Chaire Hoover d'éthique économique et sociale

22/05/2026

A new book published by former Hoover Chair member Kevin Hartmann-Cortés! This book explores the intersection between pensions and private property: what does it mean to protect pensions through private property? What are the requirements, limits, and opportunities of such an approach? These questions are addressed by analyzing the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, which has developed an evolving jurisprudence since 1972.

This book explores the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) when defining and protecting pension entitlements as property rights. The sustai…

11/05/2026

New publication: our colleague Pietro Intropi recently published an article on EU justice in Notizie di Politeia. The article engages with some of the arguments in João Labareda's book Towards a Just Europe. It argues that while sufficientarian standards of EU justice are helpful and needed, they do not exhaust the redistributive obligations of the Member States

https://research.dial.uclouvain.be/entities/publication/2d8e945b-d4b1-45fd-a884-b8775d6b487b

05/05/2026

Demain, mercredi 6 mai 2026, plusieurs membres de la Chaire Hoover interviendront lors de la Conférence du Cercle des étudiant·es de philosophie, au local ERAS 58 à Louvain-la-Neuve, entre 10h et 18h. La participation est libre, sans inscription !

09/04/2026

This week, it was our pleasure to welcome Cécile Fabre to the Hoover Chair Research Seminar. She presented a paper about the moral duty to vote in an unjust world. She argued, first, that beyond the general duty to support and promote just institutions, wrongdoers have a special duty to vote to remedy the wrongs they have created. Second, she argued that victims themselves, although certainly less blameworthy for failing to honor their duties, have a special duty to vote as well. They owe it, first, to victims of the same or other forms of injustice; and second, even if that may sound counterintuitive, to their wrongdoers, who still have rights to be protected.

02/04/2026

Nouvelle publication: Dans un article paru dans la R***e de philosophie économique, Pierre-Étienne Vandamme s'interroge sur l'héritage de John Rawls d'un point de vue éco-socialiste. Il défend l'idée que la théorie de la justice de Rawls contient des ressources indispensables pour penser un socialisme démocratique et écologique, mais doit être amendée sur un point. Plutôt que d'insister sur l'amélioration *maximale* du sort des moins favorisés, qui peut avoir des conséquences indésirables du point de vue de l'égalité et de la soutenabilité, elle devrait faire davantage de place à des équilibres différents, d'une société à l'autre, entre égalité, sobriété et efficacité.

Article en accès libre jusqu'au 25 avril ici:

Cet article examine dans quelle mesure John Rawls pourrait être considéré comme un allié intellectuel de l’écologie et du socialisme. Bien que son œuvre offre des ressources indispensables pour penser un éco-socialisme respectueux des droits fondamentaux et de l’égalité des chances, ain...

01/04/2026

Hier c'était au tour d'Isabelle Delpla, de l'Université Lyon 3, de venir nous présenter son travail. L'occasion de découvrir à la fois son récent ouvrage, Du pays vide, qui imagine des principes de justice pour des pays qui pourraient devenir inhabitables sous l'effet du changement climatique, et son prochain projet de recherche, qui vise à motiver les populations des territoires vulnérables aux fortes perturbations climatiques, en faisant d'elles les bénéficiaires plutôt que les victimes ou les coupables, dans les politiques de transition.

https://www.vrin.fr/livre/9782711630745/du-pays-vide

25/03/2026

Yesterday, Aida Martínez Suárez, a PhD candidate from the Hoover Chair and the University of Oviedo, presented her research in population ethics in our Research Seminar. She discussed the idea of longtermism, or the view that since billions of people could live lives of similar or higher quality than ours in the future (if humankind survives the current challenges), our priority should be to invest massively in the future. She objects to the view, first, on the ground that it leads to a systematic and virtually endless prioritization of the interests of future generations, thereby wronging members of current generations in need of assistance. Second, she believes that the longtermist view is in tension with parental care: parents endorsing a longtermist view would have reasons to continuously postpone their parental projects (perhaps, by freezing embryos if this became feasible) in the hope of providing their children with better lives in the future. But if everyone acted this way, this would lead to human extinction!

17/03/2026

Today, it was our pleasure to welcome Benjamin De Mesel, from KU Leuven (RIPPLE), to present a collective, interdisciplinary project on the reform of the penal system. While the idea of retribution - giving people the sentence they "deserve" - has fallen out of fashion, Benjamin and his colleagues argue that making retribution central again, in the philosophical justification of sentences, could lead to a decrease in punishment. Because it is backward-looking and focuses on the acts instead of personality and future risks, a retributive approach would limit the time people can be retained in prison based on risk assessments. It would also reduce the unfairness resulting from people being released earlier while having committed the exact same crime as others.

04/03/2026

Yesterday, Catarina Neves from Utrecht University presented her work on degrowth at our research seminar. While most existing defenses of degrowth present it as a demand of sustainability, Catarina argues that it could benefit community ties. By freeing us from the constant demand to work, produce, and earn more, it would allow us to pursue activities aimed at meeting each other's needs in a spirit of mutual care!

27/02/2026

On Tuesday, our former colleague Thomas Ferretti (University of Greenwich) visited the Hoover Chair to present his new project on algorithmic recruitment. He highlighted difficulties in achieving perfect fairness within recruitment processes. This, he believes, reveals a flawed conception of how to achieve fair equality of opportunity in society. Instead of pursuing “group fairness”, seeking to ensure statistical parity between demographic groups in each recruitment, we should target "individual fairness", and aim at equality of opportunity at the broader societal level. An approach to justice he defended in an earlier article: https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/ttr.43.1.147