A survey of recent work on egalitarianism.

The two leading traditions of theorizing about democratic legitimacy are liberalism and deliberative democracy. Liberals typically claim that legitimacy consists in the consent of the governed, while deliberative democrats typically claim that legitimacy consists in the soundness of political procedures. Despite this difference, both traditions see the need for legitimacy as arising from the coercive enforcement of law and regard legitimacy as necessary for law to have normative authority. While I endorse the broad aims of these two traditions, I believe (...) they both misunderstand the nature of legitimacy. In this essay I argue that the legitimacy of a law is neither necessary nor sufficient for its normative authority, and I argue further that the need for legitimacy in law arises regardless of whether the law is coercively enforced. I thus articulate a new understanding of the legitimacy and authority of law. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to undermine G.A. Cohen ’s polemical use of a metaethical claim he makes in his article, ‘ Facts and Principles’, by arguing that that use requires an unsustainable equivocation between epistemic and logical grounding. I begin by distinguishing three theses that Cohen has offered during the course of his critique of Rawls and contractualism more generally, the foundationalism about grounding thesis, the justice as non-regulative thesis, and the justice as all-encompassing thesis, and briefly argue that (...) they are analytically independent of each other. I then offer an outline of the foundationalism about grounding thesis, characterising it, as Cohen does, as a demand of logic. That thesis claims that whenever a normative principle is dependent on a fact, it is so dependent in virtue of some other principle. I then argue that although this is true as a matter of logic, it, as Cohen admits, cannot be true of actual justifications, since logic cannot tell us anything about the truth as opposed to the validity of arguments. Facts about a justification cannot then be decisive for whether or not a given argument violates the foundationalism about grounding thesis. As long as, independently of actual justifications, theorists can point to plausible logically grounding principles, as I argue contractualists can, Cohen ’s thesis lacks critical bite. (shrink)

The Rawlsian texts appear not to be consistent with regard to the status of the right of freedom of association. Interestingly, Rawls's early work omits mention of freedom of association as among the basic liberties, but in his later work he explicitly includes freedom of association as among the basic liberties. However, freedom of association would appear to have an economic component as well (e.g., the right to form a firm). If one turns to such “private ordering” (e.g., contract, partnership, (...) and corporate law), we find a similar ambiguity in the Rawlsian texts, as well as sharp divisions in the contemporary literature on Rawlsianism. This ambiguity has engendered widespread confusion over the scope of the two principles of justice—leading to the contemporary dispute over the breadth of what Rawls calls the “basic structure” and the question of whether the principles of justice are properly understood to govern private ordering. There is significant disagreement over the breadth of Rawls's basic structure—one aspect is whether the principles of justice apply to the private law. In a controversial passage in Political Liberalism Rawls addresses this question. This passage has, however, led commentators to reach divergent conclusions. We argue that this disagreement is explained by an instructive confusion in the passage over the distinction between what we characterize as “pre-institutional” and “post-institutional” freedom (vis-á-vis contract and property). The passage, we argue, illicitly shifts from invoking the post-institutional sense of “freedom” to the pre-institutional sense, thereby causing significant though understandable disagreement. Rawls's lapse into the pre-institutional conception of “freedom” provides interpretive grounds for the narrow understanding of the basic structure. If Rawls, however, had invoked the sense of “freedom” to which he is entitled at this stage of his theory—the post-institutional conception—such disagreement need not have arisen. (shrink)

The Queen's College, Oxford, UK In his article `Facts and Principles', G.A. Cohen attempts to refute constructivist approaches to justification by showing that, contrary to what their proponents claim, fundamental normative principles are fact- in sensitive. We argue that Cohen's `fact-insensitivity thesis' does not provide a successful refutation of constructivism because it pertains to an area of meta-ethics which differs from the one tackled by constructivists. While Cohen's thesis concerns the logical structure of normative principles, constructivists ask how normative principles (...) should be justified . In particular, their claim that justified fundamental normative principles are fact-sensitive follows from a commitment to agnosticism about the existence of objective moral facts. We therefore conclude that, in order to refute constructivism, Cohen would have to address questions of justification, and take a stand on those long-standing meta-ethical debates about the ontological status of moral notions (for example, realism versus anti-realism) with respect to which he himself wants to remain agnostic. Key Words: John Rawls • normative justification • realism versus anti-realism • methodological versus substantive principles. (shrink)

Critical response to John Rawls's The Law of Peopleshas been surprisingly harsh) Most of the complaints centre on Rawls's claim that there are no obligations of distributive justice among nations. Many of Rawls's critics evidently had been hoping for a global application of the difference principle, so that wealthier nations would be bound to assign lexical priority to the development of the poorest nations, or perhaps the primary goods endowment of the poorest citizens of any nation. Their subsequent disappointment reveals (...) that, while the reception of Rawls's political philosophy has been very broad, it has not been especially deep. Rawls has very good reason for denying that there are obligations of distributive justice in an international context. (shrink)

One of the ways by which Gerald Postema’s Bentham and the Common Law Tradition revolutionized the study of Bentham’s jurisprudence was by challenging the idea, made popular by Hart (both in his jurisprudential work and his interpretation of Bentham), that the study of law in general is normatively neutral. Against this view, Postema argued that one must understand Bentham’s views on law and jurisprudence in relation to his utilitarianism. At the time of publishing the book, Bentham went very much against (...) the grain, but this view has since gained considerable support. In my paper I seek to refine it. As I see it, Bentham did not think of utilitarianism as a moral theory. Rather, he is best understood as advancing utilitarianism as a public philosophy—an end for the legislator, and only indirectly applicable for individuals in their everyday lives. This makes Bentham’s utilitarianism tied to his legal philosophy in an even deeper sense than Postema suggested. Law is not there to imitate and help enforce an already existing utilitarian morality that tells people (independently of the law) what they should do. Instead, we should think of law as a mechanism (or a technology) for generating normative guidelines (where those do not otherwise exist). The effect of this is to reverse the familiar way of understanding the relationship between law and morality. (shrink)

The consideration of the problem of healthcare allocation as a special case of distributive justice is especially alluring when we only consider consequentialist theories. I articulate here an alternative Rawlsian non-consequentialist theory which prioritizes the fairness of healthcare allocation procedures rather than directly setting distributive parameters. The theory in question stems from Rawlsian commitments that, it is argued, have a better Rawlsian pedigree than those considered as such by Tännsjö. The alternative framework is worthy of consideration on its own merits, (...) but it also casts light on two related difficulties with Tännsjö’s approach: (i) the limits of his supposedly ecumenical methodology, which is revealed to be dialectically suspect and (ii) issues with the type of abstraction and idealization from actual judgements and preferences which the approach requires. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out to defend the claim that a central principle in democratic theory, the all-subjected principle, applies not only when one is subject to a rule by a state but also when one is subject to a rule by a ‘non-state’ unit. I argue that self-government is the value underlying the all-subjected principle that explains why a subjected individual should be included because she is subjected. Given this, it is unfounded to limit the principle to the (...) state, as subjection which threatens self-government occurs in non-state units such as corporations and families. This means that following the all-subjected principle surprisingly implies that we ought to have family and workplace democracy. (shrink)

Universal basic income is increasingly proposed as a simple answer to the problem of domination at work—one policy whose knock-on effects will transform the balance of power between workers and employers. I argue against such ‘UBI-first’ approaches. Compared to UBI proposals for other purposes, a UBI sufficient or near-sufficient for minimising domination at work would be especially demanding in two ways. First, the level of the grant would be more demanding compared to UBIs suitable for other purposes, in order for (...) workers to be able to credibly threaten to leave their jobs. Secondly, the maintenance of the grant must also meet strict criteria. The demanding level of the grant must be effectively secured against reduction, allowing workers to plan on its long-term acceptability; and in order to avoid increased state domination it must assume the status of an entitlement rather than a gift that may be withdrawn, through stabilisation against political change or some other means. These difficulties render UBI-first approaches doubtful at best, and an unhelpful distraction from other, more fruitful strategies at worst. (shrink)

In the liberal egalitarian literature, the concept of talent is inflected according to its use in broader arguments surrounding the nature of justice. In particular, sometimes talent is understood as a desirable inborn property, while at other times it is understood as a matter of inhabiting a favorable social position. Rawls’s arguments in A Theory of Justice provide useful expressions of these two very different conceptions of talent and their relationship to justice, and much of this paper involves an exploration (...) of those arguments. The former sense of talent informs Rawls’s fair equality of opportunity principle: those with equivalent levels of talent and effort are to face similar prospects. According to the latter, what is significant about talent is not its innate origins, but rather its enabling the possession of desirable goods. This second sense of talent is implicit in Rawls’s difference principle: though it is arbitrary that the talented have the ability to command high wages, it is nonetheless fair to keep those wages because the worst off benefit most from that arrangement. In this paper I explore how the two conceptions of talent operate in these influential arguments, with the broader aims of clarifying the nature of talent and its relevance to social justice. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that criminalization creates a prudential reason to refrain from the criminalized conduct in order to avoid punishment, and prudence is the wrong reason to refrain from wrongdoing. According to Michael S. Moore, these facts should lead us to conclude that the criminalization of wrongful conduct corrupts motives by making some who would otherwise have refrained from wrongdoing for the right reason, refrain from wrongdoing only out of prudence. This paper argues that and provide no reason to (...) believe that criminalization corrupts motives, but should instead lead us to conclude that the criminalization of wrongful conduct obscures motives by making it harder to identify those who refrain from wrongdoing for the right reason. The paper then goes on to argue that the badness of obscuring motives is a pro tanto reason against criminalizing wrongdoing. (shrink)

Several Dutch politicians have recently argued that medical voluntary euthanasia laws should be extended to include healthy elderly citizens who suffer from non-medical ‘existential suffering’. In response, some seek to show that cases of medical euthanasia are morally permissible in ways that completed life euthanasia cases are not. I provide a different, societal perspective. I argue against assessing the permissibility of individual euthanasia cases in separation of their societal context and history. An appropriate justification of euthanasia needs to be embedded (...) in a wider solidaristic response to the causes of suffering. By classifying some suffering as ‘medical’ and some as ‘non-medical’, most societies currently respond to medical conditions in importantly different ways than they do to non-medical suffering. In medical cases, countries like the Netherlands have a health care, health research and public health system to systematically assign responsibilities to address causes of medical suffering. We lack such a system for non-medical suffering among elderly citizens, which makes completed life euthanasia importantly different from euthanasia in medical cases. Because of this moral ‘responsibility gap’, focusing on the permissibility of completed life euthanasia in separation of wider societal duties to attend to possible causes is societally inappropriate. To spell out this objection in more philosophical terms, I introduce the concept of acts that are morally permissible but contextually problematic. (shrink)

A growing proportion of clinical research funded by pharmaceutical companies, high-income country research agencies, and not-for-profit funders is conducted in low- and middle-income settings. Disparities in wealth and access to healthcare between the populations where new interventions are often tested and those where many of them are ultimately marketed raise concerns about exploitation. This chapter examines several ethical requirements frequently advanced as mechanisms for protecting research subjects in underserved communities from exploitation and evaluates the effectiveness of those mechanisms as responses (...) to exploitation worries. It goes on to highlight where the conceptual frameworks relied upon by research ethicists must be improved if we are to fully understand the nature of the moral claims and obligations that arise in research conducted in underserved communities. (shrink)

Many distributive egalitarians do not endorse strict equality of goods. Rather, they treat an equal division as having a special status such that departures from equality must be justified. They claim, then, that an equal division is “presumptively” just. Though the idea that equality is presumptively just and that departures from it may be just has intuitive appeal, making a case for this idea proves difficult. I argue, first, that extant “presumption arguments” are unsound. Second, I distill two general philosophical (...) morals: luck egalitarians have not adequately defended the presumption of equality and they face serious obstacles in doing so; Rawls has defended it, but only indirectly via the contract apparatus. This approach narrows the presumption’s appeal. Third, I consider and reject two alternative ways of understanding the presumption of equality that might avoid the problems revealed by my examination of extant views. The first appeals to the idea of value pluralism. The second treats the presumption as a view about the burden of proof. I conclude, ultimately, that it is misleading to think of distributive egalitarianism as typically having the form of a presumption argument. (shrink)

Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote social change. We argue, however, that an adequate theory of institutions (...) should not be ‘moralized’ in that they should not be defined in terms of the values they are supposed to promote. (shrink)

One common justification for the pursuit of profit by business firms within a market economy is that profit is not an end in itself but a means to more efficiently produce and allocate resources. Profit, in short, is a mechanism that serves the market’s purpose of producing Pareto superior outcomes for society. This discussion examines whether such a justification, if correct, requires business managers to remain attentive to how their firm’s operation impacts the market’s purpose. In particular, it is argued (...) that the value of efficiency, despite views to the contrary, cannot be fully separated from the planning and intentions of business managers as long as those managers direct their firms in an ethically responsible fashion. This position is inspired by, and serves as a supportive clarification of Joseph Heath’s so-called “market failures approach” to business ethics. (shrink)

Richard Arneson argues that Fair Equality of Opportunity should be rejected, since it is not only too weak and too strong, but also problematically meritocratic. The paper aims to defend FEO, and argues that it is not too weak, since, pace Arneson, it does apply to the problem of stunted ambition. The argument from meritocracy is shown to be based on a conflation of different senses of meritocracy. Finally, it is shown that FEO, correctly interpreted, gives intuitive answers to the (...) examples put forward to bolster the too strong charge. It is concluded that Arneson’s refutation of FEO fails. (shrink)

Review of: Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions and Luck.

Die Idee, dass vor allem monetäre Anreize das Verhalten von Wirtschaftsakteuren in gewünschte Richtungen lenken und sogar dabei helfen können, durch Leistungssteigerung zusätzliche Wohlfahrtseffekte zu generieren, spielt in der politischen Ökonomie seit ihren Anfängen eine zentrale Rolle. Es spricht sogar einiges dafür, dass dieser Gedanke das verbindende Glied der Ökonomik als Gesellschaftstheorie im Gegensatz zu anderen gesellschaftstheoretischen Entwürfen ausmacht. Dennoch halte ich dieses Anreizargument aus normativer Perspektive für unterentwickelt, wie ich in Auseinandersetzung mit der Ökonomischen Ethik bzw. Ordnungsethik nach Karl (...) Homann und der Integrativen Wirtschaftsethik zeigen möchte. Weder gelingt es der Ordnungsethik nach Karl Homann, die Bedeutung von Anreizstrukturen hinreichend zu begründen, obwohl sie in Ansätzen wichtige Argumente formuliert. Noch gelingt es der Integrativen Wirtschaftsethik, die zentrale Rolle von Anreizstrukturen für die normative Theoriebildung überzeugend zurückzuweisen. Mir geht es nicht darum, den einen oder anderen wirtschaftsethischen Ansatz grundsätzlich zurückzuweisen, sondern vielmehr, auf Lücken in der Argumentation und sich daraus ergebende Forschungsfragen hinzuweisen. Vor diesem Hintergrund könnte es helfen, einen verwandten Diskurs aus der gegenwärtigen Gerechtigkeitstheorie in die Überlegungen mit einzubeziehen. Denn die grundlegende Idee der ökonomischen Gesellschaftstheorie einer Wohlfahrtssteigerung durch die gezielte Manipulation von Anreizstrukturen hat auch in der gegenwärtigen Gerechtigkeitstheorie ihre Wirkung entfaltet. In seiner Theorie der Gerechtigkeit hat John Rawls argumentiert, dass selbst Egalitaristen bestimmte Einkommensunterschiede zulassen müssen, wenn dadurch für Leistungsträgerinnen solche Anreize gesetzt werden, die gleichzeitig auch den Schlechtestgestellten zum Vorteil gereichen. Diese Argumentation ist von Gerald Cohen einer harschen Kritik ausgesetzt worden. Cohen behauptet, dass Rawls mit diesem Anreizargument seinen eigenen Egalitarismus unterläuft. Ich glaube, dass diese philosophische Diskussion des Anreizargumentes in der Gerechtigkeitstheorie für wirtschaftsethische Überlegungen relevant ist, obwohl sie innerhalb eines idealtheoretischen und egalitaristischen Bezugsrahmens geführt wird. Für diese Relevanz werde ich in vier Abschnitten argumentieren. In einem ersten Teil werde ich die Positionen der Ökonomischen Ethik von Karl Homann und der Integrativen Wirtschaftsethik von Peter Ulrich zur Rolle von Anreizen einführen und darlegen, warum ich beide Ansätze für normativ unterbestimmt halte. In einem zweiten Teil werde ich kurz die Argumentation von John Rawls und ausführlicher die Kritik von Gerald Cohen an dieser Position vorstellen. In einem dritten Teil werde ich einige Einwände gegen Cohen formulieren und die Notwendigkeit einer nichtidealen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit betonen. In einem vierten und abschließenden Teil werde ich vorschlagen, einen Teil der Wirtschaftsethik als nichtideale Gerechtigkeitstheorie zu verstehen und aus dieser Perspektive nur kurz andeuten, welche systematische Rolle dem Anreizargument zukommt. (shrink)

The feasibility constraint on the concept of justice roughly states that a necessary condition for something to qualify as a conception of justice is that it is possible to achieve and maintain given the conditions of the human world. In this paper, I propose three alternative interpretations of this constraint that could be derived from different understandings of the Kantian formula ‘ought implies can’: the ability constraint, the motivational constraint and the institutional constraint. I argue that the three constraints constitute (...) a sequence in the sense that accepting the motivational constraint presupposes that we accept the ability constraint, and to accept the institutional constraint presupposes that we accept both previous constraints. Adding the possibility of rejecting all three constraints, we get four distinct metatheoretical positions that theorists could take vis-à-vis the feasibility constraint on justice. (shrink)

Arguments from stability for liberal nationalism rely on considerations about conditions for the feasibility or stability of liberal political ideals and factual claims about the circumstances under which these conditions are fulfilled in order to argue for nationalist conclusions. Such reliance on factual claims has been criticised by among others G. A. Cohen in other contexts as ideological reifications of social reality. In order to assess whether arguments from stability within liberal nationalism, especially as formulated by David Miller, are vulnerable (...) to a comparable critique, the rationale for their reliance on factual claims is discussed on the basis of a number of concerns in John Rawls’s political liberalism. The concern with stability in liberal nationalism differs from stability in Rawls’s work, mainly because of the stronger non-ideal or ‘realist’ focus of the former. In so far as the ‘realism’ of arguments from stability for liberal nationalism is recognized, they are not vulnerable to the reification charge. But if the arguments are construed as realist, this at the same time makes for other tensions within liberal nationalism. (shrink)

This article argues that Rawlsian liberal political institutions are incapable of ensuring that the basic welfare needs of the worst off are met. This argument consists of two steps. First, I show that institutions are incapable of ensuring that the basic needs of the worst off are met without pursuing certain non-taxation-based courses of action that are designed to alter the work choices of citizens. Second, I argue that such actions are not permissible for Rawlsian institutions. It follows that a (...) state governed by a Rawls-type political conception of justice is parasitic on the willingness of citizens to be sufficiently motivated by concern for the worst off, but it cannot require or even encourage them to be so motivated. (shrink)

In contemporary debates about justice, political philosophers take themselves to be engaged with a subject that’s narrower than the whole of morality. Many contemporary liberals, notably John Rawls, understand this narrowness in terms of context specificity. On their view, justice is the part of morality that applies to the context of a society’s institutions, but only has indirect application to the context of citizens’ personal lives. In contrast, many value pluralists, notably G.A. Cohen, understand justice’s narrowness in terms of singularity (...) against a plural background. On their view, justice is one fundamental value amongst a plurality of fundamental values. The purpose of my thesis is to establish that the pluralist conception of justice’s narrowness is theoretically significant and true. To establish its theoretical significance, I argue that proper attention to the ways in which different understandings of narrowness inform the work of contemporary egalitarians explains a considerable amount of disagreement between them concerning the content and scope of distributive justice. On the one hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in the manner Cohen and other pluralists do, i.e., understand a conception of justice to be a conception of a particular fundamental value, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context are compelling. On the other hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in a contextual manner, i.e., understand justice to comprise one or more all-things-considered principles adopted for the institutional context, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context prove implausible. To establish the truth of the pluralist conception of narrowness, I argue first, that the contextual understanding is only plausible if fairness should be understood procedurally instead of substantively; and second, that substantive fairness cannot be eliminated, as specifying the content of procedural fairness requires a substantive criterion. The upshot is that justice’s narrowness is best understood in terms of singularity against a plural background, rather than in terms of context specificity. (shrink)

John Rawls famously holds that the basic structure is the 'primary subject of justice.'1 By this, he means that his two principles of justice apply only to a society's major political and social institutions, including chiefly the constitution, the economic and legal systems, and (more contentiously) the family structure.2 This thesis — call it the basic structure restriction — entails that the celebrated difference principle has a narrower scope than one might have expected. It doesn't apply directly to choices that (...) individuals make within the basic structure. Individuals can live up to the demands of justice simply by obeying whatever rules are set by, and by doing what is necessary to sustain, the basic .. (shrink)

This paper addresses the fairness of microcredit interest rates. Since microfinance institutions provide credit for the poor at relatively high prices, the fairness of their interest rates has been repeatedly debated. We first apply Rawls' principles of justice to the case of microcredit interest rates and suggest some limitations related to the hypothesis of rationality of the borrowers and the level of inequality. We then suggest another framework based on the analysis of the distribution of the benefits generated by the (...) transaction to assess the fairness of interest rates. We conceptualize this as the distribution of the bargaining range between the borrowers' and the institutions' reservation price and discuss what these reservation prices could be in the context of microfinance. (shrink)

The moral right to act in self-defense seems to be unproblematic: you are allowed to kill an aggressor if doing so is necessary for saving your own life. Indeed, it seems that from the moral standpoint, acting in self-defense is doing the right thing. Thanks, however, to works by George Fletcher and Judith Thomson, it is now well known how unstable the moral basis of the right to self-defense is. We are in the dark with regard to one of the (...) most basic problems raised by this right, namely: the problem of the innocent aggressor. The disturbing question is simple enough: Is a potential victim allowed to kill, in self-defense, a morally innocent aggressor? (shrink)

In his multi-faceted attack on Rawls’s account of justice, G.A. Cohen has argued that the notion of basic structure is necessarily insensitive to the importance of informal social norms to social justice. The paper argues that the most plausible account of the basic structure is not blind to informal social norms in any meaningful sense. Whereas informal, non-legally coercive institutions are not part of the basic structure as such, their careful consideration is necessary for the assessment of whether the basic (...) structure itself is indeed just. This claim is based on an account of what it means for normative principle to apply to institutions, which I expound in detail throughout the paper. Principles apply to institutions, I argue, not in that they restrain their conduct, but in that they indicate which social conditions they should bring about. (shrink)

A common anti-egalitarian argument is that equality is motivated by envy, or the desire to placate envy. In order to avoid this charge, John Rawls explicitly banishes envy from his original position. This article argues that this is an inconsistent and untenable position for Rawls, as he treats envy as if it were a fact of human psychology and believes that principles of justice should be based on such facts. Therefore envy should be known about in the original position. The (...) consequences for Rawlsian theory—both substantive and methodological—are discussed. (shrink)

The paper suggests that the state is subject to assessment according to principles of social justice because state institutions or practices exercise forms of power over which no particular person has control. This rationale for assessment of social justice equally applies to legally optional or informal social practices. But it does not apply to individual conduct. Indeed, it follows that principles of social justice cannot provide a basis for the assessment and guidance of individual choice. The paper develops this practice-based (...) conception of the subject of justice by rejoining G. A. Cohen's influential critique of Rawls’ focus on the “basic structure” of society. (shrink)

This paper considers the potentially wrongful discriminatory nature of certain of our dating preferences. It argues that the wrongfulness of such preferences lies primarily in the simple lookism they involve. While it is ultimately permissible for us to date people partly because of how they look, I argue that we have a duty to ‘look behind’ people’s appearance, which I take to mean that we ought not, on the basis of their appearance, to regard them as absolutely out of the (...) question for us to engage with in a romantic setting. Further, constraints similar to those suggested by a duty to look behind people’s appearance gain support from another duty we have, namely, a duty to counteract, also in our daily lives, the fact that people are undeservedly disadvantaged in various ways. (shrink)

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)

Most political liberals argue that only rules, policies and institutions that are part of society’s basic structure need to be justified with so-called public reasons. Laws enacted outside this set are legitimate if and when public reasons can justify the procedure that selects them. I argue that this view is susceptible to known problems from social choice theory. However, there are resources within political liberalism that could address them. If the scope of public reason is extended beyond the basic structure (...) it could order people’s preferences in a way that circumvents the identified issues. (shrink)

A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ self-respect, which, in turn, may also lead to unequal respect between individuals. Loss of (self-)respect is a concern for any egalitarian, including distributive egalitarians, inasmuch as it is non-compensable. This paper responds to this concern by clarifying the relationship between shame and (self-)respect. We argue, first, a luck egalitarian society and ethos (...) would be radically different from the current one and incompatible with shame over lack of talent, and, second, that while shame may still occur in a less than ideal luck egalitarian society, this kind of shame does not undermine egalitarian commitments. (shrink)

Workers who go on strike are sometimes accused of holding their employer “to ransom”, the implication being that strike action is a kind of extortion. The paper provides an analytical reconstruction of this objection, before presenting and interrogating different strategies for countering it. The first says that work-stoppages can only be extortionate if they infringe an employer’s rightful claim to productive labour, but that no employer has any such claim under capitalism. The second says that work-stoppages cannot be extortionate because, (...) by themselves, they cannot put an employer under duress. The third and most promising strategy says that an employer’s claim to the productive labour of workers is conditional upon his/her not exploiting them. This approach does not produce a blanket exoneration; it tells us that the aptness of describing a strike as extortionate depends on a prior appraisal of the conditions that the strikers work under, and the fairness with which they are treated. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article examines two potential Rawlsian arguments, namely the moral dualism argument and the educative effect of institutions argument as regards the extension of the primary subject of justice to personal conduct. The article makes two claims. First, while moral dualism is a logical step to make, it suffers from a potential conflict between the principles that apply to institutions and those that govern personal conduct. Second, despite the attractive features of the educative effect of institutions argument, an explanative gap (...) has to be filled in order to account for how and why individuals comply to just institutions. In the end, the article concludes that extending Rawls’s theory of justice to include personal conduct may be difficult to sustain. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to uncover the relation between market and justice through the critical examination of the work of Friedrich Hayek. The book argues for the following thesis: the institution of free market is not the only candidate social system; substantial, not merely formal distributive justice must become the central virtue of our social institutions. Notwithstanding its achievements and virtues, the Hayekian theory makes a simple mistake by equivocating possible social systems, dividing them into two groups. One (...) is the world of liberty and free market where people follow the general and abstract rules of conduct, accepting the outcome of market processes, be those good or bad. The other is the world of coercion and repression in which organized distributive instituions dominate and free market is non-existent. According to Hayek’s famous thesis, although freedom is possible in the latter world, we are nevertheless already on the road to serfdom: this fate is inevitable. In this dichotomy the decision is indeed simple. If justice is nothing else but the Trojan horse of oppression, then it is indeed a dangerous and unworkable ideal. However, if this dichotomy does not hold and there is a variety of acceptable social systems, then justice may become the central virtue of institutions, thereby contradicting Hayek’s theory. In the second half of the book I present this alternative, justice-governed social system in more detail. (shrink)

A minimum voting age is defended as the most effective and least disrespectful means of ensuring all members of an electorate are sufficiently competent to vote. Whilst it may be reasonable to require competency from voters, a minimum voting age should be rejected because its view of competence is unreasonably controversial, it is incapable of defining a clear threshold of sufficiency and an alternative test is available which treats children more respectfully. This alternative is a procedural test for minimum electoral (...) competence. A procedural test for minimum electoral competence also succeeds in fulfilling adults’ duties to promote children’s rational and moral engagement with democracy. A minimum voting age should therefore be rejected, all things considered. A procedural test for minimum literacy and independent voting is the most justified means to ensure competency from voters and to promote the democratic agency of children. (shrink)

Many anticosmopolitan Rawlsians argue that since the primary subject of justice is society's basic structure, and since there is no global basic structure, the scope of justice is domestic. This paper challenges the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument by distinguishing three interpretations of what Rawls meant by the basic structure and its relation to justice, corresponding to the cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion theories of distributive justice. On the cooperation theory, it is true that there is no global basic structure, but (...) the basic structure turns out to be only an instrumental condition for realizing justice, and not an existence condition that must be met before demands of justice arise. On the pervasive impact and coercion theories, the basic structure is indeed an existence condition, but there exists a global basic structure. The upshot is that on any plausible interpretation of Rawls's account of the basic structure, Rawlsian justice is global in scope. (shrink)

While there has been considerable philosophical attention given to injustices surrounding work, there has been much less on those injustices that pertain specifically to workers’ commutes. In this paper, I argue that commutes are important parts of people’s working lives, and thus deserve attention as sites of potentially considerable injustice. I evaluate commutes in terms of their impact on people’s work, their rest, the control they exercise over their lives outside of work, and their ability to meet the demands of (...) democratic citizenship. In the second half, I offer some proposals that could reform commuting, while recognizing the ways in which commuting injustice is not incidental to structures of contemporary capitalism, especially with regards to housing, but is rather a structural and constitutive feature. As a result, remedying the injustices of the commute might require a more radical restructuring of current modes of urban development. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz continue in the tradition of Plato with their work on the role of education in a just society. Both argue that a just society depends on education enabling citizens to realize democratic or civic equality and that this equality depends on sufficiency in the distribution of educational goods. I agree that education is important to preparing democratic citizens, but I disagree about the plausibility of sufficiency here, especially in the educational context. My argument is two‐fold: (...) I first reconsider a generic positional goods objection to educational inequality, I then argue that plausible sufficientarian replies to this objection fail insofar as they are premised on an impoverished conception of class and power that treats all statuses more like socio‐cultural traits when they should instead be referencing the material conditions someone has inside a social structure. One cannot bring an individual X into the halls of power and simultaneously have X represent or compensate those who are presently disadvantaged in the way that X had formerly been disadvantaged. In short, we should worry about the realistic possibility of securing and sustaining a civic‐minded elite because elites have the power and motivation to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. For the sufficientarian story to work, we need more that explains the realistic possibility of a benevolent ruling elite, until then, democratic equality seems to be better realized by aiming for equal educations, adequacy isn't enough. (shrink)

In this thesis I present a rights-based theory of exploitation. I argue that successful conceptions of exploitation should begin with the ordinary language claim that exploitation involves `taking unfair advantage'. Consequently, they must combine an account of what it means to take advantage of another with an account of when transactions are unfair. Existing conceptions of exploitation fail to provide adequate accounts of both aspects of exploitation. -/- Hillel Steiner and John Roemer provide convincing accounts of the unfairness involved in (...) exploitation, but because they fail to provide restrictive `advantage taking' conditions, their theories of exploitation include cases that we would not ordinarily describe as exploitations. Ruth Sample and Robert Goodin provide accounts that place a stronger emphasis on the attitudes involved in exploitation and the processes that bring it about. Unfortunately, these theories do not properly incorporate the unfairness aspect of exploitation. Consequently, they are either self-frustrating or incomplete. -/- I provide a conception of exploitation that combines both aspects. I claim that a bilateral, strictly Pareto improving, and voluntary transaction t between A and B is exploitative just in case (1) there exists an unrectified property rights violation at some point in the history of exchanges leading to t that (2) reduces B's bargaining power by altering her status quo point, and (3) the degree to which B's preferences are satisfied in t is less than it would be had B's bargaining power not been reduced (by the alteration of her status quo point). Further, (4a) A's egoistic preferences are better satisfied in t because B's bargaining power is limited, and (4b) if the previous conditions also hold for A, then the reduction in A's bargaining power is less than the reduction in B's bargaining power. Finally, (5) A truly believes the previous conditions hold. (shrink)

What is the relationship between justice as an individual virtue and justice as an institutional virtue? The latter has been exhaustively explored by political philosophers, whereas the former remains underexplored in the literature on virtue ethics. This article defends the view that individual justice is logically prior to institutional justice, and argues that this view requires a conception of individual justice I call ‘justice as lawfulness’. The resulting view consists of three claims. First, just institutions are composed of the relations (...) between just persons. Second, the just person has a disposition to act in accordance with the legal and social norms (collectively, thenomoi) of the existing political tradition. Third, departures from thenomoirequire that the just person act with practical wisdom to reform thenomoiaccording to an implicit standard of justice in the political tradition. (shrink)

Pluralistic theories of global distributive justice aim at justifying a plurality of principles for various subglobal contexts of distributive justice. Helena de Bres has recently proposed the class of disaggregated pluralistic theories, according to which we should refrain from defending principles that apply to the shared background conditions of such subglobal contexts. This article argues that if one does not justify how these background conditions should be regulated by principles of a just global basic structure, then the realization of the (...) principles that are justified for the subglobal contexts of distributive justice can erode and undermine justice over time. For example, the realization of justice in international trade might undermine climate justice, at least if climate justice requires increasing tariffs but justice in international trade calls for reducing tariffs. Principles of a just global basic structure would have to ensure that such justice-eroding spillover effects from one to another context of justice do not occur. Finally, the article responds critically to de Bres’ objections that an account of a just global basic structure is too idealistic, not action guiding, and superfluous. (shrink)