Kern & Nebel Win Sanders Political Philosophy Prize

The Marc Sanders Foundation has announced that its 2026 Prize in Political Philosophy has been awarded to Adam Kern (University of San Diego) and Jacob Nebel (Princeton University). Adam Kern & Jake Nebel They received the prize for their piece, “Migration and Social Population Ethics“. Here’s the abstract: This paper explores how societies should evaluate choices that affect the size or the composition of their populations through migration, a subject that we call “social population ethics.” We build a framework for theorizing about social population ethics, within which we advance two substantive claims. First, we propose a desideratum for any theory of social population ethics, according to which “mere migration” is neutral from a social perspective: societies should be indifferent to migration that makes no one better or worse off. Second, we show that natural extensions of this neutrality are inconsistent with plausible distributive principles. We call this result the “Mere…