Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Minnesota

Specializations:

Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Policy

Professional Bio:

Curriculum Vitae

Daniel Shapiro joined the philosophy department in the fall of 1988 and is now an associate professor of philosophy.  He teaches Current Moral Problems, Social and Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law. He also has taught Ethical Theory. In the spring of 2001 he taught a junior-senior seminar on "Anarchy and the State." 

Shapiro specializes in social and political philosophy and has published articles on a variety of subjects including liberalism, free speech and art subsidies, drug policy, social security privatization, market health insurance and welfare policy. 

Shapiro is writing a book in which he compares major welfare state institutions with market alternatives, as judged by four central values in contemporary political philosophy: liberty, fairness, security, and solidarity.  This book will be an expansion and outgrowth of some articles he has published in which he argues in favor of market forms of insurance as superior to government managed and financed insurance. So for example, in "Can Old-Age Social Insurance Be Justified?" Social Philosophy and Policy volume 14 (Summer 1997) Shapiro argues that a system of compulsory private pensions found in a number of countries where individuals own their own pension savings accounts that are funded by investment, and where government's role is mainly limited to requiring savings and providing a minimum pension guarantee is better than Social Security.  First, a private system provides more liberty since individuals can choose where and how to invest their own contributions, while one has almost no liberty to determine how one's taxes are utilized. Second, a private system is fairer, since it avoids the enormous intergenerational inequalities that a pay-as-you-go system produces. (Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system in that workers' taxes fund retirees' pensions, rather than investment of the worker's own contributions). Third, a private system provides more security because it gives one a property right in one's own pension, while this is absent in Social Security. Finally, a private system is more conducive to harmonious relations between generations, since all generations get a good rate of return from private investment, while in a pay-as-you-go system, early generations do very well at the expense of later ones. 

A more popular and less academic version of Shapiro's arguments in favor of a private pension system can be found at: 

http://www.socialsecurity.org/pubs/ssps/ssp-14es.html

Shapiro's approach to the question of the justification of the welfare state is distinctive in that it involves a marriage of moral and empirical arguments. Unlike most political philosophers who focus on which political values or principles are most important and tend to neglect empirical questions about how institutions really work (or don't work) and unlike social scientists who focus on institutional realities but tend to overlook questions of the moral and political justification of institutions, Shapiro looks at both values and institutions. His arguments provide a way to make progress on disputes about the welfare state since, if he is right, many welfare state institutions are worse than market alternatives from the standpoint of almost all political perspectives.