Professor, Department of Philosophy, Université de Montréal
Dietsch, Peter
Attendance to TaxCOOP2015: Competition and taxation: a look at the landscape-2015
Session: Animator: Citizen’s Discussion Night 1
After a postdoctoral stay at Créum in 2004-2005, Peter Dietsch has been, since August 2005, professor in the philosophy department of the University of Montreal. He teaches philosophy in the fields of ethics, politics and economics.
His main research interests converge on questions of distribution in economic and social ethics and are organized around two axes. The first fits into the literature of distributive justice. Mr. Dietsch works in particular on the question of the distribution of the cooperative surplus between the various contributors to the production process.
He also works to provide answers to certain questions that are central to the contemporary debate on liberal egalitarianism, such as the moral justification for the influence of talent or certain systemic factors on the well-being of members of society.
His second line of research touches on questions of a more applied nature. Although distributive justice is linked in many ways to economic issues and their institutionalization, this link is often overlooked by contemporary political philosophy. A good example is the tax system. Although distributive justice theories regularly make use of the tax system as a tool for redistribution, they rarely analyze how that system works and the implications of that functioning for distributive justice itself. In this context, Mr. Dietsch is currently working on a normative assessment of the phenomenon of tax competition, i.e. competition between states or other jurisdictions to lower their tax rates to attract capital from elsewhere.
Mr. Dietsch has authored or co-authored numerous articles in professional journals and book chapters. His book, Catching Capital – The Ethics of Tax Competition, was published on August 20, 2015.