Andreas Albertsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 4371079 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andreas Albertsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andreas |
| FAMILY NAME | Albertsen |
| SIGNATURE | ALBERTSEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7528-2493 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
No jab, no access? Is differential treatment based on vaccination (wrongfully) discriminatory
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries introduced policies that disadvantaged unvaccinated individuals, including fines, restrictions on access to public spaces, and lower healthcare priority. This article examines whether such differential treatment constitutes wrongful discrimination. Drawing on prominent philosophical accounts of discrimination, we argue that these policies qualify as direct discrimination against the unvaccinated under …
Organ markets, distributive justice and the limits of the best option argument
In debates over organ markets, the so-called best option argument is often invoked to oppose prohibition. The argument stresses that for some individuals, selling a kidney would be their best available option. In earlier work, I argued that this argument does comparatively little justificatory work under conditions of distributive injustice, because the option is best only through a narrow comparison that leaves out even better options required b…
Size Does Matter! Prioritizing Rare Diseases for Luck Egalitarian Reasons
Rarity provides a challenging case for contemporary priority setting. On the one hand, many philosophers and economists argue that rarity has no inherent moral value, and thus that rare diseases merit no special treatment in priority setting decisions simply because they are rare. On the other hand, existing priority‐setting practices demonstrate a higher willingness to pay for rare disease treatments. We argue that special priority for rare dise…
Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are widely used digital tools that match voters’ policy preferences with party or candidate positions. Since their emergence in the 1980s and rapid expansion alongside internet dissemination, VAAs have spread to more than 80 countries and generated growing academic interest. This thematic issue advances the field by analysing behavioural effects, user diversity, design innovations, including AI-driven conversatio…
Does harm or disrespect make discrimination wrong? An experimental approach
While standard forms of discrimination are widely considered morally wrong, philosophers disagree about what makes them so. Two accounts have risen to prominence in this debate: One stressing how wrongful discrimination disrespects the discriminatee, the other how the harms involved make discrimination wrong. While these accounts are based on carefully constructed thought experiments, proponents of both sides see their positions as in line with a…
Unjust organ markets and why it is irrelevant that selling a kidney is the best option
An important argument against prohibiting organ sales is that it removes the best option available to individuals in dire circumstances. However, this line of reasoning fails to recognise that selling a kidney on a regulated market is only the best option in a very narrow comparison, where a regulated organ market is compared with banning organ sales. Once we acknowledge this narrowness, selling a kidney is not the best option. This paves the way…
Distributive justice, best options and organ markets: A reply to Semrau
How important is it, morally speaking, that banning the sale of organs removes the best option available to would-be organ sellers? According to a widespread argument called the best option argument, this is very important. In a recent article I criticised such reasoning, drawing on considerations of distributive justice. Luke Semrau has argued that I have misunderstood the best option argument. In this article, I respond to Semrau’s criticism an…
Priority for registered organ donors: Unfair discrimination against non-donors
Priority rules give priority to registered organ donors in the allocation of organs. Such rules might directly discriminate against non-donors or indirectly discriminate against those whose religious commitments prevent them from registering. However, while priority rules may qualify as discriminatory, they are not necessarily wrong for the reasons discrimination is usually thought to be wrong—for reasons related to harm and disrespect. While the…
A new way to serve democracy: Recruiting Poll Workers and Electoral Participation
International audience
Anti-homeless Hostile Design as Wrongful Discrimination
Philosophical accounts of discrimination distinguish the question of what discrimination is from the question of its wrongfulness. This article addresses these two questions in the context of anti-homeless hostile design of public spaces. Regarding the first question, all forms of anti-homeless hostile design amount to discrimination, with typical cases (for example, anti-homeless spikes or benches) being direct discrimination, but with some case…
Discrimination Based on Personal Responsibility: Luck Egalitarianism and Healthcare Priority Setting
Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discriminat…
What is the folk concept of discrimination? Discriminators and comparators
According to many theorists, discrimination either requires a better treated comparator or can occur only if the discriminator belongs to a socially salient group different from that of the discriminatee. Both claims are philosophically important since they have important implications for which account of the moral wrongness of discrimination is correct, e.g., if no comparator is required, the wrongness of discrimination cannot result from treati…
Covid-19 and the vaccine tax: An egalitarian, market-based approach to the global vaccine inequality
The global inequality in the distribution of vaccines is unjust. As countries scrambled to ensure enough vaccines, the world’s poorest were left to fend for themselves, and the generosity meant to mitigate this through COVAX was not sufficiently forthcoming. In light of this, I proposed a vaccine tax, which obligates those willing and able to pay to protect their own population to contribute to protecting those residing in the world’s low-income …
Workplace heating and gender discrimination
Across Europe, countries are reducing CO 2 emissions and energy demand by lowering the temperature in public office buildings. These measures affect men and women unequally because the latter prefer and, indeed, perform better under higher temperatures than the standard temperature. Lowering the temperature thus further increases an already existing inequality. We show that the philosophical literature on discrimination provides an interesting th…
Morality and Access to Essential Medicines: Pairing the Theoretical and Practical
This is the guest editors' introduction for a special issue of the journal
Covid-19 and age discrimination: Benefit maximization, fairness, and justified age-based rationing
Age-based rationing remains highly controversial. This question has been paramount during the Covid-19 pandemic. Analyzing the practices, proposals, and guidelines applied or put forward during the current pandemic, three kinds of age-based rationing are identified: an age-based cut-off, age as a tiebreaker, and indirect age rationing, where age matters to the extent that it affects prognosis. Where age is allowed to play a role in terms of who g…
The Voting Rights of Senior Citizens: Should all Votes Count the Same
In 1970, Stewart advocated disenfranchising everyone reaching retirement age or age 70, whichever was earlier. The question of whether senior citizens should be disenfranchised has recently come to the fore due to votes on issues such as Brexit and climate change. Indeed, there is a growing literature which argues that we should increase the voting power of non-senior citizens relative to senior citizens, for reasons having to do with intergenera…
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…
Nudging Voters and Encouraging Pre-commitment: Beyond Mandatory Turnout
The discussion on mandatory turnout, which controversially introduces coercion at the heart of the electoral process, illustrates a dilemma between increasing voter turnout on the one hand and avoiding coercion on the other. If successful, a recent proposal by Elliott solves this dilemma as it removes the compulsory element of mandatory turnout. Specifically, Elliot reinterprets the policy’s purpose as (a) a pre-commitment device for those who be…
Candidates, voters, and voting advice applications
Voters often face a complex information environment with many options when they vote in elections. Research on democratic representation has traditionally been skeptical about voters’ ability to navigate this complexity. However, voting advice applications (VAAs) offer voters a shortcut to compare their own preferences across numerous issues with those of a large number of political candidates. As VAAs become more prevalent, it is critical to und…
Rare diseases in healthcare priority setting: Should rarity matter
Rare diseases pose a particular priority setting problem. The UK gives rare diseases special priority in healthcare priority setting. Effectively, the National Health Service is willing to pay much more to gain a quality-adjusted life-year related to a very rare disease than one related to a more common condition. But should rare diseases receive priority in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources? This article develops and evaluates four a…
A vaccine tax: Ensuring a more equitable global vaccine distribution
While COVID-19 vaccines provide light at the end of the tunnel in a difficult time, they also bring forth the complex ethical issue of global vaccine distribution. The current unequal global distribution of vaccines is unjust towards the vulnerable living in low-income countries. A vaccine tax should be introduced to remedy this. Under such a scheme, a small fraction of the money spent by a country on vaccines for its own population would go into…
How do the Characteristics of Voting Advice Application Users Change Over Time? Evidence from the German Election Studies
Unequal and declining electoral turnout has spurred numerous initiatives to reverse the trend. Voting advice applications (VAAs) are one prominent attempt. VAAs match the opinions of voters with those of candidates or parties. As the popularity of VAAs increases and research corroborates their effect on turnout and political preferences, it matters at lot who uses VAAs and, thus, experiences these effects. The early VAA literature found that VAA …
How the past matters for the future: A luck egalitarian sustainability principle for healthcare resource allocation
While it is plausible that we should take the possible negative dynamics of healthcare allocation decisions into account, we may not need a principle of sustainability for this.Munthe, Furmagelli, and Malmqvist are correct that luck egalitarianism focuses on the past, however, this prominent theory of distributive justice can still take into account the interests of those who will be affected by our allocation decisions.This is the case because p…
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…
Candidates, voters, and voting advice applications
Voters often face a complex information environment with many options when they vote in elections. Research on democratic representation has traditionally been skeptical about voters’ ability to navigate this complexity. However, voting advice applications (VAAs) offer voters a shortcut to compare their own preferences across numerous issues with those of a large number of political candidates. As VAAs become more prevalent, it is critical to und…
How do the Characteristics of Voting Advice Application Users Change Over Time? Evidence from the German Election Studies
Unequal and declining electoral turnout has spurred numerous initiatives to reverse the trend. Voting advice applications (VAAs) are one prominent attempt. VAAs match the opinions of voters with those of candidates or parties. As the popularity of VAAs increases and research corroborates their effect on turnout and political preferences, it matters at lot who uses VAAs and, thus, experiences these effects. The early VAA literature found that VAA …
When bad things happen to good people: Luck egalitarianism and costly rescues
According to luck egalitarianism, it is not unfair when people are disadvantaged by choices they are responsible for. This implies that those who are disadvantaged by choices that prevent disadvantage to others are not eligible for compensation. This is counterintuitive. We argue that the problem such cases pose for luck egalitarianism reveals an important distinction between responsibility for creating disadvantage and responsibility for distrib…
Markets, Distributive Justice and Community: The Egalitarian Ethos of G. A. Cohen
While markets are widely lauded as efficient and attractive allocation mechanisms, their moral limits remain a source of controversy. The writings of G. A. Cohen provide an important contribution to this debate. Cohen offers two critiques of the market. One is a distributive critique, which maintains that markets fail in eliminating the influence of differential luck on people’s lives. The other is a community critique, maintaining that market re…
Mandated Choice Policies: When Are They Preferable
Under mandated choice policies, people are free to choose whichever option they prefer, but “choosing not to choose” is penalized. In Australia, voting is mandatory, and abstaining is penalized with a fine. In New Zealand and several American states, it is mandatory for those who want to obtain a driver’s license that they decide whether to register as organ donors. If they fail to do so, they will not receive a driver’s license. Proponents of su…
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…
Personal Responsibility in Health and Health Care: Luck Egalitarianism as a Plausible and Flexible Approach to Health
Allocating health care resources based on personal responsibility is a prominent and controversial idea. This article assesses the plausibility of such measures through the lens of luck egalitarianism, a prominent responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. This article presents a framework of luck egalitarianism in health, which integrates other concerns of justice than health, is pluralist, and is compatible with a wide range of me…
Nudging Voters and Encouraging Pre-commitment: Beyond Mandatory Turnout
The discussion on mandatory turnout, which controversially introduces coercion at the heart of the electoral process, illustrates a dilemma between increasing voter turnout on the one hand and avoiding coercion on the other. If successful, a recent proposal by Elliott solves this dilemma as it removes the compulsory element of mandatory turnout. Specifically, Elliot reinterprets the policy’s purpose as (a) a pre-commitment device for those who be…
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…
Unjust Equalities
In the luck egalitarian literature, one influential formulation of luck egalitarianism does not specify whether equalities that do not reflect people’s equivalent exercises of responsibility are bad with regard to inequality. This equivocation gives rise to two competing versions of luck egalitarianism: asymmetrical and symmetrical luck egalitarianism. According to the former, while inequalities due to luck are unjust, equalities due to luck are …
A framework for luck egalitarianism in health and healthcare
Several attempts have been made to apply the choice-sensitive theory of distributive justice, luck egalitarianism, in the context of health and healthcare. This article presents a framework for this discussion by highlighting different normative decisions to be made in such an application, some of the objections to which luck egalitarians must provide answers and some of the practical implications associated with applying such an approach in the …
When bad things happen to good people: Luck egalitarianism and costly rescues
According to luck egalitarianism, it is not unfair when people are disadvantaged by choices they are responsible for. This implies that those who are disadvantaged by choices that prevent disadvantage to others are not eligible for compensation. This is counterintuitive. We argue that the problem such cases pose for luck egalitarianism reveals an important distinction between responsibility for creating disadvantage and responsibility for distrib…
Markets, Distributive Justice and Community: The Egalitarian Ethos of G. A. Cohen
While markets are widely lauded as efficient and attractive allocation mechanisms, their moral limits remain a source of controversy. The writings of G. A. Cohen provide an important contribution to this debate. Cohen offers two critiques of the market. One is a distributive critique, which maintains that markets fail in eliminating the influence of differential luck on people’s lives. The other is a community critique, maintaining that market re…
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…
Personal Responsibility in Health and Health Care: Luck Egalitarianism as a Plausible and Flexible Approach to Health
Allocating health care resources based on personal responsibility is a prominent and controversial idea. This article assesses the plausibility of such measures through the lens of luck egalitarianism, a prominent responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. This article presents a framework of luck egalitarianism in health, which integrates other concerns of justice than health, is pluralist, and is compatible with a wide range of me…
How the past matters for the future: A luck egalitarian sustainability principle for healthcare resource allocation
While it is plausible that we should take the possible negative dynamics of healthcare allocation decisions into account, we may not need a principle of sustainability for this.Munthe, Furmagelli, and Malmqvist are correct that luck egalitarianism focuses on the past, however, this prominent theory of distributive justice can still take into account the interests of those who will be affected by our allocation decisions.This is the case because p…
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…
Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy
In the final parts of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, he presents his vision for a just and more equal society. This vision marks an alternative to contemporary societies, and differs radically both from the planned Soviet economies and from social democratic welfare states. In his sketch of this vision, Piketty provides a principled account of how such a society would look and how it would modify the current status of private property through co…
Mandated Choice Policies: When Are They Preferable
Under mandated choice policies, people are free to choose whichever option they prefer, but “choosing not to choose” is penalized. In Australia, voting is mandatory, and abstaining is penalized with a fine. In New Zealand and several American states, it is mandatory for those who want to obtain a driver’s license that they decide whether to register as organ donors. If they fail to do so, they will not receive a driver’s license. Proponents of su…
Rare diseases in healthcare priority setting: Should rarity matter
Rare diseases pose a particular priority setting problem. The UK gives rare diseases special priority in healthcare priority setting. Effectively, the National Health Service is willing to pay much more to gain a quality-adjusted life-year related to a very rare disease than one related to a more common condition. But should rare diseases receive priority in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources? This article develops and evaluates four a…
A vaccine tax: Ensuring a more equitable global vaccine distribution
While COVID-19 vaccines provide light at the end of the tunnel in a difficult time, they also bring forth the complex ethical issue of global vaccine distribution. The current unequal global distribution of vaccines is unjust towards the vulnerable living in low-income countries. A vaccine tax should be introduced to remedy this. Under such a scheme, a small fraction of the money spent by a country on vaccines for its own population would go into…
How do the Characteristics of Voting Advice Application Users Change Over Time? Evidence from the German Election Studies
Unequal and declining electoral turnout has spurred numerous initiatives to reverse the trend. Voting advice applications (VAAs) are one prominent attempt. VAAs match the opinions of voters with those of candidates or parties. As the popularity of VAAs increases and research corroborates their effect on turnout and political preferences, it matters at lot who uses VAAs and, thus, experiences these effects. The early VAA literature found that VAA …
Covid-19 and age discrimination: Benefit maximization, fairness, and justified age-based rationing
Age-based rationing remains highly controversial. This question has been paramount during the Covid-19 pandemic. Analyzing the practices, proposals, and guidelines applied or put forward during the current pandemic, three kinds of age-based rationing are identified: an age-based cut-off, age as a tiebreaker, and indirect age rationing, where age matters to the extent that it affects prognosis. Where age is allowed to play a role in terms of who g…
The Voting Rights of Senior Citizens: Should all Votes Count the Same
In 1970, Stewart advocated disenfranchising everyone reaching retirement age or age 70, whichever was earlier. The question of whether senior citizens should be disenfranchised has recently come to the fore due to votes on issues such as Brexit and climate change. Indeed, there is a growing literature which argues that we should increase the voting power of non-senior citizens relative to senior citizens, for reasons having to do with intergenera…
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…
Nudging Voters and Encouraging Pre-commitment: Beyond Mandatory Turnout
The discussion on mandatory turnout, which controversially introduces coercion at the heart of the electoral process, illustrates a dilemma between increasing voter turnout on the one hand and avoiding coercion on the other. If successful, a recent proposal by Elliott solves this dilemma as it removes the compulsory element of mandatory turnout. Specifically, Elliot reinterprets the policy’s purpose as (a) a pre-commitment device for those who be…
Candidates, voters, and voting advice applications
Voters often face a complex information environment with many options when they vote in elections. Research on democratic representation has traditionally been skeptical about voters’ ability to navigate this complexity. However, voting advice applications (VAAs) offer voters a shortcut to compare their own preferences across numerous issues with those of a large number of political candidates. As VAAs become more prevalent, it is critical to und…
Discrimination Based on Personal Responsibility: Luck Egalitarianism and Healthcare Priority Setting
Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discriminat…
What is the folk concept of discrimination? Discriminators and comparators
According to many theorists, discrimination either requires a better treated comparator or can occur only if the discriminator belongs to a socially salient group different from that of the discriminatee. Both claims are philosophically important since they have important implications for which account of the moral wrongness of discrimination is correct, e.g., if no comparator is required, the wrongness of discrimination cannot result from treati…
Covid-19 and the vaccine tax: An egalitarian, market-based approach to the global vaccine inequality
The global inequality in the distribution of vaccines is unjust. As countries scrambled to ensure enough vaccines, the world’s poorest were left to fend for themselves, and the generosity meant to mitigate this through COVAX was not sufficiently forthcoming. In light of this, I proposed a vaccine tax, which obligates those willing and able to pay to protect their own population to contribute to protecting those residing in the world’s low-income …
Workplace heating and gender discrimination
Across Europe, countries are reducing CO 2 emissions and energy demand by lowering the temperature in public office buildings. These measures affect men and women unequally because the latter prefer and, indeed, perform better under higher temperatures than the standard temperature. Lowering the temperature thus further increases an already existing inequality. We show that the philosophical literature on discrimination provides an interesting th…
Morality and Access to Essential Medicines: Pairing the Theoretical and Practical
This is the guest editors' introduction for a special issue of the journal
Does harm or disrespect make discrimination wrong? An experimental approach
While standard forms of discrimination are widely considered morally wrong, philosophers disagree about what makes them so. Two accounts have risen to prominence in this debate: One stressing how wrongful discrimination disrespects the discriminatee, the other how the harms involved make discrimination wrong. While these accounts are based on carefully constructed thought experiments, proponents of both sides see their positions as in line with a…
Unjust organ markets and why it is irrelevant that selling a kidney is the best option
An important argument against prohibiting organ sales is that it removes the best option available to individuals in dire circumstances. However, this line of reasoning fails to recognise that selling a kidney on a regulated market is only the best option in a very narrow comparison, where a regulated organ market is compared with banning organ sales. Once we acknowledge this narrowness, selling a kidney is not the best option. This paves the way…
Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Law and economics (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Economic Justice (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Psychology (11 works)