Philosophy student and Philosophy professor win prestigious prize

Gillian Brock and Hamish Russell have been selected as joint winners of the 2014 Amartya Sen Prize Contest. The prize is named in honour of Professor Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winning professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, “whose work has shown how the rigor of economic thinking can be brought to bear on normative and practical questions of great human significance”.

The prize was awarded for a paper they co-authored in the area of remedial responsibilities with respect to institutional corruption, with a special focus on fiscal institutions. This proved to be an especially good fit with the 2014 theme of how illicit financial flows relate to global poverty and inequality.

Gillian Brock is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Auckland and a Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. Hamish Russell, who in 2013 was a BA (Honours) student in Philosophy, was also Gillian’s research assistant on several of her research projects, including her project on institutional corruption. Hamish has recently begun his PhD at The University of Toronto, and was awarded an Ontario Trillium Scholarship.

Gillian and Hamish were both invited to visit Yale University to present the work and receive the prize on Saturday 8 November. Hamish was able to take up the invitation and, according to the organizers of the event, “did a wonderful job presenting the paper”.

The winning paper, “Abusive Tax Avoidance and Responsibilities of Tax Professionals”, discusses how to assign remedial responsibilities for the problem of abusive tax avoidance. Abusive tax avoidance reduces the effectiveness and equity of fiscal institutions, contributes to significant levels of deprivation in both developed and developing countries and, they argue, fuels a variety of forms of institutional corruption.