05/05/2026 Hoover Tuesdays "Harvesting Inequality: Land Grabbing and Distributive Justice"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Kebadu Mekonnen Gebremariam.

This paper examines the social justice implications of farmland grabbing—broadly defined as an expropriative transfer of land from peasant farmers to financial interests. Recent studies in political philosophy that directly address the topic take the distinctive wrong of land grabbing to involve in the way it undermines territorial rights. This paper takes a different approach. It scrutinizes farmland grabbing via two important debates within egalitarian political philosophy, namely the general debate between luck and relational egalitarians about the aim of egalitarian justice, and a specific debate regarding the incentives argument for inequalities. 

I submit that a defense of land grabbing through the incentives argument would be untenable, so for two reasons. Firstly, the process by which assets such as farmland are coded as capital invariably determines their market value, thereby allocating incentives before their productive contributions are known. Secondly, since land grabbing’s distinctive feature consists in expropriation, and not in exploitation, its justification should lie in something other than reasons for unequal distribution of the return from cooperative schemes of production. 

This paper also shows that both luck and relational egalitarianism have implausible implications, each for different reasons. Luck egalitarian views condemn both paradigmatic cases of land grabbing and what I call Robin Hood cases, even though the latter is aimed at eliminating the role of unchosen disadvantages in the distribution of farmland. While relational egalitarianism avoids the challenges that arise when applying a distributive account of justice to a form of land capture that fosters control over land without acquisition, it too has implausible implications at the extremes of material wellbeing. I conclude by highlighting the advantages of Cohen’s community constrained luck egalitarianism—as one plausible approach for rejecting paradigmatic cases of farmland grabbing while simultaneously declaring Robin Hood cases as permissible.

12/05/2026 Hoover Tuesdays “Intergenerational Justice and the Right to Bequeath: A Justification Based on and Beyond Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s Critique of Inheritance”

Hoover Tuesdays by  Fernanda Diab (Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay)

Scholars have identified inheritance transfers as playing a significant part in wealth accumulation and the rise of inequality in contemporary societies. However, their widespread acceptance as a social institution, along with the economic interests that have emerged around them —such as the trend toward the abolition of inheritance tax— give rise to an axiological tension that must be addressed when approaching the issue philosophically. My research aims to contribute to revealing the normative implications of hereditary transmission, acknowledging this tension and supplementing critiques based on distributive justice with a critique framed in terms of domination. It seeks to argue that the ideal of freedom as non-domination, primarily addressed within democratic republicanism, expands the critical potential for evaluating inheritance by delving into the problem of property and its connection to the access to the goods necessary to achieve economic independence and, consequently, political equality. 
These two principles are indispensable values for the construction and legitimacy of democracy. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that the inheritance of property is a politically unresolved problem, the solution of which cannot be considered in isolation from a conception of fiduciary property. 
One of the main contributions intended is to frame the treatment of the right to inheritance as a problem of intergenerational justice, meaning its study must be projected toward its effects on remote generations. The social and political thought of Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872-1958) serves as a precursor to this postulate and will therefore be considered as such. The Uruguayan philosopher not only offers methodological guidelines for addressing inheritance as a normative problem, but also justifies its limitation based on the harmful effects on the living conditions of future generations. On this occasion I discuss the relationship between private inheritance, intergenerational duties and the fiduciary conception of property.