2019 Pacific Division Presidential Address: Individual Well-Being and Social Justice

Below is the audio recording of Richard Arneson’s presidential address, “Individual Well-Being and Social Justice,” given at the 2019 Pacific Division Meeting. The full text is available on the APA website (member sign-in is required) as well as on JSTOR. 

The audio of the lecture is available here:

“Individual Well-Being and Social Justice” by Richard Arneson

Richard Arneson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and holder of the Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he has taught since 1973. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. Arneson is a political philosopher with a special interest in theories of social justice. He also works on normative ethics, including applied ethics topics. His recent publications include Prioritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2022); “Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power,” in Wealth and Power, eds. M. Bennett, H. Brouwer, and R. Claassen (Routledge, 2022); and “Basic Equality, Rational Agency Capacity, and Potentiality,” in How Can We Be Equals? Moral Equality: Its Meaning, Justification, and Scope, eds. G. Floris and N. Kirby (Oxford University Press, 2024). He served as president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2018–2019.

About this series: The Blog of the APA is pleased to publish the Presidential Addresses and John Dewey Lectures given at the Eastern, Central, and Pacific APA Division Meetings, which communicate the ideas and experiences that the renowned philosophers who delivered them felt are most important for people in the field to know. The Blog wishes to thank the APA leadership and Jeremy Cushing for their support and assistance in making these recordings available.