NWO veni project 2024-2027 ‘Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Philosophy of Taxation’

Updates

I am keeping this page updated over the course of the project. If you are interested in reading any work-in-progress, send me a message!

Papers

2024. “The Future of the Philosophy of Work.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 41(2), 181-201, with Markus Furendal and Willem van der Deijl-Kloeg. http://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12730

Activities

08.04.2024 – 15.06.2024. Research visit to Oxford University

26.02.2024 “Vijf misverstanden over verdienste.” Filosofisch café, Utrecht.

01.03.2024. “Can Investment Income be Deserved?”. Presentation at URPP Interdisciplinary Conference: Taxation and Inequality, University of Zürich.

14.02.2024. “Fairness in the Choice of Tax Base: On the justification of a general consumption tax.” Co-organised a lunch seminar at the Fiscal Institute Tilburg (FIT) with speaker Bruno Verbeek.

07.02.2024. “Een bovengrens voor rijkdom.” with speakers Ingrid Robeyns, Arjan Lejour, Wouter Schakel, Tazuko van Berkel. Moderation by Huub Brouwer and Robert Dur. Arminius Rotterdam, with Nederlands Gesprek Centrum, Koninklijke Vereniging voor Staathuishoudkunde, and NWO project Philosophy of Taxation (VI.Veni.221F.045).

Keywords

taxation, distributive justice, income inequality, wealth inequality

Description

Taxation is an important way in which governments can implement policy measures to approximate philosophical ideals about the just distribution of income and wealth. Nevertheless, the topic of taxation has, for a long time, been ignored by philosophers, who mostly focused on how governments should spend the tax income they collect. This is a shame, because as the philosopher Leif Wenar puts it, “[i]n the absence of theories of distributive justice that have some traction on the public conscience, the battles to set tax policy will always be won by appeals to interest and efficiency” (2005, p. 286). 

Only recently have political philosophers started to work on philosophical justifications for various forms of taxation. This emerging philosophical literature is still fragmentary, in that it tends to examine arguments for different tax bases separately, without a coherent story overall. The project sets out to make an essential contribution to the literature on philosophy of taxation by holistically examining, using the method of reflective equilibrium, which activities and/or things should be taxed and at what rates. 

Aim

The aim of the project is to come up with concrete suggestions for tax system redesign by examining two questions: 

  • Tax base: What activities and/or entities should be taxed? and
  • Tax rate: To what degree should these be taxed? 

The project consists of three parts. First, I will focus on philosophical arguments in favor of and against five possible tax bases: labor income, wealth income, wealth itself, gifts and inheritance, and consumption. Then, I will consider to what degree different rates of taxation are justified both on the same tax base (progressive taxation) and between the different tax bases analysed during the first part. Finally, I will analyze my findings and translate these into concrete policy suggestions for reforming existing systems of taxation.

Planned outputs

Among other things, I will organise a series of debates about taxation at debate centre Arminius Rotterdam in collaboration with the Royal Dutch Economics association, do a focus group study on public opposition to inheritance taxation, do interviews with philosophers and economists at the forefront of taxation research (to appear in the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics), edit a journal special issue on philosophy of taxation, and write a monograph on philosophy of taxation targeted at economists, legal scholars, political scientists and philosophers.

Grant amount

325.459 EUR, with co-funding from The Netherlands Centre for Dialogue and the Tilburg Philosophy Department.