Richard Arneson

Richard J. Arneson is an American philosopher with a specialization in political philosophy. He has been a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) since 1973, where he also served as department chair from 1992 to 1996 and as graduate advisor. In 1996, he was a visiting professor in the ethics, politics, and economics program at Yale University. Arneson obtained his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. His academic contributions are primarily in the areas of utilitarianism, luck egalitarianism, and prioritarianism. He has also engaged in critical analyses of Marxism, proposing that capitalism's exploitative nature stems from unequal distribution of social goods rather than solely from the labor theory of value. Arneson argues that surplus transfer is only ethically problematic when it results from such inequality, and that it can be legitimate under certain conditions, such as compensating for unequal natural endowments or wealth.