Distributive Justice

This chapter discusses what maximin egalitarians should think about two types of age-sensitive taxation. One is a form of cumulative income taxation, which taxes yearly incomes taking into account all earlier income years instead of only the last one. The second is age-differentiated taxation, which taxes yearly incomes adjusting the rate to the taxpayer’s age. The chapter first presents the main reasons supporting cumulative income taxation and then proceeds to look at how it affects fiscal obligations across life. Then it (...) argues that egalitarians should aim at a fiscal reform that benefits the young and the elderly but not the middle-aged. Finally, it questions whether cumulative income taxes can deliver this without resorting to age-differentiated taxes. The chapter shows that while cumulative income taxation can benefit the young, age-differentiated taxes are necessary to benefit the elderly. (shrink)

The scale and character of past injustice can seem overwhelming. Grievous wrongdoing characterizes so much of human history, both within and between different political communities. This raises a familiar question of reparative justice: what is owed in the present as a result of the unjust actions of the past? This article asks what should be done in situations where contemporary debts stemming from past injustice are massive in scale, and seemingly call for nonideal resolution or settlement. Drawing on recent work (...) by Sara Amighetti and Alasia Nuti on deliberative reparative processes, the article differentiates between two different approaches to settling claims for reparation. The first pursues settlement in a legal or quasi legal sense, seeking to close a matter through discussion, compromise, and bargaining in such a way as to maximize one’s interest while drawing a line under the events in question. The second is grounded not in one’s own interest but in an acknowledgement of the inevitable inadequacy of one’s reparative response. Such an approach to settlement centres the agency of the individuals and groups harmed by past wrongdoing. The article examines the reparations issue with reference to a range of recent cases of alleged settlement, including claims for reparation for torture by the British army in Kenya in the 1950s, for sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in East Asia in the Second World War, and for genocide by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908. (shrink)

Is political equality viable when a capitalist economy unequally distributes private property? This book examines the nexus between wealth and politics and asks how institutions and citizens should respond to it. -/- Theories of democracy and property have often ignored the ways in which the rich attempt to convert their wealth into political power, implicitly assuming that politics is isolated from economic forces. This book brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus. The chapters are (...) divided into three thematic sections. Part I analyses wealth and politics from the perspective of various political traditions, such as liberalism, republicanism, anarchism, and Marxism. Part II addresses the economic sphere, and looks at the political influence of corporations, philanthropists, and commons-based organisations. Finally, Part III turns to the political sphere and looks at the role of political parties and constitutions, and phenomena such as corruption and lobbying. -/- Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in political philosophy, political science, economics, and law. (shrink)

Proposals of distributive justice in childhood education are mainly divided in two camps: educational adequacy and educational equality. This paper shows that the compelling insights of both camps are complementary. I begin by distinguishing two kinds of views of educational adequacy. One identifies the thresholds of adequate education with essential capacities to be autonomous (John White) and to participate in public deliberation (Amy Gutmann). I defend the priority of these thresholds, but also their compatibility with other principles of justice that (...) regulate educational inequalities above the thresholds. Another kind of adequacy view is posed by Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz. In their view, a just distribution of educational resources derives from the demands of relational equality. An adequate education should develop social, political, and civic equal relationships among children, and the adult citizens that they will become. The other camp of proposals of distributive justice in childhood education is educational equality. Its defenders, like Harry Brighouse and Colin Macleod, identify two prima facie reasons to offset inequalities in educational resources among children. I argue that these reasons are compatible with educational adequacy views. My central claim is that all-things-considered proposals of educational justice should contain the compelling insights of both camps. (shrink)

What, if anything, is wrong with price gouging? Its defenders argue that it increases supply of scarce necessities; critics argue that it is exploitative, inequitable and vicious. In this paper, I argue for its moral wrongness and legal prohibition, without relying on charges of exploitation, inequity or poor character. What is fundamentally wrong with price gouging is that it violates a duty of easy rescue. While legal enforcement of such duties is controversial, a special case can be made for their (...) legal enforcement in this context. This account distinguishes, morally, price gouging by corporations from that of individual entrepreneurs. (shrink)

In recent years, much public attention has been devoted to the existence of pay discrepancies between men and women at the upper end of the income scale. For example, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Hollywood gender pay gap’. We can refer to such discrepancies as cases of millionaire inequality. These cases generate conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the unequal remuneration involved looks like a troubling case of gender injustice. On the other, it’s natural to feel uneasy when (...) confronted with the suggestion that multi-millionaires are somehow being paid inadequately. In this paper, we consider two arguments for rectifying millionaire inequality, clarifying their appeal but also identifying the obstacles that each will have to surmount in order to succeed. (shrink)

It is a precept of commonsense morality that parents have permissions to be partial toward their own children in various ways: they are permitted to act in a variety of ways that favor the interests of their own children. But how are such permissions to be reconciled with more general principles of justice? In this article, I discuss this question as it arises for one kind of liberal egalitarian theory of justice. Given their robust commitment to an ideal of equality, (...) such theories face prima facie difficulties in accommodating the commonsense permissions of parental partiality. After sketching the contours of the apparent conflict between equality and parental partiality, I survey some of the ways in which some writers have attempted to reconcile equality and parental partiality, and I criticize these reconciliation proposals, which in different ways subordinate a concern for equality to a concern for parental partiality. I then suggest a different direction for reconciliation, which subordinates a concern for partiality to a concern for equality. This alternative reconciliation strategy, I argue, deserves to be taken seriously by liberal egalitarians; whether it is the most plausible way to reconcile equality and parental partiality depends on one’s view about the moral weight of people’s interest in parenting. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the most important and complex problems of the modern age. The sheer scale of the harm produced, coupled with the fact that the changes are human-induced, necessitates a duty to prevent climate-induced impacts. There is a growing literature exploring how costs and benefits should be shared at national, state and generational levels. This chapter adds to this literature by exploring how normatively guided plans could be hindered by barriers beyond distributive justice frameworks and their subsequent (...) applications. Even if we recognise a prima face duty to mitigate climate change impacts, there are motivational barriers that could block people from making the requisite changes – motivational barriers that ultimately curtail the effectiveness of climate mitigation strategies. After outlining each of these barriers, this chapter then argues that insights from local food movements could provide novel strategies to potentially address each of the barriers above, as they have leveraged normative arguments to motivate individual and collective action. Lessons from food-focused activism, coupled with normatively guided strategies for sharing costs and benefits, has the potential to help communities work towards effectively addressing climate change. (shrink)

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is it, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights and social justice? Pablo Gilabert offers a systematic defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of justice. In Human Dignity and Human Rights (OUP 2019), he advanced an account of human dignity for the context of human rights discourse, which covers (...) the most urgent, basic claims of dignity. This book extends the dignitarian approach to more ambitious claims of maximal dignity of the kind encoded in democratic socialist conceptions of social justice. In particular, this book focuses on the just organization of working practices. It recasts in a dignitarian format the critique of capitalist society as involving exploitation, alienation, and domination of workers, and revamps a neglected but inspiring socialist principle. In its dignitarian interpretation, the Abilities/Needs Principle (‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!’) yields reasonable and feasible requirements on social cooperation geared to empowering each human being to lead a flourishing life. While Human Dignity and Human Rights offered the first systematic philosophical account of human dignity in human rights discourse, Human Dignity and Social Justice presents the first systematic application of the dignitarian framework to the core ideals of democratic socialism. (shrink)

This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice (...) or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. (shrink)

Defenders of the Everettian version of quantum mechanics generally hold that it makes no difference to what we ought to do. This paper will argue against this stance, by considering the use of lotteries to select the recipients of indivisible goods. On orthodox non-Everettian metaphysics this practice faces the objection that only actual and not probable goods matter to distributive justice. However, this objection loses all force within Everettianism. This result should be of interest to both philosophers of physics and (...) to ethicists. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Charles W. Mills and considering the case of reparations to Black Americans, this article defends the “structural turn” in the philosophical reparations scholarship. In the Black American context, the structural turn highlights the structural and institutional operations of a White supremacist political system and a long chronology of state-sponsored injustice, as opposed to enslavement as a standalone historical episode. Here, the question whether distributive justice is more appropriate than reparative justice is particularly pressing, since structural (...) racial inequalities form part of the basis for reparations. Derrick Darby’s pragmatic argument for non-race-specific redistributive policies and Tommie Shelby’s principled defense of distributive justice are both considered, as well as the challenge to the structural turn that comes from Carlton Waterhouse’s argument for reparations for enslavement rather than “legacy of slavery” reparations. (shrink)

Shortened version of an article that first appeared in Philosophical Papers (2017).

This article asks how the costs and benefits of operating a monetary union should be distributed amongst its more and less competitive members, taking as an example the operation of the European Monetary Union (EMU or Eurozone). Drawing on existing domestic and transnational justice debates, I resist both a purely procedural and a purely distributive view. The former assumes treaties against a fair background can make any distribution fair and disregards how individual citizens are likely to fare depending on how (...) a monetary union is organized. The latter requires justice amongst Eurozone co-citizens, neglecting the value of member states’ choices and attitudes towards risk. Instead, I defend a view of the EMU as an association of free self-determining states. I also argue that a variety of factors are relevant to this problem, including the need to protect less competitive states from ‘domination,’ or inappropriate forms of control by their co-members, and to protect citizens from various forms of deprivation even if their own governments are willing to expose them to the relevant risks. (shrink)

The Moral Responsibility Account of Liability to Defensive Harm (MRA) states that an agent becomes liable to defensive harm if, and only if, she engages in a foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. Advocates of the account contend that liability to defensive harm is best understood as an aspect of distributive justice. Individuals who are liable to some harm are not wronged if the harm is imposed on them, and liability to defensive harm thus helps ensure that (...) harm is borne by whoever has least of an objection of justice against being burdened with it—or so advocates of the MRA insist. In this paper, I argue that liability to defensive harm is not grounded in considerations of distributive justice. While it depends on the wider societal context what allocation of a burden is distributively most just, liability to defensive harm is a distinctly localised affair. I propose that liability to defensive harm is best understood as part of the enforcement dimension of our rights to non-interference. Framing liability in this way does not invalidate the MRA. It does, however, render subjective impermissibility accounts of liability particularly promising. (shrink)

Most agree that envy, or at least the malicious kind, should not have any role in the moral justification of distributive arrangements. This paper defends a contrary position. It argues that at...

This article makes the case for a specific variety of what we call collective capital institutions (CCIs), by returning to the idea of Wage-Earner Funds – a 1970’s Swedish policy proposal designed gradually to shift ownership and control over parts of the economy over to democratically controlled institutions. We identify two attractive rationales in favour of such a scheme, and argue that both can fruitfully be transposed to the current worldwide economic situation. The egalitarian rationale is that CCIs could help (...) in the pursuit of equality by giving a wider set of people a stake in collectively owned companies and a right to their profits. The democratic rationale is that CCIs redistribute not only these profits, but also the power over economic decisions made within companies. We then contrast such schemes for collective capital ownership with the similar but much more privatised proposals set out in, for instance, John Rawls’s idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’. We argue that CCIs ultimately are more likely to contribute to the development of the ‘sense of justice’ within society that is needed for a stable just society. We conclude that CCIs deserve a great deal more exploration in academic and political discussions of egalitarian economic systems. (shrink)

This article gives a detailed analysis of Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ and her claim that it is a genuinely Aristotelian contemporary po-litical philosophy. The paper examines how Nussbaum bases her ‘capabilities approach’ on human nature and questions her assertion that both Aristotle’s account of human nature and her own approach are not metaphysical. In order to analyze the normative dimension of Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’, this article focuses on Aristotle’s doctrine of distributive justice and equality. It shows how Nussbaum adopts and modifies (...) this doctrine in an egalitarian way and demonstrates that her reading and appropriation of it is problematic. With reference to contemporary literature on Aristotle’s Politics, the article criticizes how Nussbaum assimilates Aristotle’s political philosophy into modern values and notions, laying out six primary reasons supporting the thesis that Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ cannot be regarded as an Aristotelian one. (shrink)

This paper discusses the philosophical concept of John Rawls on distributive justice and how it can be applied as a possible guide in the Philippine ayuda distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, it discusses how the pandemic affected the Philippine economy and the complaints on the ayuda program regarding the ayuda distribution in the country. Second, it explains Rawlsian distributive justice and Rawls’ ideas, such as the veil of ignorance, liberty, and difference principles. Lastly, it discusses Rawls’ notion of distributive (...) justice as a guide in the ayuda distribution to provide a perspective on the equitable and just distribution of benefits given the limited resources. The main point is that the distribution of financial assistance or ayuda can be guided by Rawls’s notion of distributive justice, which prioritizes the well-being of the least well-off or disadvantaged. (shrink)

Suppose one can fully alleviate either the very large individual health burdens of a first group or instead the significantly lesser burdens of a second group that is at least as numerous. In such cases, the most commonly applied principles for priority setting in health have two characteristics. First, when both groups are equally large, they prioritize alleviating the plight of the more severely burdened. Second, when both groups differ in size, these common principles are unlimited in their aggregation: one (...) very large burden can be outweighed not merely by a large number of middling burdens, but also by a sufficiently large number of very minor burdens. While priority for the significantly more severely burdened when group sizes are equal is uncontroversial, many thinkers have challenged unlimited aggregation. There is, however, little evidence on the public’s views. Here, we examine the responses to priority-setting dilemmas of a representative sample of the UK population (n = 389). We find that an overwhelming majority of respondents’ views do not align with commonly used priority setting principles. A substantial share (forty-four per cent) of respondents do not always prioritize by severity when group sizes are equal. Moreover, among those who do prioritize by severity, most reject unlimited aggregation. A test for the influence of the assumed status quo did not yield a robust effect. Overall, our findings suggest that public support for commonly employed priority-setting principles cannot be assumed, and that unorthodox principles that place limits on the ability of very small burdens to outweigh very large ones may be more popular. (shrink)

Distributive justice is generally important to persons in society. This was widely recognized by early Confucian thinkers, particularly Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, in ancient China. Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi had developed, in varying degrees and with different emphases, their respective conceptions of distributive justice to address the relevant social problems in their times. These conceptions not only are intrinsically valuable political thoughts, but may prove useful in dealing with current or future social issues. Thus in this essay, first I provide (...) a detailed interpretation of each of those thinkers’ conceptions of distributive justice, then I combine some essential elements of those conceptions to form a general and coherent conception, which is called a complex Confucian conception of distributive justice, and finally I evaluate this conception by considering some of its implications and limitations, in theory and in practice. This aims mainly at exploring the meaning and practical bearing of basic Confucian conceptions of distributive justice. (shrink)

A central task of climate justice is to agree upon a just distribution of the right to emit greenhouse gases. According to the equal per capita shares view, the right to emit should be divided equally between every inhabitant of Earth, since to emit is to use up the resource of atmospheric absorptive capacity, and this is a resource to which no one person has any stronger claim than any other. The fact that a significant proportion of the Earth’s ability (...) to absorb and sequester greenhouse gases actually comes not from the atmosphere, but from terrestrial climate sinks that are located within national borders, and that are therefore plausibly subject to legitimate territorial claims, poses a serious challenge to the intuitive egalitarian simplicity of the equal per capita shares view. A defence of this view, then, is tantamount to a defence of the redistribution of terrestrial sink capacity, and therefore must involve either an argument against the legitimacy of territorial claims to terrestrial sink capacity, or an argument for why legitimate territorial claims to terrestrial sink capacity should nevertheless be ignored in favour of an equal per capita distribution of emissions shares. One strategy for doing so involves applying Charles Beitz’s resource redistribution principle to terrestrial sink capacity. Some authors have argued that this strategy will fail due to important differences between the nature of ‘conventional’ natural resources, and the nature of a resource link climate sink capacity. In this paper, I consider five arguments to this effect that seek to establish the legitimacy of territorial claims to terrestrial sink capacity. Respectively, they appeal to attachment, identity, self-determination, improvement and fairness in order to do so. I argue that each one either fails to establish the legitimacy of territorial claims to terrestrial sink capacity, or, where they do plausibly establish legitimacy, they do so in a way that renders them vulnerable to type- objections that suggest territorial claims to terrestrial sink capacity should nevertheless be ignored. I conclude that, if one is willing to adopt the resource redistribution principle, a just distribution of emissions shares need not respect territorial claims to terrestrial sink capacity. (shrink)

In this article, we aim to map out the complexities which characterise debates about the ethics of vaccine distribution, particularly those surrounding the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. In doing so, we distinguish three general principles which might be used to distribute goods and two ambiguities in how one might wish to spell them out. We then argue that we can understand actual debates around the COVID-19 vaccine – including those over prioritising vaccinating the most vulnerable – as reflecting disagreements (...) over these principles. Finally, we shift our attention away from traditional discussions of distributive justice, highlighting the importance of concerns about risk imposition, special duties, and social roles in explaining debates over the COVID-19 vaccine. We conclude that the normative complexity this article highlights deepens the need for decision-making bodies to be sensitive to public input. (shrink)

Social inequality may obstruct the generation of knowledge, as the rich and powerful may bring about social acceptance of skewed views that suit their interests. Epistemic equality in the context of justification is a means of preventing such obstruction. Drawing on social epistemology and theories of equality and distributive justice, we provide an account of epistemic equality. We regard participation in, and influence over a knowledge-generating discourse in an epistemic community as a limited good that needs to be justly distributed (...) among putative members of the community. We argue that rather than trying to operationally formulate an exact criterion for distributing this good, epistemic equality may be realized by insisting on active participation of members of three groups in addition to credited experts: relevant disempowered groups, relevant uncredited experts, and relevant stakeholders. Meeting these conditions fulfills the political, moral, and epistemic aims of epistemic equality. (shrink)

The standard version of sufficientarianism maintains that providing people with enough, or as close to enough as is possible, is lexically prior to other distributive goals. This article argues that this is excessive – more than distributive justice allows – in four distinct ways. These concern the magnitude of advantage, the number of beneficiaries, responsibility and desert, and above-threshold distribution. Sufficientarians can respond by accepting that providing enough unconditionally is more than distributive justice allows, instead balancing sufficiency against other considerations.

In this thesis, I argue that Van Parijs’ theory of distributive justice, which grounds his basic income offer, is blind to racial inequality, and therefore to racial injustice. I revise his theory to make it insusceptible to charges of blindness to racial injustice as well as suitable for grounding a basic income that can help eliminate racial inequality. According to Van Parijs’ theory, people’s freedom should not only incorporate the absence of hindrance in doing what they might want to do. (...) It should also include their real access to the opportunities to do what people might want to do, hence he defines freedom as critically including a principle of the leximinning of real freedom, or more precisely, of opportunities. On the principle of leximinning opportunities, one society is more just than an alternative if the least well-off people in that society are better off in terms of opportunities than the least well-off people in the alternative, and if both groups are equally well off the groups above them are compared, and so on until a better off comparable group is found. I argue that on this account, a leximin chooser would be unable to consider a racially equal society as more just than a racially unequal society. That is, Van Parijs’ theory is blind to racial injustice. To deal with this, I argue for racially sensitive versions of leximin and real freedom and suggest that the theory that emerges will ground a basic income offer that can help eliminate or at least reduce racial injustice. (shrink)

The article argues that persons should be conceived as self-owners and entitled to acquire private property within justifiable property conventions because they should be able to live as project pursuers. This is the ‘project pursuit argument’. It leads to a conception of self-ownership that is stringent, but weaker than standard libertarian notions of self-ownership, and to an understanding of private property as a convention that has to meet a sufficientarian threshold in order to be justifiable.

Much of the climate justice discussion revolves around how the remaining carbon budget should be globally allocated. Some authors defend the unjust enrichment interpretation of the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). According to this principle, those states unjustly enriched from historical emissions should pay. I argue that if the BPP is to be constructed along the lines of the unjust enrichment doctrine, countervailing reasons that might be able to block the existence of a duty of restitution should be assessed. One might (...) think that the duty to provide restitution no longer has moral weight if many benefits were already consumed, if the particular benefits obtained from historical emissions cannot be transferred from one country to another, or if present members of developed countries framed their life plans based upon the expectation of continued possession of those benefits. I show that none of these reasons negate the duty to provide restitution. (shrink)

In attempts to compare different distributions with regards to need, so-called “measures of need-based distributive justice” have emerged in recent years. Each of the proposed measures relies on a single dimension of need that is taken into account. This is shown to be problematic since humans experience different kinds of need that appear to be incommensurable. A strategy to deal with this problem is introduced by using multidimensional measures.

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that (...) participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (shrink)

I investigate which inequalities are permissible on the supposition that an ideal society would be modelled on an ideal family. One idea salient in the African and East Asian philosophical traditions is that the right sort of socio-political interaction would be similar to the intuitive ways that family members ought to relate to each other. I answer the question of what principles implicit in healthy familial relationships entail for economic and ecological inequalities, and contend that the implications are plausible.

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 202-238, Spring 2022.

"Providing a thorough examination of distributive justice, Distributive Justice and Taxation presents and discusses different theories of what constitutes a just society, and how goods should be distributed in such a society. The distribution of goods in society has direct and serious consequences on the lives of the people. There are therefore important questions to be asked regarding the justice of that distribution: Is it just that some people inherit large fortunes while others inherit nothing? Do rich people have additional (...) access to political power because of their wealth? If so, is that just? And should the ambition for economic policies be to combat poverty, or to reduce inequality? This book explores these questions and a number of others through the analysis of related theories, spanning from strong egalitarian theories on the left to right-wing libertarianism. The chapters also explicitly examine the case of taxation - one of the most important and controversial measures of distribution of goods in society. Placing emphasis on the case of Norway and using data from both the UK and USA as a point of comparison, the work details and explores the key features of the tax system. It concludes by presenting and evaluating arguments for and against taxes such as income tax, wealth tax, and inheritance tax. This book is essential reading for those interested in distributive justice, as well as students and scholars of philosophy, law, political science and economics. J2rgen Pedersen is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Department of Business Administration, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway"--. (shrink)

This volume of seminal and recent articles by philosophers in the distributive justice debate covers a range of representative positions, including libertarian, egalitarian, desert and welfare theories. The introduction and articles are designed to allow students and professionals to see some of the most influential pieces that have shaped the field, as well as some key critics of these positions. The articles intersect in such a way as to develop an appreciation of the types of theories and the central issues (...) addressed by theories of distributive justice. (shrink)

When is life-sustaining treatment not in the best interests of a minimally conscious child? This is an extremely difficult question that incites seemingly intractable debate. And yet, it is the question courts in England and Wales have set out to answer in disputes about appropriate medical treatment for children.

Historical entitlement theories of property rights, which claim that individuals can acquire moral property rights over natural resources by appropriating them, traditionally face a strong objection: it is widely implausible that a single individual can unilaterally impose duties on everyone around him and yet, apparently, this is exactly what such theories allow. In this essay, I argue that the same problem appears in all other theories of distributive justice and if this problem was a reason to reject historical entitlement theories, (...) it would also be a reason to reject all rival theories. Which means that as long, as one is committed to any theory of distributive justice at all, she, at the risk of inconsistency, cannot rely on the aforementioned objection to criticize historical entitlement theories. (shrink)

Substantially increased wealth inequality across the developed world has prompted many philosophers, economists and legal theorists to support comprehensive taxes on all forms of wealth. Proposals include levying taxes on the basis of total wealth, or alternatively the change in the value of capital holdings measured from year-to-year. This contrasts with most existing policies that tax capital assets at the point they are transferred from one beneficiary to another through sale or gifts. Are these tax reforms likely to meet their (...) aims of greater economic and political equality? We argue that these policies are likely to fail because, following neoclassical economic theory, they are based on a conception of capital as possessing given values in what amounts to a static equilibrium. This mischaracterizes the dynamic and subjective character of market economies and the contested value of real instantiations of capital goods. This makes them very difficult, often impossible, to value apart from at the point of voluntary transfer or profit realization. This means most taxes levied on a mark-to-market basis will be arbitrary and unfair. We propose alternative policies based on an income realization approach to taxation that are more likely to curb excessive wealth holdings. This includes introducing international treaties that prohibit preferential tax treatment for individual companies and specific sectors, and broadening the income tax base to include the imputed rent of personal housing wealth. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship between the supersession thesis and the rights of future people. In particular, I show that changes in circumstances might supersede future people’s rights. I argue that appropriating resources that belong to future people does not necessarily result in a duty to return the resources in full. I explore how these findings are relevant for climate change justice. Assuming future generations of developing countries originally had a right to use a certain amount of the (...) carbon budget, changing circumstances could result in rights-supersession. Consequently, members of future generations of industrialized countries may be allowed to use part of the share of the carbon budget belonging to developing countries. (shrink)

Policing in many parts of the world—the United States in particular—has embraced an archetypal model: a conception of the police based on the tenets of individuated archetypes, such as the heroic police “warrior” or “guardian.” Such policing has in part motivated moves to (1) a reallocative model: reallocating societal resources such that the police are no longer needed in society (defunding and abolishing) because reform strategies cannot fix the way societal problems become manifest in (archetypal) policing; and (2) an algorithmic (...) model: subsuming policing into technocratic judgements encoded in algorithms through strategies such as predictive policing (mitigating archetypal bias). This paper begins by considering the normative basis of the relationship between political community and policing. It then examines the justification of reallocative and algorithmic models in light of the relationship between political community and police. Given commitments to the depth and distribution of security—and proscriptions against dehumanizing strategies—the paper concludes that a nonideal-theory priority rule promoting respect for personhood (manifest in community and dignity-promoting policing strategies) is a necessary condition for the justification of the above models. (shrink)

I explore the idea that the state should love its citizens. It should not be indifferent towards them. Nor should it merely respect them. It should love them. We begin by looking at the bases of this idea. First, it can be grounded by a concern with state subordination. The state has enormous power over its citizens. This threatens them with subordination. Love ameliorates this threat. Second, it can be grounded by the state's lack of moral status. We all have (...) reason to love everyone. But we beings with moral status have an excuse for not loving everyone: we have our own lives to lead. The state has no such excuse. So, the state should love everyone. We then explore the nature of the loving state. I argue that the loving state is a liberal state. It won't interfere in its citizens' personal spheres. It is a democratic state. It will adopt its citizens' ends as its own. It is a welfare state. It will be devoted to its citizens' well-being. And it is an egalitarian state. It will treat all its citizens equally. This constitutes a powerful third argument, an abductive argument, for the ideal of the loving state. (shrink)

In Confucius, Rawls and the Sense of Justice, in addition to making an interesting comparison between Rawls’ and Confucius’ sense of justice, Erin M. Cline also tried to seek elements of distributive justice, or at least concern for distributive matters, in the Analects. I shall, in this essay, try to pursue the subject even further, by examining Confucianism’s attitude towards the contemporary distributive ideals in the analytical philosophy literature—egalitarianism, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. This will be done by first closely examining Cline’s (...) interpretation of certain passages of the Analects, showing that there might be other possible interpretations of these passages. From these parts of the Analects, I will attempt to demonstrate that Confucius has not given us sufficient normative discussion of the economic matters of society for our purpose. I will therefore turn to Mencius and Xunzi for better understanding of distributive justice in Confucianism, and then argue against Joseph Chan’s thesis that Confucian distributive justice can be characterized as simply sufficientarianism, providing evidence that Confucianism may also care about equality and priority in general. (shrink)

This article begins by distinguishing between two approaches to egalitarian trade justice – the explicative approach and the applicative approach – and notes that the former has been used to defend conclusions that are less strongly egalitarian than those defended by advocates of the latter. The article then engages with the primary explicative account of trade egalitarianism – that offered by Aaron James – and argues that its egalitarian conclusions are unduly minimalistic. The aim of the article is not to (...) criticize the explicative approach, but rather to show that the arguments and commitments of its best-known defender – James – either fail to rule out, or in fact positively support, more robustly egalitarian conclusions. (shrink)

In any complex human society, distinct persons may have strikingly different standards of living. Those who lead the most undesirable, poorest lives in society can be called the worst off. Given that we almost always do not want to be, but some have to be, the worst off, we may want to find a right way to treat the worst off. In the West, John Rawls has proposed a conception of justice as fairness, and in the East, Confucius and Mencius (...) have developed conceptions of ren and yi partly in order to deal with social injustice in the distribution of benefits and the problem of the worst off. Their conceptions and proposed solutions provide valuable ideas, which through comparison may be better assessed and then employed, or even combined, to address the problem. In this essay, I try to examine and compare their conceptions of distributive justice and the worst off, and then expound their suggested solutions to the problem and propose a provisional answer on the basis of those ideas. (shrink)

Growing economic inequality, workforce precarity, the perceived meaninglessness of many jobs, and the prospect of widespread technological unemployment have led to an unprecedented level of critical scrutiny of the institution of work. Some scholars go so far as to propose that we should take seriously, or even embrace, a “post-work” future. This volume aims to provide the first critical overview of the scholarly arguments about the design and desirability of such a “post-work” world. Topics addressed in its chapters include the (...) historical origins of the work ethic; work’s relation to freedom, leisure, and self-realization; alternative visions of a post-work world; the intersection of post-work thinking with economic justice; and post-work’s relevance to environmental sustainability, care work, and democratic change. (shrink)

Legitimate expectations should be considered in the transition to a low-carbon society. After explaining under what conditions and circumstances expectations are legitimate, this paper shows that those expectations whose frustration undermines the ability to plan, infringes basic moral rights, or is extremely costly for its bearer might justify a deviation in the baseline of justice in favour of the expectation holder. People should be notified about the likely frustration of their expectations so that they can avoid the frustration of their (...) expectations, adapt their life plans and minimise costs. Since the frustration of legitimate expectations seems unavoidable in the transformation to a low-carbon society, priority should be given to the protection of the expectations of those who cannot be materially compensated. Still, if two groups are eligible for material compensation, we should give priority to protecting the expectation of those who cannot continue with the same life plan as before if their expectations are frustrated. (shrink)

America’s COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated and disparately harmed minority communities. How can the allocation of scarce treatments for COVID-19 and similar public health threats fairly and legally respond to these racial disparities? Some have proposed that members of racial groups who have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic should receive priority for scarce treatments. Others have worried that this prioritization misidentifies racial disparities as reflecting biological differences rather than structural racism, or that it will generate mistrust among groups who (...) have previously been harmed by medical research. Still others complain that such prioritization would be fundamentally unjust. I argue that, to pass muster under current law, policymaking in this area must recognize a crucial distinction: prioritizing minority communities, such as hard-hit neighborhoods, without regard to individual race is typically legal, but prioritizing individuals on the basis of their racial identity faces is likely not. I also explain how prioritization on the basis of Native American status is allowable and legally distinct from prioritization on the basis of individual race. -/- In Part II, I provide a brief overview of current and proposed COVID-19 treatments and identify documented or likely scarcities and disparities in access. In Part III, I argue that randomly allocating scarce medical interventions, as some propose, will not effectively address disparities: it both permits unnecessary deaths and concentrates those deaths among people who are more exposed to infection. In Part IV, I explain why using individual-level racial classifications in allocation is precluded by current Supreme Court precedent. Addressing disparities will require focusing on factors other than race, or potentially considering race at an aggregate rather than individual level. I also argue that policies prioritizing members of Native American tribes can succeed legally even where policies based on race would not. In Part V, I examine two complementary strategies to narrow racial disparities. One would prioritize individuals who live in disadvantaged geographic areas or work in hard-hit occupations, potentially alongside race-sensitive aggregate metrics like neighborhood segregation. These approaches, like the policies school districts adopted after the Supreme Court rejected individualized racial classifications in education, would narrow disparities without classifying individuals by race. The other strategy would address the starkly disparate racial impact of deaths early in life by limiting the use of age-based exclusions from vaccine or treatment access that explicitly deprioritize the prevention of early deaths and so disparately exclude minorities, and by considering policies that prioritize the prevention of early deaths. (shrink)

In this landmark volume, Samuel Hollander presents a fresh and compelling history of moral philosophy from Locke to John Stuart Mill, showing that a ‘moral sense’ can actually be considered compatible with utilitarianism. The book also explores the link between utilitarianism and distributive justice. Hollander engages in close textual exegesis of the works relating to individual authors, while never losing sight of the intellectual relationships between them. Tying together the greatest of the British moral philosophers, this volume reveals an unexpected (...) unity of eighteenth and nineteenth century ethical doctrine at both the individual and social level. Essential reading for advanced students and researchers of the history of economic thought, political economy, history of ethics, history of political thought and intellectual history. -/- Samuel Hollander is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Canada, and an Officer in the Order of Canada. (shrink)