and to what extent) we can decide to trust others.

Most discussions in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics concern the avoidance of individual wrongs like discrimination, the violation of privacy, or algorithmic unfairness. Focusing instead on the collective good of community, this article assesseses how AI will shape our ability to realize this value in contemporary polities. After characterizing the good of community and defining its societal prerequisites, different sections assess how AI advances will likely shape it in the future. Section three sketches some positive effects that AI could have: by providing us with unprecedented powers to control the social world, we could, in principle avoid many currently prevailing community-undermining phenomena. Sections four and five contrasts this hopeful vision with AI’s challenges. I document how its implementation has threatened community in existing, imperfect polities through entrenchment and dispersal and how it has contributed to anti-community pathologies and decommunitarization. Section five looks at possible structural long-term shifts and their impact on democratic community, namely ‘datafication’, ‘automation’ and a ‘disappearing public sphere’. Each of these phenomena challenge our ability to realise the ideal in rapidly transforming circumstances. Finally, section six summarizes the argument and points to some policies to both mitigate AI’s threats and harness its possibilities: For some challenges, received policy instruments may be sufficient. But for the most significant ones, democratic polities need to develop and implement genuinely new forms of collective political action to control where and how AI is implemented.

May European Union (EU) member states, in the pursuit of enforcing the norms of ‘EU justice’, unilaterally adopt harmful policies that are ordinarily impermissible in the course of voluntary cooperation amongst democratic states? Though conditions of permissible vigilantism are strict and only rarely met, there are some basic EU duties the compliance with which each individual member state is permitted to enforce unilaterally. Such measures are sometimes permissible even if European community law says otherwise: to the extent that European law prevents states from enforcing these duties, it lacks authority.

This article investigates what role the ideal of equality of opportunity should play in a European social market economy (ESME). After defining ‘social market economy’ and sketching different conceptions of equality of opportunity, it is argued that a social market economy must implement a substantive version of equality of opportunity. Subsequent sections assess how such a robust ver- sion needs adaptation in light of the EU’s special nature: first, it assesses the merits of a direct transnational application of interpersonal substantive equality. Second, it considers what the ideal requires in a ESME understood along internationalist lines: even on this account, labour mobility creates tensions between EU citizens’ claims to equal prospective chances in a fair cross-border competition against each state’s prerogative of providing the highest level of education to its residents. The concluding section offers some suggestions how we might alleviate this tension between domestic equality of opportunity and national autonomy.

The aim of this article is to shed light on ‘Eurozone justice’ by developing a sound answer to the more general question of what member states of monetary unions owe one another. After explaining the moral significance of monetary arrangements in terms of every state’s two core interests in realizing justice and maintaining effective economic sovereignty, I propose and defend two principles of justice in monetary unions: First, a principle of robust non‐exploitability and, second, a principle of equitable risk sharing. Robust non‐exploitability requires that the voluntary arrangement between states in monetary matters neither exploits any state nor foreseeably creates conditions of vulnerability likely to engender exploitation by other agents (states, creditors, banks, and so on). The second principle requires states to share equitably the risks that arise from monetary union: given the risks from monetary cooperation that each state foreseeably faces in light of its economic structure, the expected burdens and benefits must be fairly distributed, taking into account the role of states’ choices in creating risk.

This article asks what features should characterise the boundaries between the EU and the outside world from the standpoint of demoicracy. Section one summarises the normative core of that view and grounds it in the values of autonomy, equal recognition and non-domination. Section two categorises the issues that arise for the demoicrat when it comes to the consequences of political borders. We demonstrate – through the example of intra-demoicracy border crossing – why demoicrats will seek to follow the three desiderata of procedural fairness, just outcomes, and overall consistency in designing political solutions. Section three defends a set of principles that would ideally govern large-scale arrival of refugees. Section four addresses questions of non-ideal theory, reflecting on how demoïcratic theorists should think about current EU policies. Though we do not offer a comprehensive solution to the tensions we identify, the conclusion offers some proposals of how demoicrats may alleviate them.

There is widespread agreement that the European Union is presently suffering from a lack of social justice. Yet there is significant disagreement about what the relevant injustice consists in: Federalists believe the EU can only remedy its justice deficit through the introduction of direct interpersonal transfers between people living in separate states. Intergovernmentalists believe the justice-related purpose of the EU is to enable states to cooperate fairly, and to remain internally just and democratic in the face of increased global pressure on welfare states. I suggest that despite their fundamental differences, many of the most reasonable and prominent philosophical accounts of social justice in the EU nonetheless converge in their institutional prescriptions. In particular, they may each serve as a justificatory basis for introducing the European social minimum, an EU-wide income support scheme.

While some denounce the legacies of colonialism they discern in the EU’s practices and discourse, others believe these accusations to be unfounded, raising the question: how apt is the analogy between the 19th-century standard of civilisation and the EU’s narratives and modes of actions today? In this essay, we address the question by developing a ‘new standards typology’ articulated around two axes: agency denial and hierarchy. These refer respectively to the unilateral shaping of standards applicable to others, and to the salience of Eurocentricism in the way the standards are enforced and structure the international system. Ultimately, we argue that in transforming their ‘continent’ from a metropolis to a microcosmos – from a cluster of colonial capitals to an EU that contains many of the world’s tensions within itself – Europeans have only partially succeeded in transcending their colonial impulses. We conclude by suggesting that the EU’s relevance is grounded in its ability to become a post-colonial power, and that to achieve this, those acting in its name need to remember historical legacies and reflect upon the ‘standards’ that inspire their action.