This paper introduces a theory of ownership that is rooted in Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship – The Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership. Its central idea is that natural resources are not available to us automatically as other approaches to justice implicitly assume. Before we can use a resource, we need to do preparatory work in the form of making an entrepreneurial judgement on it. This fact, as I argue, makes it possible to put private ownership as a natural right on (...) a firm normative ground and answer many traditional challenges to private property. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism (...) is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory. (shrink)

There is a large and growing body of empirical work on people’s intuitions about distributive justice. In this paper, we investigate how well luck egalitarianism and desertism—the two normative approaches that appear to cohere well with people’s intuitions—are supported by more fine-grained findings in the empirical literature. The time is ripe for a study of this sort, as the positive literature on justice has blossomed over the last three decades. The results of our investigation are surprising. In three different contexts (...) (good option luck, good brute luck, and bad brute luck) in which the demands of luck egalitarianism and those of a mainstream desert-based view come apart, the latter carries the day. One ramification of these findings is that people’s intuitions about justice are moralized; that is, they appeal to particular conceptions of the good. Luck egalitarians must decide whether to embrace these moralized intuitions by adopting desertism—or to resist them. (shrink)

Like American politics, the academic debate over justice is polarized, with almost all theories of justice falling within one of two traditions: egalitarianism and libertarianism. This book provides an alternative to the partisan standoff by focusing not on equality or liberty, but on the idea that we should give people the things that they deserve. Mulligan argues that a just society is a meritocracy, in which equal opportunity prevails and social goods are distributed strictly on the basis of merit. That (...) gives citizens their just deserts. In addition to its novel conceptual approach, meritocracy is distinctive from existing work in two ways. First, it is grounded in research on how people actually think about justice. Empirical research reveals that people don't think that social goods should be distributed equally. Nor do they dismiss the idea of social justice. Across ideological and cultural lines, people want rewards to reflect merit. Second, the book discusses hot-button political issues and makes concrete policy recommendations. These issues include anti-meritocratic bias against women and racial minorities and the United States’ widening economic inequality. Justice and the Meritocratic State offers a new theory of justice and provides solutions to our most vexing social and economic problems. It will be of keen interest to philosophers, economists, and political theorists. (shrink)

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only (...) together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. (shrink)