Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Inequality

  • An Answer to “Questions for Free-Market Moralists”

    Mark D. White I read with great interest Amia Srinivasan's contribution to the New York Times' philosophy column "The Stone" titled "Questions for Free-Market Moralists." After introducing the political philosophies of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, she states that "on the whole, Western societies are still more Rawlsian than Nozickian: they tend to have social…

  • How Much Inequality Do We Want? This is the Wrong Question.

    Mark D. White Today on The Atlantic's website, Dan Ariely describes an experiment he conducted with Mike Norton in which they survey people about both the current distribution of wealth in the U.S. and what they thought the ideal distribution of wealth is. Not surprisingly, they find that most everybody underestimates the level of inequality of wealth,…

  • I may suck, but not as much as you

    Mark D. White Please excuse the flippant title, and get ready for a bit of a rant. (Listen–it's almost Friday, and it's been a rough couple of weeks.) I'll start with a old joke: Two campers are in the woods when they spot a bear heading toward them. One camper starts running while the other…

  • Inequality: Confusing the Issue

    Mark D. White The topic of today's "Room for Debate" feature at The New York Times is inequality, prompted by a recent paper by Mike I. Norton and Dan Ariely that shows a large number of Americans would prefer to live in a society with a more equitable distribution of wealth (like Sweden). Norton himself…

  • Does health (or health care) have special moral status?

    Mark D. White I just came across a fascinating paper titled "Is Health (Really) Special? Health Policy Between Rawlsian and Luck Egalitarian Justice" by Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. From the abstract: In recent work, Norman Daniels extends the application of Rawls's principle of "fair equality of opportunity"…