Lasse Nielsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 114767 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lasse Nielsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lasse |
| FAMILY NAME | Nielsen |
| SIGNATURE | NIELSEN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern Denmark |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3093-4448 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Health sufficientarianism and health inequality
This paper asks: If we are sufficientarians about health, then why do we care about health inequality? This is an important ethical question which should be of interest to moral philosophers as well as decision-makers, bureaucrats, and healthcare professionals. I present a generic account of health sufficientarianism and I argue that this account offers a distinctive and plausible explanation for our concern with health inequality. Central to my …
Having enough of a say
Political Equality is the view that, in political matters, everyone should have an equal say. Political Sufficiency is the view that, in political matters, everyone should have enough of a say. Whereas Political Equality is concerned with relativities, Political Sufficiency is a matter of absolutes. It is natural to assume that, to justify ‘one person, one vote’, we must appeal to Political Equality. We argue that this is not the case. If Politic…
Too Rich for Your Own Good? A Defense of Wellbeing‐Based Limitarianism
The author declares no conflicts of interest
‘So, the Moral Is: Do Not Take Nude Pictures’: Paternalism, Discrimination and Negative Social Sanctions
Sometimes, adults with educational roles, for example, teachers or parents, in particular paternalise children from certain groups with the motive of protecting them from unjustified social sanctions. This paper analyses a case where a teacher seeks to prevent girls, not boys, from sharing intimate pictures of themselves. We argue that the case represents an example of the broader phenomenon of paternalistic discrimination . Based on an analysis …
Conceptualizing stereotype articulation in frontline work
In this article, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing what we call stereotype articulation—the practice and process of expressing and conveying stereotypes in social interactions. Building the theoretical insights from analysis of empirical material from an ethnographic study of encounters between schoolteachers and pupils in Danish schools, we find school teachers articulate stereotypes about groups of students in di…
It’s a Gender Thing”—The Wrongdoing of Stereotype Articulation
In this article, we study wrongdoing features of discrimination. We develop grounded moral theory as an analytical tool to explore the wrongdoing of stereotype articulations and apply that to cases of stereotype articulation by teachers in primary school. Since cases of wrongful discrimination refer to stereotypes—such as ethnicity and gender—articulations of these stereotypes will expose the wrongdoing features of discrimination. Moreover, focus…
The normativist-naturalist puzzle: Functions and assumptions of health assessment tools
While there is no shortage in discussions of health assessment tools, little is known about health professionals' experience of their practical uses. However, these tools rely on assumptions that have significant impacts on the practice of health assessment. In this study, we explore health professionals' experiences with health assessment tools, that is, how they define, use, and understand these tools, and whether they take them to measure heal…
The expressive injustice of being rich
According to limitarianism , it is morally impermissible to be too rich . We consider three main challenges to limitarianism: the redundancy objection , the inconclusiveness objection , and the commitment objection . As a distributive principle, we find that limitarianism fails to overcome the three objections—even taking recent theoretical innovations into account. Instead, we suggest that the core commitment of limitarianism can be drawn from t…
What’s Wrong With Extreme Wealth
The expansion in the wealth of the extremely wealthy has received much attention in recent public and academic debate. In political theory, the phenomenon has only recently begun to be scrutinized. This article builds on these preliminary steps, exploring the normative reasons we have to worry about extreme wealth. Looking at the issues, first, through a distributive lens, we reveal that the excess wealth of the extremely wealthy compounds the in…
Earned citizenship and fairness
In many Western countries, it has become standard to demand immigrants that earn their right to citizenship by coming to meet a set of citizenship requirements. Moreover, many European governments justify the citizenship requirements on the grounds of fairness, because they are not discriminatory and because the demands of the requirements are to immigrants’ individual efforts. This trend invites exploration of whether this practice is justified.…
Disability Discrimination and Patient-Sensitive Health-Related Quality of Life
It is generally accepted that morally justified healthcare rationing must be non-discriminatory and cost-effective. However, given conventional concepts of cost-effectiveness, resources spent on disabled people are spent less cost-effectively, ceteris paribus, than resources spent on non-disabled people. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that standard cost-effectiveness discriminates against the disabled. Call this the disability discrimination pr…
Pandemic justice: Fairness, social inequality and Covid-19 healthcare priority-setting
A comprehensive understanding of the ethics of the COVID-19 pandemic priorities must be sensitive to the influence of social inequality. We distinguish between ex-ante and ex-post relevance of social inequality for COVID-19 disadvantage. Ex-ante relevance refers to the distribution of risks of exposure. Ex-post relevance refers to the effect of inequality on how patients respond to infection. In the case of COVID-19, both ex-ante and ex-post effe…
Relational Justice: Egalitarian and Sufficientarian
Relational egalitarianism is a theory of justice according to which people must relate as equals. In this article, we develop relational sufficientarianism – a view of justice according to which people must relate as sufficients. We distinguish between three versions of this ideal, one that is incompatible with relational egalitarianism and two that are not. Building on this, we argue that relational theorists have good reason to support a plural…
The numbers fallacy: Rescuing sufficientarianism from arithmeticism
This paper argues in defence of sufficientarianism that there is a general flaw in the most common critiques against it. The paper lays out sufficientarianism and presents the problems of indifference, of outweighing priority, and of discontinuity. Behind these problems is a more general objection to the abruptness of the sufficiency threshold relying upon an assumption regarding arithmeticism about value. The paper argues that sufficientarians n…
Envy, Levelling-Down, and Harrison Bergeron: Defending Limitarianism Against Three Common Objections
Pandemic prioritarianism
Prioritarianism pertains to the generic idea that it matters more to benefit people, the worse off they are, and while prioritarianism is not uncontroversial, it is considered a generally plausible and widely shared distributive principle often applied to healthcare prioritisation. In this paper, I identify social justice prioritarianism , severity prioritarianism and age-weighted prioritarianism as three different interpretations of the general …
Against the Applicability Argument for Sufficientarianism
Contractualist age rationing under outbreak circumstances
Age rationing is a central issue in the health care priority‐setting literature, but it has become ever more salient in the light of the Covid‐19 outbreak, where health authorities in several countries have given higher priority to younger over older patients. But how is age rationing different under outbreak circumstances than under normal circumstances, and what does this difference imply for ethical theories? This is the topic of this paper. T…
Why Not Community? An Exploration of the Value of Community in Cohen's Socialism
The work of prominent analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen provides a vision of socialism which has distributive justice and community at its core. While Cohen's view of distributive justice has been hugely influential, much less has been said about community. This article argues that community plays three distinct roles in Cohen's socialism. One is as an independent value, the second is as a necessary adjacent counterpart to justice, which serves both…
Being Responsible and Holding Responsible: On the Role of Individual Responsibility in Political Philosophy
Reconciling automatic and conditional immigrant naturalisation
Discussions within political theory on naturalisation tend to focus on whether or not it is reasonable and fair to make naturalisation conditional on meeting integration requirements. Those who emphasise the right of long-term immigrants to be included as equal citizens argue that automatic naturalisation is preferable, while those who put emphasis on the state’s legitimate interest in promoting the conditions for a reasonably just society tend t…
Harsh and Disrespectful: Rescuing Moral Agency from Luck and Choice
Many policies hinge on determining whether someone’s situation is due to luck or choice. In political philosophy, this prevalence is mirrored by luck egalitarian theories. But overemphasizing the distinction between luck and choice will lead to tensions with the value of moral agency, on which the distinction is grounded. Here, we argue that the two most common contemporary critiques of luck egalitarianism, holding it to be harsh and disrespectfu…
What Is the Point of the Harshness Objection
According to luck egalitarianism, it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. The most common criticism of luck egalitarianism is the ‘harshness objection’, which states that luck egalitarianism allows for too harsh consequences, as it fails to provide justification for why those responsible for their bad fate can be entitled to society's assistance. It has largely gone unnoticed that the harshness obje…
Teach Them to Play! Educational Justice and the Capability for Childhood Play
Sufficiency and Satiable Values
This article identifies value‐satiability sufficientarianism as a distinctive version of the sufficiency view, which has been ignored in the literature on distributive justice. This is unfortunate because value‐satiability sufficientarianism is much better equipped than alternative sufficiency views to cope with the standard objections against sufficiency. Most often, sufficientarianism refers to satiability as a feature of moral principles and r…
Sufficiency as Freedom from Duress
Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 23, Issue 4 p. 406-426 Original Article Sufficiency as Freedom from Duress† David V. Axelsen, Corresponding Author David V. Axelsen Political Science, Aarhus University Philosophy, University of WarwickSearch for more papers by this authorLasse Nielsen, Lasse Nielsen Political Science, Aarhus University VIA University College, HorsensSearch for more papers by this author David V. Axelsen, Corresponding Author…
Capabilitarian Sufficiency: Capabilities and Social Justice
This paper suggests an account of sufficientarianism—that is, that justice is fulfilled when everyone has enough—laid out within a general framework of the capability approach. In doing so, it seeks to show that sufficiency is especially plausible as an ideal of social justice when constructed around key capabilitarian insights such as freedom, pluralism, and attention to empirical interconnections between central capabilities. Correspondingly, w…
What’s Wrong With Extreme Wealth
The expansion in the wealth of the extremely wealthy has received much attention in recent public and academic debate. In political theory, the phenomenon has only recently begun to be scrutinized. This article builds on these preliminary steps, exploring the normative reasons we have to worry about extreme wealth. Looking at the issues, first, through a distributive lens, we reveal that the excess wealth of the extremely wealthy compounds the in…
What Is Our Real Concern with Real Inequality
In this article, I offer an account of when and why inequality is problematic. I build this account upon the central elements of the sufficiency view—that justice is concerned with eliminating noncomparative deficiencies rather than comparative inequalities. The account that I develop here is concerned with an inequality if, and only if, it involves an instance of noncomparative deficiency; either material or social. I then conduct an analysis of…
What is Wrong with Sufficiency
What Is the Point of the Harshness Objection
According to luck egalitarianism, it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. The most common criticism of luck egalitarianism is the ‘harshness objection’, which states that luck egalitarianism allows for too harsh consequences, as it fails to provide justification for why those responsible for their bad fate can be entitled to society's assistance. It has largely gone unnoticed that the harshness obje…
Playing for social equality
This article claims that the protection of children’s capability for play is a central social-political goal. It provides the following three-premise argument in defense of this claim: (i) we have strong and wide-ranging normative reasons to be concerned with clusters of social deficiency; (ii) particular fertile functionings play a key role for tackling clusters of social deficiency; and finally (iii) the capability for childhood play is a cruci…
The expressive injustice of being rich
According to limitarianism , it is morally impermissible to be too rich . We consider three main challenges to limitarianism: the redundancy objection , the inconclusiveness objection , and the commitment objection . As a distributive principle, we find that limitarianism fails to overcome the three objections—even taking recent theoretical innovations into account. Instead, we suggest that the core commitment of limitarianism can be drawn from t…
Why Not Community? An Exploration of the Value of Community in Cohen's Socialism
The work of prominent analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen provides a vision of socialism which has distributive justice and community at its core. While Cohen's view of distributive justice has been hugely influential, much less has been said about community. This article argues that community plays three distinct roles in Cohen's socialism. One is as an independent value, the second is as a necessary adjacent counterpart to justice, which serves both…
Reconciling automatic and conditional immigrant naturalisation
Discussions within political theory on naturalisation tend to focus on whether or not it is reasonable and fair to make naturalisation conditional on meeting integration requirements. Those who emphasise the right of long-term immigrants to be included as equal citizens argue that automatic naturalisation is preferable, while those who put emphasis on the state’s legitimate interest in promoting the conditions for a reasonably just society tend t…
Sufficiency as Freedom from Duress
Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 23, Issue 4 p. 406-426 Original Article Sufficiency as Freedom from Duress† David V. Axelsen, Corresponding Author David V. Axelsen Political Science, Aarhus University Philosophy, University of WarwickSearch for more papers by this authorLasse Nielsen, Lasse Nielsen Political Science, Aarhus University VIA University College, HorsensSearch for more papers by this author David V. Axelsen, Corresponding Author…
Essentially Enough
This chapter outlines the elements needed to render sufficiency a plausible ideal of distributive justice. To attain such plausibility, it must avoid four potentially debilitating problems: ambiguity, arbitrariness, underdemandingness, and blindness to important values other than sufficiency. Critics think these problems are inescapably a part of sufficientarian views. This chapter claims that sufficientarians can avoid these critiques by includi…
Sufficiency Grounded as Sufficiently Free: A Reply to Shlomi Segall
Telic sufficientarianism is the view that it is better, other things equal, if people are lifted above some sufficiency threshold of special moral importance. In a recent contribution, Shlomi Segall has raised the following objection to this position: The telic ideal of sufficiency can neither be grounded on (i) any personal value, nor (ii) any impersonal value. Consequently, sufficientarianism is groundless. This article contains a rejoinder to …
What is Wrong with Sufficiency
Capabilitarian Sufficiency: Capabilities and Social Justice
This paper suggests an account of sufficientarianism—that is, that justice is fulfilled when everyone has enough—laid out within a general framework of the capability approach. In doing so, it seeks to show that sufficiency is especially plausible as an ideal of social justice when constructed around key capabilitarian insights such as freedom, pluralism, and attention to empirical interconnections between central capabilities. Correspondingly, w…
Playing for social equality
This article claims that the protection of children’s capability for play is a central social-political goal. It provides the following three-premise argument in defense of this claim: (i) we have strong and wide-ranging normative reasons to be concerned with clusters of social deficiency; (ii) particular fertile functionings play a key role for tackling clusters of social deficiency; and finally (iii) the capability for childhood play is a cruci…
What Is Our Real Concern with Real Inequality
In this article, I offer an account of when and why inequality is problematic. I build this account upon the central elements of the sufficiency view—that justice is concerned with eliminating noncomparative deficiencies rather than comparative inequalities. The account that I develop here is concerned with an inequality if, and only if, it involves an instance of noncomparative deficiency; either material or social. I then conduct an analysis of…
Sufficiency and Satiable Values
This article identifies value‐satiability sufficientarianism as a distinctive version of the sufficiency view, which has been ignored in the literature on distributive justice. This is unfortunate because value‐satiability sufficientarianism is much better equipped than alternative sufficiency views to cope with the standard objections against sufficiency. Most often, sufficientarianism refers to satiability as a feature of moral principles and r…
Harsh and Disrespectful: Rescuing Moral Agency from Luck and Choice
Many policies hinge on determining whether someone’s situation is due to luck or choice. In political philosophy, this prevalence is mirrored by luck egalitarian theories. But overemphasizing the distinction between luck and choice will lead to tensions with the value of moral agency, on which the distinction is grounded. Here, we argue that the two most common contemporary critiques of luck egalitarianism, holding it to be harsh and disrespectfu…
What Is the Point of the Harshness Objection
According to luck egalitarianism, it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. The most common criticism of luck egalitarianism is the ‘harshness objection’, which states that luck egalitarianism allows for too harsh consequences, as it fails to provide justification for why those responsible for their bad fate can be entitled to society's assistance. It has largely gone unnoticed that the harshness obje…
Teach Them to Play! Educational Justice and the Capability for Childhood Play
Contractualist age rationing under outbreak circumstances
Age rationing is a central issue in the health care priority‐setting literature, but it has become ever more salient in the light of the Covid‐19 outbreak, where health authorities in several countries have given higher priority to younger over older patients. But how is age rationing different under outbreak circumstances than under normal circumstances, and what does this difference imply for ethical theories? This is the topic of this paper. T…
Why Not Community? An Exploration of the Value of Community in Cohen's Socialism
The work of prominent analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen provides a vision of socialism which has distributive justice and community at its core. While Cohen's view of distributive justice has been hugely influential, much less has been said about community. This article argues that community plays three distinct roles in Cohen's socialism. One is as an independent value, the second is as a necessary adjacent counterpart to justice, which serves both…
Being Responsible and Holding Responsible: On the Role of Individual Responsibility in Political Philosophy
Reconciling automatic and conditional immigrant naturalisation
Discussions within political theory on naturalisation tend to focus on whether or not it is reasonable and fair to make naturalisation conditional on meeting integration requirements. Those who emphasise the right of long-term immigrants to be included as equal citizens argue that automatic naturalisation is preferable, while those who put emphasis on the state’s legitimate interest in promoting the conditions for a reasonably just society tend t…
Envy, Levelling-Down, and Harrison Bergeron: Defending Limitarianism Against Three Common Objections
Pandemic prioritarianism
Prioritarianism pertains to the generic idea that it matters more to benefit people, the worse off they are, and while prioritarianism is not uncontroversial, it is considered a generally plausible and widely shared distributive principle often applied to healthcare prioritisation. In this paper, I identify social justice prioritarianism , severity prioritarianism and age-weighted prioritarianism as three different interpretations of the general …
Against the Applicability Argument for Sufficientarianism
Disability Discrimination and Patient-Sensitive Health-Related Quality of Life
It is generally accepted that morally justified healthcare rationing must be non-discriminatory and cost-effective. However, given conventional concepts of cost-effectiveness, resources spent on disabled people are spent less cost-effectively, ceteris paribus, than resources spent on non-disabled people. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that standard cost-effectiveness discriminates against the disabled. Call this the disability discrimination pr…
Pandemic justice: Fairness, social inequality and Covid-19 healthcare priority-setting
A comprehensive understanding of the ethics of the COVID-19 pandemic priorities must be sensitive to the influence of social inequality. We distinguish between ex-ante and ex-post relevance of social inequality for COVID-19 disadvantage. Ex-ante relevance refers to the distribution of risks of exposure. Ex-post relevance refers to the effect of inequality on how patients respond to infection. In the case of COVID-19, both ex-ante and ex-post effe…
Relational Justice: Egalitarian and Sufficientarian
Relational egalitarianism is a theory of justice according to which people must relate as equals. In this article, we develop relational sufficientarianism – a view of justice according to which people must relate as sufficients. We distinguish between three versions of this ideal, one that is incompatible with relational egalitarianism and two that are not. Building on this, we argue that relational theorists have good reason to support a plural…
The numbers fallacy: Rescuing sufficientarianism from arithmeticism
This paper argues in defence of sufficientarianism that there is a general flaw in the most common critiques against it. The paper lays out sufficientarianism and presents the problems of indifference, of outweighing priority, and of discontinuity. Behind these problems is a more general objection to the abruptness of the sufficiency threshold relying upon an assumption regarding arithmeticism about value. The paper argues that sufficientarians n…
The expressive injustice of being rich
According to limitarianism , it is morally impermissible to be too rich . We consider three main challenges to limitarianism: the redundancy objection , the inconclusiveness objection , and the commitment objection . As a distributive principle, we find that limitarianism fails to overcome the three objections—even taking recent theoretical innovations into account. Instead, we suggest that the core commitment of limitarianism can be drawn from t…
What’s Wrong With Extreme Wealth
The expansion in the wealth of the extremely wealthy has received much attention in recent public and academic debate. In political theory, the phenomenon has only recently begun to be scrutinized. This article builds on these preliminary steps, exploring the normative reasons we have to worry about extreme wealth. Looking at the issues, first, through a distributive lens, we reveal that the excess wealth of the extremely wealthy compounds the in…
Earned citizenship and fairness
In many Western countries, it has become standard to demand immigrants that earn their right to citizenship by coming to meet a set of citizenship requirements. Moreover, many European governments justify the citizenship requirements on the grounds of fairness, because they are not discriminatory and because the demands of the requirements are to immigrants’ individual efforts. This trend invites exploration of whether this practice is justified.…
Political science (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Economics (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Law and economics (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (10 works)