This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism (...) cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized. (shrink)

According to the trilemma claim, we cannot have all three of equality, Pareto, and freedom of occupational choice. In response to the trilemma, John Rawls famously sacrificed equality by introducing incentives. In contrast, GA Cohen and others argued that we can, in fact, have all three provided that individuals are properly motivated by an egalitarian ethos. The incentives debate, then, concerns the plausibility of the ethos solution versus the plausibility of the incentives solution. Considerable ink has been spilled on both (...) sides of the debate. Yet, in this essay, I argue that we cannot have this debate until we clarify the terms. Once we clarify the terms, however, we might discover that there is no debate to be had. This is because, depending on how equality, Pareto, and freedom of occupational choice are interpreted, there might not be a trilemma in the first place. Specifically, I use a small but crucial distinction in how equality, the egalitarian ethos, and Pareto are assessed – what I call the internal/external distinction – to disentangle the various paths each solution – the ethos or incentives – could take. I conclude that both solutions have gained illicit plausibility by virtue of not keeping the distinction straight. (shrink)

Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper, I show that reciprocal libertarianism is a coherent and appealing view. I discuss how reciprocal libertarians can handle conflicts between self-ownership and reciprocity, and I show that reciprocal libertarianism can be realised in a framework of individual ownership of external resources or in a socialist scheme of common ownership (libertarian socialism). I also compare reciprocal libertarianism with left-libertarian (...) approaches: I argue that a reciprocity-sensitive version of left-libertarianism (reciprocal left-libertarianism) is coherent and morally superior to traditional left-libertarianism, on grounds of incorporating a distinctively solidaristic and recognition-oriented aspect of equality. The policy implications of reciprocal libertarianism will differ depending on which rights people can have over external resources, but all reciprocal libertarian views acknowledge the existence of social rights that people have as co-operators. (shrink)

Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundamental issues of justice are settled. The aim is to accommodate within public reason the due concern for the disabled (...) while upholding political liberalism. To achieve this aim, a revision of the basic ideas of persons and society is proposed. The idea of persons should be regarded as more fundamental than that of social cooperation, and persons should be defined in terms of minimal moral powers. (shrink)

This paper considers the view that the basis of equality is the range property of being a moral person. This view, suggested by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (1971), is commonly dismissed in the literature. By defending the view against the criticism levelled against it, I aim to show that this dismissal has been too quick. The critics have generally failed to fully appreciate the fact that Rawls's account is restricted to the domain of distributive justice. On (...) Rawls's view distributive justice is a matter of the fair terms of cooperation among the participants of a system of social cooperation. I argue that this understanding of distributive justice can provide a compelling rationale for considering moral personality as the basis of equality for this domain of morality. That moral persons are indeed equal is further supported by an intuitive argument concerning the irrelevance of morally arbitrary factors, giving us reasons to believe that varying capacities among moral persons does not result in an unequal moral status. The dismissal of Rawls's account of equality has thus been premature, and it remains an important view to consider. (shrink)