Does the kind of socialist ideal articulated by G. A. Cohen in Why Not Socialism? add anything substantial to the Rawlsian conception of justice? Is it an ideal that Rawlsians should want to take on board, or is it ultimately foreign to their outlook? I defend a mixed answer to these questions. On the one hand, we shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which Rawls's theory already addresses the concerns that motivate Cohen’s appeal to the socialist ideal. Within the bounds of (...) a society living up to Rawls’s two principles of justice, I maintain, there would be little room left for an ideal of social relations to do any independent work. On the other hand, Cohen’s ideal may still have an important role to play within Rawlsian theory – not within the confines of a given society but on the international stage, beyond the liberal state as we know it. This asymmetry between the domestic and the international case stems from the fact that Rawls's principles of justice apply in full strength only at the domestic l... (shrink)

Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to satisfy what this paper calls the moral tyranny constraint. According to this constraint, any acceptable theory of justice must preclude the possibility of an agent unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably leaving others with less advantage under conditions of full compliance with the theory. This paper (...) argues that claim forfeiture is built into luck egalitarianism specifically to preclude such moral tyranny. However, it contends that the dominant interpretation of luck egalitarianism fails to fully satisfy the moral tyranny constraint. It offers an alternative interpretation that both eliminates the possibility of moral tyranny and rescues the position from two other prominent objections that have been directed against luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the philosophy of explanation can help inform core debates in value theory. Specifically, it argues that there is a consistent parallelism between the properties of explanation and the properties of justification such that one can reasonably infer that any property of explanation has a counterpart property of justification. Thus, by appealing to facts about the nature of explanation, one can derive various conclusions about the justifications offered by normative theorists. The paper illustrates this point by considering (...) a debate within political philosophy over whether inequality requires justification in a way that equality does not. Egalitarians typically presume an affirmative answer to this question. However, libertarian critics note that this justificatory asymmetry cannot be simply assumed without argument. This paper argues that, by appealing to the explanation-justification parallelism, one can resolve this debate in favor of the egalitarians, as there are two properties of explanation, the justificatory analogs of which vindicate the egalitarian presumption. (shrink)