15 found
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  1. Assessing Non-intrinsic Limitarianism.Alexandru Volacu & Adelin Costin Dumitru - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (1):249-264.
    In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as (...)
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  2.  37
    Justice, Symmetry, and Voting Rights Ceilings.Alexandru Volacu - 2021 - Theoria 87 (3):643-658.
    In this article I aim to offer a first critical assessment of the most prominent arguments in favour of restricting the voting rights of senior citizens. The first argument discussed, most thoroughly articulated by van Parijs, maintains that intergenerational justice would be improved under schemes which restrict the voting rights of senior citizens, thereby diminishing their overall electoral weight. The second argument, reconstructed from Lau's defence of child enfranchisement, maintains that the cognitive decline associated with the process of aging should (...)
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  3.  45
    Wealth, Political Inequality, and Resilience: Revisiting the Democratic Argument for Limitarianism.Alexandru Volacu - 2024 - Res Publica 30 (3):589-607.
    In this paper I aim to provide a novel account of the Democratic Argument for limitarianism. I first claim that the standard version of this argument is questionable due to its reliance on a problematic central premise, namely that excessive wealth damages democracy because of its detrimental impact on political equality. Subsequently, I relocate the fundamental democratic worry in regard to excessive wealth in the process of backsliding, and more specifically in the relation between excessive wealth and political polarization. I (...)
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  4.  34
    Too old to vote? A democratic analysis of age-weighted voting.Andrei Poama & Alexandru Volacu - 2023 - European Journal of Political Theory 22 (4):565-586.
    Are there any prima facie reasons that democracies might have for disenfranchising older citizens? This question reflects increasingly salient, but often incompletely theorized complaints that members of democratic publics advance about older citizens’ electoral influence. Rather than rejecting these complaints out of hand, we explore whether, suitably reconstructed, they withstand democratic scrutiny. More specifically, we examine whether the account of political equality that seems to most fittingly capture the logic of these complaints – namely, equal opportunity of political influence over (...)
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  5.  29
    Electoral Quid Pro Quo: A Defence of Barter Markets in Votes.Alexandru Volacu - 2019 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (5):769-784.
    In this article I aim to provide the first normative discussion of barter voting markets, namely markets which allow the trading of votes on issues/elections for votes on other issues/elections. The article is framed within the wider literature on the legal permissibility of vote buying, with a particular focus on the recent debate between Christopher Freiman and James Stacey Taylor. I argue that while Taylor's objections successfully defeat Freiman's case in favour of standard voting markets, they are unable to also (...)
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  6.  34
    Preferences, reasoning errors, and resource egalitarianism.Alexandru Volacu - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (8):1851-1870.
    In this paper I aim to examine some problematic implications of the fact that individuals are prone to making systematic reasoning errors, for resource egalitarianism. I begin by disentangling the concepts of preferences, choices and ambitions, which are sometimes used interchangeably by egalitarians. Subsequently, I claim that the most plausible interpretation of resource egalitarianism takes preferences, not choices, as the site of responsibility. This distinction is salient, since preference-sensitive resource egalitarianism is faced with an important objection when applied to situations (...)
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  7. Etica aplicată şi de ce avem nevoie de ea.Daniela Cutas, Alexandru Volacu & Adrian Miroiu - 2021 - In Alexandru Volacu, Daniela Cutas & Adrian Miroiu (eds.), Alegeri morale. Teme actuale de etică aplicată. Polirom.
    În cele ce urmează vom prezenta pe scurt zona de cercetare a eticii aplicate și locul ei în cadrul disciplinei filosofiei. Vom discuta apoi despre ce fac filosofii când fac etică aplicată. Vom trece în revistă câteva concepte importante din etica aplicată, cum ar fi deontologie, virtute, grijă sau drepturi. Apoi vom încerca să oferim un răspuns la întrebarea din titlul introducerii: de ce avem nevoie de etica aplicată? Vom povesti pe scurt despre istoria eticii aplicate în România, iar la (...)
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  8.  18
    Democratic disenfranchisement: a relational account.Alexandru Volacu - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Standard accounts of democratic disenfranchisement either start from a presumption of universal inclusion and justify electoral exclusions as deviations from the norm, or attempt to draw a demarcation line between justifiable inclusion and exclusion relying on membership in the political community. Even when successfully employed, each strategy only provides a partial view of disenfranchisement, which is usually targeted at just one or two groups of agents. In this article, I develop a generally applicable account of disenfranchisement, grounded in a respect-based (...)
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  9.  23
    Voting Lotteries, Compulsory Voting and Negative Freedom.Alexandru Volacu - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (2):331-349.
    In this article I aim to counter Jason Brennan’s principled objection to the Representativeness Argument for compulsory voting, and to criticize the case in favour of voting lotteries, on which this challenge is predicated. In brief, Brennan claims that compulsory voting should be rejected because there is an alternative system, i.e. a voting lottery, which is able to ensure demographic proportionality in electoral turnouts without diminishing the freedom of citizens. But even on the most favourable conception of freedom which the (...)
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  10.  12
    Maximization, Slotean Satisficing, and Theories of Sufficientarian Justice.Alexandru Volacu - 2017 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1):73-90.
    In this paper I seek to assess the responses provided by several theories of sufficientarian justice in cases where individuals hold different conceptions of rationality. Towards this purpose, I build two test cases and study the normative prescriptions which various sufficiency views offer in each of them. I maintain that resource sufficientarianism does not provide a normatively plausible response to the first case, since its distributive prescriptions would violate the principle of personal good and that subjective-threshold welfare sufficientarianism as well (...)
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  11.  51
    Pluralist welfare egalitarianism and the expensive tastes objection.Alexandru Volacu & Oana-Alexandra Dervis - 2016 - Contemporary Political Theory 15 (3):285-303.
    In this article we aim to reduce the force of the expensive tastes objection to equality of welfare by constructing a pluralist welfare egalitarian theory which is not defeated by it. In the first part, we argue that Cohen’s condition of responsibility-sensitiveness is not able to provide a satisfactory rebuttal of the expensive tastes objection for at least a class of theories of justice, namely those that adhere to a methodologically fact-sensitive view. In the second part, we explore the possibility (...)
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  12.  19
    An incrementalist approach to political philosophy. The case of heterogeneous rationality assumptions in theories of distributive justice.Alexandru Volacu - 2016 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 9 (2):217.
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  13.  29
    Alegeri morale. Teme actuale de etică aplicată.Alexandru Volacu, Daniela Cutas & Adrian Miroiu (eds.) - 2021 - Polirom.
    De ce este importanta familia? Care este statutul moral al copiilor si cine are ce responsabilitati fata de ei? Ce este consimtamintul si care sint conditiile in care este valid? Care ar trebui sa fie rolul religiei in dezbaterile publice dintr-o societate democrata? Cum ar trebui sa fie gestionate inegalitatile sociale create de mosteniri? Ar trebui ca vaccinarea sa fie obligatorie? Este legitim sa fie cenzurate anumite forme de discurs? Avem datoria sa votam si, daca da, care sint considerentele morale (...)
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  14. Ideal and non-ideal theory.Alexandru Volacu - 2024 - In Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory. New York, NY: Routledge.
     
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  15.  31
    Prioritarianism and Other-Regarding Decision-Making under Risk.Alexandru Volacu - 2017 - Ethical Perspectives 24 (2):199-224.
    In the present contribution I attempt to refute a recent challenge raised by Michael Otsuka against prioritarianism, according to which the priority view is objectionable since it rejects the moral permissibility of choosing in accordance with rational self-interest – understood as maximization of expected utility – in one-person cases involving other-regarding decision-making under risk. I claim that Otsuka’s argument is bound to make an illegitimate move, which is either to assume implausibly that individuals are generally risk-neutral or to assume implausibly (...)
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