What do we owe to each other simply out of respect, or concern, for our common humanity? What can we claim? The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as many states' constitutions embody competing answers to these questions. Different accounts of what we owe to others out of concern for our common humanity ground divergent accounts of the basic minimum just societies and the international community must help people secure. 

A Minimally Good Life argues that concern for our common humanity requires helping others live minimally good lives when doing so does not require sacrificing our own ability to live well enough. This, it suggests, provides a unified answer to the question of what we must give to, and can demand from, others as a basic minimum. More precisely, Nicole Hassoun argues that people must obtain the things that let them secure the relationships, pleasures, knowledge, appreciation, worthwhile activities, and other things that a reasonable and caring person free from coercion and constraint would set as a minimal standard of justifiable aspiration. That is, as reasonable, caring, free people, we should put ourselves into each other's shoes and think about what we need to live well enough as each person. Hassoun makes this case by engaging with the main competitors in the literature: those that offer different accounts of the basic minimum and the limits of our obligations. She then defends a new way of helping people in present and future generations reach the sufficiency threshold and of responding to apparent tragedy when helping everyone seems impossible.

Please join us for a virtual Author-meets-Critics session on Nicole Hassoun’s ‘A Minimally Good Life.’ Barbara Buckinx, Roger Crisp, Stephen Darwall, Dan Haybron, Liam Shields, and Peter Stone will offer comments. Nicole Hassoun will respond. 

The workshop is co-organized by the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University and Trinity College Dublin, and co-sponsored by TCD's Center for Justice and Values and Princeton’s Department of Philosophy and University Center for Human Values. 

Author: 

Nicole Hassoun is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. She has held visiting positions at Cornell and Stanford Universities, the United Nations World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, the Center for Poverty Research in Salzburg, the Franco-Swedish Program in Philosophy and Economics in Paris, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt. She has published about a hundred papers in journals like the American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Development Economics, Tropical Medicine and International Health, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, The European Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy and Economics. Her first book Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations was published in 2012 and her second book Global Health Impact: Extending Access on Essential Medicines for the Poor appeared in 2020. Professor Hassoun also heads the Global Health Impact project intended to extend access to medicines to the global poor. The project aims to assist policy makers in setting targets for and evaluating efforts to increase access to essential medicines.

Commentators:

Barbara Buckinx is a Research Scholar with the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Her research interests are in global governance, migration, and the environment. In her work, she aims to reconcile the divide between normative political theory and policy research and give guidance to scholars as well as policy makers on what to allow, what to prohibit, and how to target reform in global governance. She also collaborates with the UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict on topics including gender inclusivity and justice & accountability in reintegration processes. She is co-chair of the Global Justice Network and a member of the Global Health Impact Organization’s Pandemic Health Equity Research Group. She co-edited Domination and Global Political Justice: Conceptual, Historical, and Institutional Perspectives (2015) and her work has appeared in journals such as Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Migration Studies, Democratic Theory, Ethics & International Affairs, and PS: Political Science & Politics. 

Roger Crisp is Director of the Uehiro Oxford Institute, Professor of Moral Philosophy, and Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He studied Literae Humaniores at Oxford, and then took the B.Phil. and D.Phil. under the supervision of J.L. Ackrill, Jonathan Glover, James Griffin, Michael Lockwood, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, Alan Ryan, and David Wiggins. He served as editor of Utilitas and for several years was an associate editor of Ethics. He was a Delegate of Oxford University Press for over a decade. In 2017-18, he was President of the Mind Association, and has given the Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 2018), the Parcells Lecture (University of Connecticut, 2022), and the Cottingham Lecture (University of Reading, 2024). His main research interest is ethics, especially normative ethics, the history of ethics, and practical ethics. He continues to work in other areas of philosophy, including ancient philosophy and political philosophy. He has published monographs on J.S. Mill (1997), Henry Sidgwick (2015), and the British moralists (2019), as well as Reasons and the Good (2006), a defense of various Sidgwickian positions in normative ethics. He has edited a number of collections, including the Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, and has translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for Cambridge University Press.

Stephen Darwall is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. His research has concerned the foundations of ethics, moral psychology, moral theory, and the history of these subjects, primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Impartial Reason (1983), a theory of practical reason, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640-1740 (1995), a discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of obligation and motivation, Philosophical Ethics (1988), a textbook in moral philosophy, Welfare and Rational Care (2002), on the metaethics of well-being or welfare, and The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (2006), on the centrality of second-personal address and authority to moral obligation and responsibility. His most recent monographs are Honor, History, and Relationship: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics II (2013) and Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant (2023). An associate editor of Ethics and founding co-editor of Philosophers' Imprint, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, a past president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and he has held the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship on four occasions. 

Dan Haybron is the Theodore R. Vitali C.P. Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He received his PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on ethics and the philosophy of psychology, with an emphasis on well-being, as well as related issues in political philosophy. He has published numerous articles in these areas. In 2015 he was awarded a $5.1 million grant for a three-year project, Happiness and Well-Being: Integrating Research Across the Disciplines, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Saint Louis University. He is the author of The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (2008), and Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (2013). A new monograph, The Lives We Should Want, is under contract with Oxford University Press. He is also active in the policy arena, including work with the United Nations, Bhutan, and Mexico, and is currently a core workgroup member of the Vatican’s initiative on Science and Ethics for Happiness and Well-Being. 

Liam Shields is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Manchester. In his research and teaching he uses the methods of analytic political theory to shed light on pressing practical problems. In particular, he works on distributive justice, educational opportunity and parents’ rights. He has a B.A. in Politics and Philosophy from Keele University (2004-2007) and an M.A in Political Philosophy (the idea of toleration) from the University of York, where he was awarded a C & J.B. Morrell scholarship (2007-2008). He studied for his PhD (“The Prospects for Sufficientarianism”) in the Philosophy department at the University of Warwick (2008-2011). Shortly after submitting his PhD, he took up the position of Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, where he worked on a project on Social Justice and Children. In 2012, he was appointed Lecturer in Political Theory in Politics at the University of Manchester. For the academic year 2013/14 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University, where he worked on a Spencer Foundation funded project on “Equality of Opportunity and Education.” In 2016, he published his first book Just Enough: sufficiency as a demand of justice. Since 2015, he has been PhD Admissions and Recruitment Tutor for Politics. 

Peter Stone is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He has previously taught at Stanford University and held a Faculty Fellowship at Tulane University’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs. He works in contemporary political theory, with particular interest in theories of justice, democratic theory, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of social science. He is the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the editor of Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader (Imprint Academic, 2011). His work has appeared in such journals as Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP), the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Theory, Social Theory and Practice, and Theory and Decision. He has served as President, Vice President, and Secretary of the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI).

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