University of Gothenburg
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Alexander Andersson

Postdoctor

Philosophy and Logic
unit
Telephone
+46 31-786 45 66
Mail
alexander.andersson@gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Room number
C516
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Alexander Andersson

Background

Doctor of Practical Philosophy.

Research

As of September 2022, I will be a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Swedish Research council, working on a project titled “What do we deserve in a meritocracy?” (2022-2025). During these years I will split my time between Gothenburg and Tilburg University (TiLPS). The purpose of the project is to investigate the tenability of meritocracy – which holds that jobs and economic benefits should be distributed according to desert. Critics view the increasing levels of income inequality and elitism as the result of meritocratic policies. Proponents of meritocracy blame market imperfections and state interventions for preventing meritocratic policies from enabling a just society.

The central issue for meritocratic thinking is that it is seldom obvious what it means to deserve something. In order to make sense of its potential, this project will focus on solving what I call the practical problems of desert. First, meritocrats need to explain how one can be rightfully deserving of, say, a higher income than others even though most of our innate talents are the result of luck. Second, there needs to be a clear methodology for comparing the efforts and contributions of different workers, both between workers employed by the same company and workers who work in different sectors. Lastly, the meritocrat needs to provide a so-called “anchor” for desert claims. This means that there needs to be a way of translating someone’s deservingness into economic rewards, such as answering what a hard day’s work is worth in monetary terms.

My doctoral project was part of the Financial Ethics Research Group and focused mainly on the concept of desert and just pay theories. I defended my thesis "Giving Executives Their Due: Just Pay, Desert, and Equality" in December 2021. The thesis is available here.

Teaching Fall 2021 & Spring 2022

FP1100: Political philosophy

FP1100: Normative ethics

FP1100: History of moral philosophy (together with Petra Andersson)

FI1100: Normative ethics (together with Joakim Sandberg)

LIB140: Plato's Republic (Political Philosophy)

LIB131 Quadrivium: Människan och naturen (Ethics)