Policies allowing some minors to consent to receive recommended vaccines are ethically defensible. However, a policy change at the federal level expanding minor consent for vaccinations nationwide risks triggering a political backlash. Such a move may be perceived as infringing on the rights of parents to make decisions about their children’s health care. In the current post-COVID environment of heightened anti-vaccination activism, changes to minor consent laws may be unadvisable, and policy makers should proceed with caution.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a heterogeneous assortment of groups and individuals articulated scientific, political, and philosophical objections to vaccination. They engaged in an ongoing battle for public opinion with medical and scientific elites, who responded with their own counterpropaganda. These ideological struggles reflected fear that scientific advances were being put to coercive uses and that institutions of the state and civil society were increasingly expanding into previously private realms of decision making, especially child rearing. This essay (...) analyzes the motivations and tactics of antivaccination activists and situates their actions within the scientific and social climate of the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Their actions reveal how citizens of varied ideological persuasions, activists and nonactivists alike, viewed scientific knowledge during a period of swift and unsettling change, when the application of biologic products seemed to hold peril as well as promise. (shrink)

As therapeutic advances in the treatment of AIDS began to emerge in the late 1980s and public health began to have more to offer than just the threat, or the perceived threat, of quarantine or partner notification, fissures began to appear in the alliance against named HIV reporting that had emerged a few years earlier. In 1989, New York City’s Health Commissioner stated that the prospects of early clinical intervention warranted “a shift toward a disease-control approach to HIV infection along (...) the lines of classic tuberculosis practices,” including the “reporting of seropositives.”Although his proposal met with fierce and effective resistance, it is now clear that his call represented part of a national trend. The CDC continued to press for cases of HIV to he reported by name to health departments, an effort that assumed the dimensions of a campaign. It was supported by a growing number of public health officials. (shrink)

As therapeutic advances in the treatment of AIDS began to emerge in the late 1980s and public health began to have more to offer than just the threat, or the perceived threat, of quarantine or partner notification, fissures began to appear in the alliance against named HIV reporting that had emerged a few years earlier. In 1989, New York City’s Health Commissioner stated that the prospects of early clinical intervention warranted “a shift toward a disease-control approach to HIV infection along (...) the lines of classic tuberculosis practices,” including the “reporting of seropositives.”Although his proposal met with fierce and effective resistance, it is now clear that his call represented part of a national trend. The CDC continued to press for cases of HIV to he reported by name to health departments, an effort that assumed the dimensions of a campaign. It was supported by a growing number of public health officials. (shrink)

In 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed capping the size of sugary beverages that could be sold in the city’s restaurants, sporting and entertainment facilities and food carts. After a lawsuit and multiple appeals, the proposal died in June 2014, deemed an unconstitutional overreach. In dissecting the saga of the proposed soda cap, we highlight both the political perils of certain anti-obesity efforts and, more broadly, the challenges to public health when issues of consumer choice and the threat (...) of paternalism are involved. (shrink)

It is one of the remarkable and significant consequence of the AIDS epidemic that out of the context of enormous suffering and death there emerged a forceful set of ideas linking the domains of health and human rights. At first, the effort centered on the observation that protecting individuals from discrimination and unwarranted intrusions on liberty were, contrary to previous epidemics, crucial to protecting the public health and interrupting the spread of HIV But in fairly short order, the scope of (...) the health and human rights perspective expanded dramatically to focus on the ways in which the most fundamental social arrangements rendered individuals and communities vulnerable to HIV Racial and ethnic minorities, those who were marginalized, and women were at risk because of their subordinate status. In the face of such an understanding, nothing short of social change could be adequate to the challenge posed by the AIDS epidemic. (shrink)

It is one of the remarkable and significant consequence of the AIDS epidemic that out of the context of enormous suffering and death there emerged a forceful set of ideas linking the domains of health and human rights. At first, the effort centered on the observation that protecting individuals from discrimination and unwarranted intrusions on liberty were, contrary to previous epidemics, crucial to protecting the public health and interrupting the spread of HIV But in fairly short order, the scope of (...) the health and human rights perspective expanded dramatically to focus on the ways in which the most fundamental social arrangements rendered individuals and communities vulnerable to HIV Racial and ethnic minorities, those who were marginalized, and women were at risk because of their subordinate status. In the face of such an understanding, nothing short of social change could be adequate to the challenge posed by the AIDS epidemic. (shrink)

Fairchild, Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health Abstract Surveillance is a cornerstone of public health. It permits us to recognize disease outbreaks, to track the incidence and prevalence of threats to public health, and to monitor the effectiveness of our interventions. But surveillance also challenges our understandings of the significance and role of privacy in a liberal democracy. In this paper we trace the (...) century-long history of public health surveillance in the United States situating that history in the context of the broad social, political, and ideological forces that have shaped our conceptions of privacy. Although we focus here on the United States, the debates over privacy that unfolded in the 1960s were repeated in many European nations. The themes we explore here, then, provide a framework for examining the relationship between privacy and public health in other contexts. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Review of Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America – By Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove.

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

Organ donation after the circulatory determination of death requires the permanent cessation of circulation while organ donation after the brain determination of death requires the irreversible cessation of brain functions. The unified brain-based determination of death connects the brain and circulatory death criteria for circulatory death determination in organ donation as follows: permanent cessation of systemic circulation causes permanent cessation of brain circulation which causes permanent cessation of brain perfusion which causes permanent cessation of brain function. The relevant circulation that (...) must cease in circulatory death determination is that to the brain. Eliminating brain circulation from the donor ECMO organ perfusion circuit in thoracoabdominal NRP protocols satisfies the unified brain-based determination of death but only if the complete cessation of brain circulation can be proved. Despite its medical and physiologic rationale, the unified brain-based determination of death remains inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act. (shrink)

There is a significant debate over the moral status of human embryos. This debate has important implications for practices like abortion and IVF. Some argue that embryos have the same moral status as infants, children, and adults. However, critics claim that the frequency of pregnancy loss/miscarriage/spontaneous abortion shows a moral inconsistency in this view. One line of criticism is that those who know the facts about pregnancy loss and nevertheless attempt to conceive children are willing to sacrifice embryos lost for (...) the healthy children they ultimately have. I respond to this criticism and argue that on the most plausible accounts of well-being, these embryos are not made worse off and thus not “sacrifices.” I then make some more general remarks about what people’s typical views about pregnancy loss show about their views toward the moral status of embryos. (shrink)

Animal behaviour and welfare research are part of a wider endeavour to optimize the health and wellbeing of humans, animals and ecosystems. As such, it is part of the One Health research agenda. This article applies ethical principles described by the One Health High Level Expert Panel to animal behaviour and welfare research. These principles entail that animal behaviour and welfare research should be valued equitably alongside other research in transdisciplinary and multisectoral collaboration. It should include and promote a multiplicity (...) of marginalized voices, including those of animals, and it should apply and describe a harmonious balance between human—animal-environment interactions. Lastly, it should describe how humans need to change behaviour, adopt sustainable solutions and recognize the importance of animal welfare and the integrity of the whole ecosystem. (shrink)

This chapter provides an account of sexual ontology, grounded in and responsive to Irigaray’s philosophy, that focuses on the question of possibility. I first consider possibility in terms of the ontological negativity of sexuate beings, whereby one sex or sexuate morphology does not exhaust all that that kind of being is or can be. Second, I consider how sexual difference, as a relational structure of being, engenders possibilities for sexuate beings to develop as irreducible individuals. With particular focus on the (...) human being and the looming question of transhumanist technologies, I argue that these principles develop a sexual ontology that recognizes determinate limits between sexes while allowing for varied and creative expressions of sexuate life. (shrink)

The past few decades have seen an explosion of research on causal reasoning in philosophy, computer science, and statistics, as well as descriptive work in psychology. In Causation with a Human Face, James Woodward integrates these lines of research and argues for an understanding of how each can inform the other: normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, while descriptive results can suggest important normative concepts. Woodward's overall framework builds on the interventionist treatment of causation that he developed in Making (...) Things Happen. Normative ideas discussed include proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality. He argues that these normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter. Woodward also discusses the common philosophical practice-particularly salient in philosophical accounts of causation--of appealing to intuitions or judgments about cases in support of philosophical theses. He explores how, properly understood, such appeals are not different in principle from appeals to results from empirical research, and demonstrates how they may serve as a useful source of information about causal cognition. (shrink)

While substantial progress has been made in the field known as artificial consciousness, at the present time there is no generally accepted phenomenally conscious machine, nor even a clear route to how one might be produced should we decide to try. Here, we take the position that, from our computer science perspective, a major reason for this is a computational explanatory gap: our inability to understand/explain the implementation of high-level cognitive algorithms in terms of neurocomputational processing. We explain how addressing (...) the computational explanatory gap can identify computational correlates of consciousness. We suggest that bridging this gap is not only critical to further progress in the area of machine consciousness, but would also inform the search for neurobiological correlates of consciousness and would, with high probability, contribute to demystifying the “hard problem” of understanding the mind–brain relationship. We compile a listing of previously proposed computational correlates of consciousness and, based on the results of recent computational modeling, suggest that the gating mechanisms associated with top-down cognitive control of working memory should be added to this list. We conclude that developing neurocognitive architectures that contribute to bridging the computational explanatory gap provides a credible and achievable roadmap to understanding the ultimate prospects for a conscious machine, and to a better understanding of the mind–brain problem in general. (shrink)

Discusses the work of G.I. Gurdjieff and his establishment of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of man, and examines the contributions of Gurdjieff's two major disciples, P.D. Ouspensky and A.R. Orage.

This book presents a comprehensive, accessible survey of Western philosophy of music from Pythagoras to the present. Its narrative traces themes and schools through history, in a sequence of five chapters that survey the ancient, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. Its wide-ranging coverage includes medieval Islamic thinkers, Continental and analytic thinkers, and neglected female thinkers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All aspects of the philosophy of music are discussed, including music and the cosmos, music's value, music's relation (...) to the other arts, the problem of opera, the origins of musical genius, music's emotional impact, the moral effects of music, the ontology of musical works, and the relevance of music's historical context. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars in philosophy and musicology, and all who are interested in the ways in which philosophers throughout history have thought about music. (shrink)

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...) love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper’s core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. (shrink)

A fresh explication of the Thomist justification of self-defense casts off the hobbles of the principle of double effects to find a more secure footing in the historicaldevelopment of subjective natural rights by medieval jurists, and a straight-forward application to the latent threat of death in childbirth posed by non-consensual pregnancy. By articulating the implicit Thomistic right to defensive abortion in terms of conditional rights bestowed in Creation as correlative to particular natural law duties, justly proportionate limits to defensive abortion (...) are identified, and balanced against the forfeited or reserved natural rights variously imputed to conceptus and embryo in non-consensual pregnancies. Subsequently, the varieties of involuntary consent are examined from a Thomist perspective with a view to their relevance in justifying recourse to a rehabilitated practice of defensive abortion when free and full consent to impregnation and childbirth is absent. (shrink)

This article develops an interpretation and defense of Husserl’s account of the omnitemporality of idealities. I first examine why Husserl rejects the atemporality and temporal individuation of idealities on phenomenological grounds, specifically that these attributions prove countersensical in how they relate idealities to consciousness. As an alternative to these conceptions, I develop a two-sided interpretation of omnitemporality expressed in modal terms of actuality and possibility, the actual referring to appearances in time and the possible, to reactivation at any time. In (...) defense of this interpretation of omnitemporality, I consider influential criticisms against Husserl’s account of idealities as they concern time, particularly whether the historical genesis of idealities compromises their omnitemporality by binding them to time. Ultimately, I argue that the transcendental historicity of idealities, despite being relevant to the question of validity and access, proves indifferent to their omnitemporality. (shrink)

Warren Zevon’s musical career, though brilliant throughout, is particularly notable for its ending: diagnosed with a terminal illness, Zevon refused a potentially debilitating medical treatment to put his remaining energy into recording another album. The resulting record –2003’s 'The Wind' – was in many ways the perfect farewell: songs of dirty, dark, uncompromising, country-tinged rock, blistering guitar solos, all mixed with intelligent, black-as-coal gallows humour. But it was also a moving farewell to his fans, a heartfelt, personal reflection on his (...) life and impending death: it begins with the words “sometimes I feel like my shadow’s casting me” and ends with “keep me in your heart for a while”. 'The Wind' ranks among Zevon’s very best and belongs in the same category as albums like David Bowie’s 'Blackstar' and Leonard Cohen’s 'You Want It Darker': works of great artists that knew the end was coming and made that knowledge musical. But though it had a particular force towards the end, death had always featured as a prominent theme in Zevon’s music. In fact, the albums that preceded his terminal diagnosis – especially 2000’s 'Life’ll Kill Ya' – have a marked preoccupation with death and dying, and many of his song’s characters (gunmen, gangsters, boxers, murderers of all stripes) either dealt death out, died, or both. -/- In this chapter, I argue that Zevon’s music and speech in his late public appearances personify an idea in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy called ‘authentic being-towards-death’. In his landmark text 'Being and Time', Heidegger undertakes a painstaking analysis of human existence. One of its conclusions is that to live a fully authentic life, we must reckon with our mortality, come to terms with it and allow this reckoning to have a transformative effect on how we live and how we think about our existence. This results, Heidegger argues, in a distinct way of being that he calls ‘being-towards-death’ and ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ in the face of death. Authentic being, which involves properly taking ownership of our lives and their meaning, cannot be adequately achieved without a serious confrontation with the fact that we will one day die. I claim that Warren Zevon’s music, with its continual engagement with death which culminates in 'The Wind', is one of the great musical manifestations of exactly this type of project. Heidegger’s writing is often notoriously abstract, but it pertains to the most fundamental issues about what it means to be human. Engaging with it alongside Zevon’s music provides a fruitful opportunity to make it concrete, better able to understand its most important aspects while providing an interesting conceptual toolkit to apply to the music of one of the great songwriters of death. (shrink)

One of the most important topics that Thomas Aquinas discusses in his extensive corpus is the love of friendship, which is a unique form of love aimed at persons. Yet Aquinas's teachings on this are perplexing, for he claims that this love always produces union between lover and beloved, and that it is always a mutual love. This implies that one's love depends on reciprocation from the beloved, which seems implausible given the possibility of phenomena such as unrequited love. A (...) common interpretation of Aquinas's account of the love of friendship maintains that it is enough that one desires union and mutuality for such love to obtain even if such desires remain unrealized, but in this paper I reject this reading and argue that achieving union and mutuality is essential to this form of love. This novel interpretation ultimately reveals that the love of friendship is an intrinsically interpersonal act. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show that the natural idea that humiliation is harmful calls explanation and to argue that the most straightforward ways of responding to this explanatory demand fall short in important ways. I end by considering a line of response which I take to be promising, which appeals to our need, as social animals, for interpersonal connection.

Many people attempt to give meaning to their lives by pursuing projects that they believe will bear fruit after they have died. Knowing that their death will preclude them from protecting or promoting such projects people who draw meaning from them will often attempt to secure their continuance by securing promises from others to serve as their caretakers after they die. But those who rely on such are faced with a problem: None of the four major accounts that have been (...) developed to explain directed promissory obligation (the Authority View, the Trust View, the Assurance View, and the Reliance View) support the view that we are obligated to keep our promises to persons who are now dead. But I will provide hope for those who wish to use such promises to protect the meaning with which they have endowed their lives. I will argue that while we cannot wrong a person who is now dead by breaking a promise made to her during her life, we could wrong the living by so doing. We thus (might) have reason to keep the promises that we made to those who are now dead. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that writers on metaphor have misunderstood Aristotle on metaphor. Aristotle is not an elitist about metaphor and does not consider metaphors to be merely ornamental. Rather, Aristotle believes that metaphors are ubiquitous and believes that people can express themselves in a clearer and more attractive way through the use of metaphors and that people learn and understand things better through metaphor. He also distinguishes between the use of metaphor and the coinage of metaphor, and believes (...) that the ability to coin marvelous new metaphors is a form of literary genius, and he provided an entirely natural origin of metaphor coinage. (shrink)

Beginning right at the start of the recently published volume II of Donner le temps, at its ‘bord’ or ‘boarding’ upon or out of a calmy oceanic surface, this essay examines the functions and movements of distinct surfaces in between Heidegger and Derrida. Confronting thus the tradition of the ‘Grund’, ‘Abgrund’, ‘Urgrund’, ‘Ungrund’, with the khôra-like surface of archi-writing and dissemination, the essay proposes an investigation of the philosophical and writerly space of Derrida/Heidegger not through their marks and letters, but (...) instead through the different surfaces of inscription and – simultaneous – effacement as the ‘proper places’ of thought and experience, of Destruktion and deconstruction. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

This paper explores some issues about the choice of variables for causal representation and explanation. Depending on which variables a researcher employs, many causal inference procedures and many treatments of causation will reach different conclusions about which causal relationships are present in some system of interest. The assumption of this paper is that some choices of variables are superior to other choices for the purpose of causal analysis. A number of possible criteria for variable choice are described and defended within (...) a broadly interventionist approach to causation. (shrink)

The vitality of Platonism.--The divine origin of the soul.--The doctrine of the logos in Heraclitus.--The Hymn of Cleanthes.--Ancient Greek views of suffering and evil.--The moral and intellectual value of classical education.

In this article I respond to the constructive criticisms of my views in Markets with Limits that have been developed by Amy E. White, Roderick T. Long, and Julian Koplin. I also outline how Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski have surreptitiously altered their position in the second edition of their book Markets Without Limits—alterations that they appear to have made in response to my criticisms. First, they have changed the view that they attribute to those they identify as anti-commodification theorists (...) in response to my claim that none of them hold the position that they attribute to them. Second, they have altered their definition of what constitutes a “semiotic” objection to markets. I argue that none of these changes successfully address my initial criticisms. By contrast, I believe that the revisions that I make to my views in response to the objections of White and Long address their concerns, and I concur with Koplin’s development of my views in the context of the use of AI. (shrink)

A novel account of virtue signaling and what makes it bad has recently been offered by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke. Despite plausibly vindicating the folk’s conception of virtue signaling as a bad thing, their account has recently been attacked by both Neil Levy and Evan Westra. According to Levy and Westra, virtue signaling actually supports the aims and progress of public moral discourse. In this paper, we rebut these recent defenses of virtue signaling. We suggest that virtue signaling only (...) supports the aims of public moral discourse to the extent it is an instance of a more general phenomenon that we call norm signaling. We then argue that, if anything, virtue signaling will undermine the quality of public moral discourse by undermining the evidence we typically rely on from the testimony and norm signaling of others. Thus, we conclude, not only is virtue signaling not needed, but its epistemological effects warrant its bad reputation. (shrink)

This paper interprets the influential colony management simulator ‘Dwarf Fortress’ existentially, in terms of finitude, absurdity, and narrative. It applies Aarseth/Möring’s proposed method of game interpretation, adopting their definition of ‘cybermedia’ as a generalized game ontology, then providing a specialized ontology of ‘Dwarf Fortress’ which describes its genre and salient gameplay features, incorporating Ian Bogost’s concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’. It then gives an existentialist interpretation of ‘Dwarf Fortress’ which centres on ‘finitude’, ‘absurdity’, and ‘narrative’, showing that ‘Dwarf Fortress’ is a (...) game about the existential tensions involved in being human. We live knowing our lives and civilizations are finite, that there are radical limits on what we can know and do. There is no meaning inherent in the world, or in history, so it is up to us to create our own, and one of our most powerful ways of doing this is narrative. (shrink)

A new process philosophy of signs, where process becomes primary, and fixed relation secondary'Behind Red Doors - Signs, Process and the Political' - a post by James Williams on the Edinburgh University Press blogWhat is a sign? We usually think that it is a fixed relation: a red light signifies 'Stop'. In his bold new book, James Williams now argues that signs are varying processes: seeing the red light triggers a creative response to the question, Should I stop?Williams (...) develops this new process philosophy of signs through a formal model, in contrast to earlier structuralist definitions. He draws on the philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead, criticises earlier work on the sign in biology by Jakob von Uexküll, and connects to contemporary work on process in the philosophy of biology by John Dupré.The process model has wide applications in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and informs their critical debates with science. In defining the sign as essentially political, this radical definition of the sign opens up new possibilities for social and political critique.". (shrink)

This book on modal logic is especially designed for philosophy students. It provides an accessible yet technically sound treatment of modal logic and its philosophical applications. Every effort is made to simplify the presentation by using diagrams instead of more complex mathematical apparatus. These and other innovations provide philosophers with easy access to a rich variety of topics in modal logic, including a full coverage of quantified modal logic, non-rigid designators, definite descriptions, and the de-re de-dicto distinction. Discussion of philosophical (...) issues concerning the development of modal logic is woven into the text. The book uses natural deduction systems, which are widely regarded as the easiest to teach and use. It also includes a diagram technique that extends the method of truth trees to modal logic. This provides a foundation for a novel method for showing completeness that is easy to extend to quantifiers. This second edition contains a new chapter on logics of conditionals, an updated and expanded bibliography, and is updated throughout. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude toward envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy poses to political stability. Yet he also briefly discusses the kind of envy that individuals experience toward their social peers, which he calls particular envy, and which I refer to as peer envy. He quickly concludes, however, that particular envy would not present a serious risk to the stability of his just society. In this article, I contest (...) this claim by arguing that the principles that structure Rawls’s ideal society are likely to exacerbate particular envy to a politically risky extent. Section 1 reconstructs his account of envy, giving special attention to his belief that competition kindles envy between peers. Section 2 then examines the way in which Rawls often endorses rivalry within the body politic. I argue that the society governed by justice as fairness is, on account of this rivalry, likely to generate a politically problematic degree of particular envy. In Section 3, I invoke ancient Greece as an example of a society that was, as a result of its intense competitiveness, often imperiled by dangerously elevated levels of peer envy. I then survey the key institutional mechanisms by which the ancient Greeks sought to manage this hazardous emotion. It turns out, however, that most of these mechanisms would be unavailable to Rawls insofar as they starkly contravene his principles of justice. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society that fosters rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)