Description: The &ldquo\;Liberty\, Equality\, and Utility: Assessing the trade-offs between individual liberty\, well-being\, and material equality&rdquo\; project at the Université\; de Fribourg\, funded by the John Templeton Foundation\, invites essay submissions on the question: &ldquo\;Does Liberty Upset Patterns?&rdquo\;. This prize competition aims to encourage new work on tensions between commitments to individual liberty and 'patterned' goods\, broadly construed to include commitments to equality\, priority\, Pareto-optimality\, and more. There are of course well-known challenges for reconciling these commitments. Using his widely-discussed Wilt Chamberlain example\, Nozick pressed a challenge for reconciling commitments to individual liberty and patterned views of distributive justice. Sen\, in his influential paper\, &ldquo\;The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal&rdquo\;\, pressed another challenge for reconciling commitments to individual liberty and a weak Pareto condition. Particular essay topics could include\, but are not limited to\, how to measure individual liberty/freedom\, patterned views of distributive justice\, game theoretic accounts of rights\, and philosophical discussions of any relevant formal results in social choice theory and/or welfare economics.
\nPrizes: First prize will receive 4\,000 CHF and an invitation to present at a conference in June 2026. Second prize will receive 2\,000 CHF. Third prize will receive 1\,000 CHF.
\nDetails: Submissions up to 12\,000 words (including footnotes\, excluding references) should be fully anonymised and submitted via email to libertyequalityutility@unifr.ch before April 27th 2026. The panel reserves the right not to award any or all prizes\, depending on the quality of submissions.
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