Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Equality, equity or need? Public opinion towards distributive justice in the changing welfare state" "Bart Meuleman" "Centre for Sociological Research" "Contemporary Western societies are characterized by a de-structuring of the social contract of organized modernity. This brings along renewed discussions on distributive justice, i.e. how the burdens and benefits of our major institutions and social arrangements can be distributed fairly. Three principles of distributive justice are distinguished: (1) equity: distribution dependent on contributions; (2) equality: the same access to social welfare for all citizens; (3) need: selective concern to citizens highest in need. Although contemporary societal conflicts are essentially rooted in these principles, a limited body of research has tapped into public opinion on distributive justice.My doctoral project aims to contribute to the literature by providing insight into citizens’ distributive justice preferences through achieving three objectives:1. Conceptualize and investigate distributive justice preferences through a domain-specific and multi-layered approach.2. Investigate the roots of distributive justice preferences by identifying individual determinants as well as macro-level explanations.3. Study the consequences of distributive justice preferences for crucial policy discussions, such as activation policies and basic income policies." "The idea of distributive justice in seventeenth-century moral and political philosophy." "Toon Braeckman" "Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE)" "How to divide things fairly? Philosophers have been pondering this question under the heading of ‘distributive justice’ at least since Aristotle. It has recently been argued that the meaning of this term changed dramatically in the last 200 years.Today, distributive justice deals primarily with the fair division of benefits and burdens arising from social cooperation. It gives citizens a right to material goods based on need or effort. Yet before, say, 1790, scholars claim, distributive justice was not concerned with property arrangements. It allocated goods according to worthiness, and did not entail rights. How exactly modern distributive justice differs from earlier accounts is disputed. Older conceptions were probably more diverse than is currently recognized. This project fills a significant gap in the literature by analysing 17th–century ideas of distributive justice. To this end, I will examine what some of the main political philosophers of the period wrote about it – Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), John Locke (1632-1704) and G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) – as well as English radicals like Gerard Winstanley (1609-1676). The project has an innovative angle: it analyses distributive justice in light of changing conceptions of justice as such (of which distributive justice is but a part). My hypothesis is that new ways of thinking about the notion arose in the 17th-century due to renewed reflection on rights and merit." "Social Justice in the European Union: Principles for Just Distribution" "Helder De Schutter" "Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE), Institute of Philosophy" "The objective of the PhD project that I propose to pursue consists in developing a conception of social justice for the European Union (EU). In particular, I aim to define principles for distributing socio-economic goods at the EU level and to look at the implications these principles have for institutional design and policy reform. The PhD project is situated in the context of the nascent debate on EU social justice and more broadly in the global justice debate within political philosophy. Articulating a conception of EU justice is important both for its far-reaching implications for EU social and economic policies and reforms, and as a testing ground for theories of justice beyond the state. First, whereas most accounts of justice beyond the state take either individuals or states to be agents among which justice hold, my project suggests that a conception for justice beyond the state needs to include two sets of principles: one for justice among individuals and another for justice among states. Second, applying this conception to the EU level, the project defines what EU citizens on one hand and EU member states on the other owe one another. Third, it examines the institutional setups and policy reforms implied by these principles. Fourth, it investigates the status of EU justice in comparison with global justice as such." "Global Justice and Global Democracy." "Helder De Schutter" "Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE), Institute for International Law" "What is globalization? And how should our political institutions respond to it? This dissertation formulates and answer to both these questions by relating the ideas of three Enlightenment thinkers to three elements of globalization: globalizing democracy to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, international law to Immanuel Kant and international trade to David Hume. Through a close reading of these authors, the dissertation asks whether globalization is democratic and how it could be, whether it is legal and how it could be, and whether it leads to increased prosperity as well as how it could do so. In Rousseau’s ideas of democracy, it finds a justification for tying democracy to the institutions of representative democracy in the state. Even though there is a radical promise in democracy where each person in the world shares power equally between them, our inability to distinguish our group interest from what is in the interest of all requires us to practice democracy through a shared set of institutions that gives each person an equal vote. Any attempt to move away from these state institutions signals a decline in democratic accountability and democratic participation, so that the promise of global democracy must remain unfulfilled. In Kant’s ideas on law and morality the dissertation however finds a way to make good on the global democratic promise by reframing it. Rather than giving each person an equal vote and an equal share of power, the international extension of law can give each person equal rights. I analyze how Kant transforms the global democratic ideal to the ideal of a universal law between us, and how it is possible for our international order to conform to the ideal of such a universal law. Rather than imposing a shared human rights standard through international institutions like the UN, I argue that Kant advocated a world of equally sovereign states. When each state is recognized as sovereignly equal to every other, no persons and no states coerce each other, so that it becomes possible for the law in every state to mutually adjust itself to the law in every other state. When we stick to ideal of sovereign equality, the ideal of a universal law can be constructed through what Kant called ‘cosmopolitan right’, or through voluntary global exchange and cooperation. In Hume’s ideas on international trade and exchange, I further explore what can spur such cosmopolitan exchange and cooperation. While international law makes it possible for a universal law to arise voluntarily, international trade can positively motivate us construct a universal law between us. Because, as I argue through a reading of Hume, economic exchange generates a relation of mutual benefit between distant strangers, it provides an incentive to interact beyond borders. When properly regulated, international trade moreover provides a way to alleviate global poverty by making poor economies more prosperous. I however also argue that international exchange is only mutually beneficial and able to alleviate poverty when it takes into account both Kant’s ideal of sovereign equality as well as Rousseau’s ideal of statist representative democracy. Even though international trade constructs relations to strangers and alleviates poverty through growth, it distributes these overall benefits unequally. The recognition that all states are sovereignly equal, and the recognition that all persons have equal voting power in a democracy can correct this unequal distribution of benefits, by distributing them equally within states. As a whole, the dissertation thus finds that globalization is best understood through the ‘co-originality’ of democracy, international law and international trade, and that a reading of Rousseau, Kant and Hume can help us see this. Each ideal needs the other two to fulfill its universalist promise, and this philosophical exploration of democracy, international law and international trade models how globalization works. How globalization should work can also be understood through this reading. The dissertation finds three principles of ‘global justice’ that make globalization just. Principle 1 specifies the priority of sovereign democracy, so that no cross-border coercion should exist between sovereign states. Principle 2 demands legal cooperation between states, so that the mutual adjustment between systems of state law can voluntarily conform to the ideal of a universal law. Principle 3 then advocates that each state maximizes its share of international trade as a share of its economy and that it gives priority to (global) worst-off under international trade. As there is a ‘lexical priority’ between these principles, the first takes precedence over the second and the third, so that in case of war, peace becomes more important than mutual adjustment and trade, and so that when peace and cosmopolitan interaction are possible, the fair distribution of the benefits of international trade becomes most important. " "The European Green Deal and Climate Justice: a Comparative Assessment of lnternational Distributions of Costs and Benefits" "Jan Orbie" "Department of Political Sciences" "In the EU's shift towards a green economy with the European Green Deal, the issue of justice and fairness has been a cornerstone. The severity and scope of the climate emergency calls for concerted international action. According to Horn and Sapir, for global climate cooperation to be conducive to impactful action “it is equally important that [climate policy] be perceived as fair in terms of the international distribution of costs and benefits that it entails”. Despite the EU’s clear track record in trying to solidarize global climate efforts its performance as a champion of climate justice is ambivalent,. There is a significant body of literature from political philosophy, moral philosophy, and climate ethics, identifying what we can consider fair in terms of the allocation of the costs and benefits of climate policy. This literature has by and large coalesced around two key principles of climate justice that have also normatively influenced the Paris Agreement: the Polluter Pays Principle, and the Ability to Pay Principle. However, there has so far been little to no research coherently assessing the EU’s policy practice against these principles. This research project intends to fill this gap by proposing a systematic assessment of three recent EU climate policies against the two principles of climate justice. The central question would be: to what extent does the European Green Deal align with the Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle?" "An ethical analysis of age as a criterion for decision making in health care." "Guido Pennings" "Department of Philosophy and moral sciences" "This project will examine if and to what extent the use of age in the decision making in health care is a form of discrimination. In order to do this a comparison will be made with other forms of discrimination. The analysis will be carried out withing the broader framework of theories pertaining to distributive justice." "Efficiency, equity and autonomy: the ethics of vaccination policy." "Philippe Beutels" "Vaccine & Infectious Disease Institute (VAXINFECTIO)" "We aim to investigate the ethical justifiability of different vaccine policy options. Vaccines are credited with having saved more lives than any other medical technology. Their distribution is of critical importance to guarantee a fair equality of opportunity to everyone. We distinguish three different but possibly conflicting ethical values that constitute just vaccination programs: efficiency, equity and autonomy.Cost-effective vaccines must guarantee as much health as possible given the budget constraint. However the distribution of the financial and medical burdens and benefits of vaccination programs in a population should also be equitable. Since the burdens and benefits of vaccination do not remain limited to the vaccinated person, distributive justice is more complex to determine, compared to other health products and services. Moreover the social dimension of vaccination also creates tension between individual rights and societal duties." "Inequality, consumption, and climate change policy: the demand side matters" "Freddy Heylen" "Department of Economics" "This research project studies the influence of inequality on an economy’s environmental impact and the implications of this influence for climate change mitigation policy. A key observation underlying this research project is that inequality influences a society's environmental impact through the effects of inequality on consumption: (1) inequality might induce increased positional consumption, and (2) low-income households tend to have higher emission intensities of consumption than high-income households. Not only could these mechanisms entail substantially different climate change policy conclusions, a realistic modelling of consumption dynamics is important given the growing emphasis on demand-side mitigation in the climate change literature. My approach consists of constructing, calibrating and simulating computable overlapping generation models. Controlling for inequality-consumption-emissions linkages, I compare the effects of environmental fiscal policy packages in a long-run general equilibrium setting with heterogeneous agents, and focus particularly on demand-side mitigation measures. I then proceed to examine one prominent proposal for climate justice - debt-financed intertemporal transfers: the intragenerational distributional consequences and the environmental impact of these potential distributional consequences have not yet been studied." "Just Air? The Spatial Politics of Urban Air Pollution." "Maarten Loopmans" "Geography and Tourism" "Air pollution is the largest environmental health hazard in the Western world. Especially cities are often ‘hotspots’ of air pollution. However, we are not all equally exposed to bad air. Due to the increasing role of traffic as one of the most important causes of air pollution, mainly people living near major roads suffer from its detrimental health effects. This project develops two case studies in Antwerp and London, where this unequal distribution of air quality has become a topic of public interest and debate. Concretely, it investigates the controversies concerning the closure of the ring road in Antwerp and the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street in London. The project studies, first, the root causes of the current uneven distribution of air pollution in Antwerp and London by looking how and why major infrastructural decisions were made, and how this affects particular social groups more than others. Second, it investigates how scientists, medics, policy makers, civil society and other actors put this problem on the public agenda and how and why they succeed in turning it into an issue of political contention. Third, it examines whether and how making abstraction from spatial differences in exposure to air pollution depoliticises the problem, or alternatively, whether and how the framing of air pollution as an issue of spatial (in)justice stimulates citizens to raise their voices and engage in action and debate." "Out of business or business as usual? Illicit cannabis suppliers in a legalized cannabis market." "Tom Decorte" "Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law" "Several jurisdictions are currently considering reforming their cannabis laws with regards to the production and distribution of that substance, and there have been noteworthy policy changes in this area in recent years, especially in the Americas. One of the central arguments (and goals) associated with the legalization of a non-medical cannabis market is the reduction or elimination of the illicit market. Nevertheless, we know very little about whether and how the introduction of a legal cannabis market may affect the illicit market and its players. The proposed study seeks precisely to shed light onto the eventual supply-side changes following cannabis legalization. In particular, the focus falls on understanding: 1) how pre-existing illicit cannabis suppliers have adapted to a post-cannabis-legalization context; and 2) the extent to which new non-official supply actors have emerged in that context. To achieve these research goals, the study draws on Uruguay as a case study. The research design envisions the collection of multiple data sources, including secondary data (e.g. official statistics, policy reports and other documentary sources), court files, and interviews with three groups of participants: representatives of law enforcement, of the national cannabis agency, and with imprisoned illicit cannabis suppliers in Uruguay. It will be one of the first studies to explore eventual adaptations of illicit cannabis suppliers in a post-legalization framework."