Workshop in normative economic philosophy

The Hoover Chair is hosting a workshop in normative philosophy of economics, bringing together philosophers and economic ethicists to present and discuss a range of current work in economic ethics, ranging from business ethics to urban ethics, political economy, and market ethics. All interested participants are welcome to attend; please inform the organizers in advance.

Organizers :

Morgane Delorme (morgane.delorme.1@umontreal.ca)

Pierre-Etienne Vandamme (pierre-etienne.vandamme@uclouvain.be)

Hoover Chair, 3 place Montesquieu, Louvain-La-Neuve 
5 November 2025 ; 10am - 5pm

Each intervention is 50mn: 15mn presentation + 35mn Q&A

10h - 10h50
Sandrine Blanc, INSEEC Business School
Purpose(s) beyond welfare – A value-led interpretation of purpose(s) and governance in profit-with-purpose corporations

11h - 11h50
Pierre-Yves Néron, ESPOL Université Catholique de Lille
The Sense of the Exceptional: Corporate Life and the Ethics of the Ordinary

Lunch break 1h (12h - 13h)

13h - 13h50
Geert Demuijnck, EDHEC Business School
Detachment as a desirable and disturbing form of economic irrationality

14h - 14h50
Morgane Delorme, postdoctoral researcher UQAM School of Management
Equal political autonomy in the Eurozone

This paper argues that debates on Eurozone justice, dominated by distributive remedies such as a fiscal union, overlook an important breach of political equality. Using an egalitarian standard, I define politi- cal equality in the monetary union as the equal worth of democratic fiscal autonomy (DFA), namely a polity’s effective capacity, through its legislature, to authorise taxes, allocate expenditures, and borrow within a framework it can meaningfully shape and revise. Section 1 reconstructs the economic case for risk-sharing and shows how the Eurozone predictably compresses fiscal space in some member states more than in others. Section 2 demonstrates that this compression translates into political inequality via three mechanisms: the emptying of electoral mandates, the pre-shrinking of policy menus (reinforced by competitiveness benchmarking and an austerity paradigm), and the displacement of parliamentary authorship by technocratic conditionality, illustrated notably by the Greek crisis programmes. While a fiscal union can mitigate cyclical stress, it does not by itself equalise the worth of budgetary rights and may entrench oversight logics. Section 3 advances a complementary reform package to safeguard DFA.

20mn Coffee break 14h50 - 15h10

15h10 - 16h
Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger, ESPOL Université Catholique de Lille
Place-Based Rights and the Moral Topography of Gentrification

I argue that claims about «wrongful gentrification» often conflate distinct normative situations, and that only a subset of cases are pro tanto wrongful. Drawing on recent philosophical work on occupancy and place related rights (Stilz’s individual occupancy, Moore’s individual vs. group incidents of occupancy, and Kolers-style location-specific claims), I distinguish (i) infill and densification with newcomers, where residents may assert individual or collective place-claims but these typically generate qualification (voice, mitigation, compensation) rather than exclusionary vetoes against new construction; (ii) quasi- territorial/ collective place-rights, which ground procedural standing and limited stewardship powers without entailing dominion over entry or price; and (iii) state-led «population replacement», such as in- tentional clearance, renewal, or redevelopment, that presumptively wrongs residents by breaching occu- pancy rights and undermining equal civic status, especially under constrained exit options or path-de- pendent attachments. I then contrast these with (iv) market-driven amenity shifts that are often harmful yet not per se wrongful, unless coupled with coercive tools (such as evictions, exclusionary design, or policing externalities) or the fore-seeable denial of reasonable exit/voice. Empirically, I integrate contemporary findings that displacement effects vary by context and mechanism, while highlighting state-driven and health-mediated harms as especially severe. The upshot is a calibrated doctrine: cities owe robust voice, due process, and targeted compensation/relocation guarantees in (iii), qualified miti- gation and inclusion in (i)–(ii), and remedy only for specific coercive or rights-violating mechanisms in
(iv). This clarifies when gentrification goes wrong and when justice requires opening cities to newco- mers through fair densification rather than defensive exclusion.

16h10 - 17h
Louis Mosar, PhD candidate in KU Leuven University (RIPPLE)
The Civic Economy: From Regulated Capitalism to the Socialised Market

Recently, some authors have formulated the idea that a capitalistic market economy constitutes a form of republican unfreedom that is not reducible to the domination on the work floor or capitalistic class domination. Instead, these authors argue that it is market forces themselves that constitute a form of unfreedom. In this text, I want to focus on the argument as it has been presented by Eric MacGilvray, because MacGilvray’s account is conductive for thinking about what republican economy should look like. He argues that markets are unproblematic from a republican perspective as long as they are controlled by those who are subjected to them. This suggests that a form of regulated market capita- lism should be the favoured republican position, a claim that also dovetails well with Pettit’s instance that republicanism favours centre-left politics. In this text, I want to think through MacGilvray’s sug- gestion that a market economy requires people’s control over that market economy. I argue that this does not lead to a form of regulated capitalism, but instead to what Diane Elson has called a ‘socialized market’. That distinction can be made based on Karl Polanyi’s concept of economic ‘integration’ and the relation between the state and the market economy.

Closure drink at 5pm in LLN