¹ Cohen, G. A., If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

² Paul offers this as a matter of robust statistical observation. But how is that possible? Could making tax brackets officially more progressive have a counter-progressive effect? How? For a possible answer, see Rajagopalan, Shruti, “The Equity-Complexity Trade-Off in Tax Policy: Lessons from the Goods and Services Tax in India,” Social Philosophy & Policy 39, no. 1 (Summer 2022): 139–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rajagopalan observes that simple tax systems (such as a flat tax) yield observable results. Observable results can always be interpreted as insufficiently equitable. That opens the door for the richest of the rich to lobby for something more complex, always ostensibly for the sake of equity. But complexity always works to the advantage of those whose lawyers are adept at exploiting complexity’s loopholes. Are loopholes inevitable? No, but that is just to say that the richest of the rich hire lawyers to make sure the loopholes are there, hidden in the footnotes of a bill of legislation that no one (not even the legislators who each wrote a few hundred pages of the bill) will ever actually read in its entirety.

³ Chambers reports that Cambridge University is campaigning to “Break the Silence” regarding sexual harassment. To Chambers, the implicit premise is that the onus is on women to raise each other’s awareness. Analogously, if there were a campus epidemic of bicycle theft, a consciousness-raising campaign might focus on “the main things you need to do to prevent your bike from being stolen,” but Chambers might find that response not quite serious if it were limited to consciousness-raising, with no commitment to stepping up law enforcement.

⁴ The abrupt change in the trajectory of the human condition beginning around 1870 is chronicled by McCloskey, Deirdre, Bourgeois Virtue: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ As Pleasants notes, Thomas Piketty says, “inequality has increased in all regions of the world since the 1980s” and “has come at the expense of the bottom 50 percent of the distribution.” Note, however, that when Piketty says, “at the expense of,” he never actually says that the bottom 50 percent is poorer; he knows they are not. Rather, Piketty means that the income share of the bottom 50 percent has decreased from 20–25 percent to 15–20 percent. Piketty, Thomas, Capital and Ideology, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020)Google Scholar, 1. As Piketty realizes, this may mean a lot to academics, while meaning little to the least advantaged. As Amartya Sen once remarked (following a presentation of mine at the Royal Society of London in 2016), the question that professed egalitarians need to ask is: What are the dimensions of rising inequality that poor people care about? Michael Moore may hate falling behind his fellow one-percenters, but changes in the pecking order at the top are of no concern to the bottom 50 percent.

⁶ Hamlin, Alan and Stemplowska, Zofia, “Theory, Ideal Theory, and the Theory of Ideals,” Political Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 57 Google Scholar.

⁷ Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 137 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 145. See also Schmidtz, David, “History and Pattern,” Social Philosophy & Policy 22, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 148–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Schmidtz, David, “Realistic Idealism,” in Methods in Analytical Political Theory, ed. Blau, Adrian (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 131–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For discussion of this topic, see the recent volume of Social Philosophy & Policy on The Administrative State (38, no. 1 [Summer 2021]).

¹⁰ Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–43Google Scholar.

¹¹ Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 231.

¹² Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 231.

¹³ Schmidtz, David, Living Together: Inventing Moral Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Part II (“After Solipsism”). See also Richard Miller’s reflections on Shallow Pond within the context of a thoughtful critique of libertarian moral theory in his “Learning from Libertarianism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, ed. Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3–21.

¹⁴ Cohen, G. A., Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 316 Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 8.

¹⁶ Cohen warns against confusing rules of regulation with fundamental principles. So lest we get confused, let’s be clear: To say that political theory asks what makes communities work is not to propose a regulation; it is to identify political theory’s subject matter.

¹⁷ Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 271–72, 302–4. Oddly, from his premise that humanitarian values can trump egalitarian ideals, Cohen does not infer that egalitarian ideals are fact-sensitive. Why not? I regret not having a chance to ask. He would have had an interesting answer.

¹⁸ A remark about the grand conversation that is philosophy. Years ago, on a hike, a graduate student told me she had me figured out. She said my arguments in class were so strangely inconclusive (she may have used the word ‘flimsy’) that it seemed I was not even trying to win. What she suddenly realized, she said, is that it is actually true that I’m not trying to win. I’m simply giving students something to think about. I never forgot that.

The point is, I discussed Cohen’s work often but never thought that Cohen and I were having a debate that would end with Cohen saying, “Okay, you win. I concede.” In fact, Cohen gave me plenty to think about and always treated me as if I were returning the favor. My dealings with him were unfailingly cordial, constructive, and even warm. In some unstated Canadian way, we were fellow travelers. His untimely death was a real loss.