There is an odd proximity between Hayek, hero of the libertarian right, and Rawls, theorist of social justice, because, at the level of principle, Hayek was in some important respects a Rawlsian. Although Hayek said that the idea of social justice was nonsense, he argued against only a particular principle of social justice, one that Rawls too rejected, namely distribution according to individual merit. Any attempt to make reward and merit coincide, Hayek argued, would undermine the market's price system, leaving (...) us all poorer and less free. Like Rawls, Hayek held that we should assess social institutions from behind a veil of ignorance, and he thought that doing so pushed us toward egalitarianism. Most of the distance between Hayek and Rawls at the level of policy stems from Hayek's optimism about the operation of markets, his equivocation about the meaning of central concepts, and his appeal to under-argued slippery slopes. Hayek wavered, however, between claiming that private property and markets benefit everyone, compared to the feasible alternatives, and the principle that they maximize the opportunities of a randomly selected member of society, i.e., aggregate opportunity. Contemporary Hayekians claim that capitalism raises the position of the worst off in the long run, in future generations, whereas Rawlsians insist that inequalities between social positions should benefit the worst off now. (shrink)

Within a social justice ethical framework, the use of ‘enforcement’ measures to prevent people from engaging in ‘street activities’, such as begging and street drinking, can only be morally justified if such initiatives can be shown to benefit the welfare of the vulnerable ‘street users’ affected. It may be hypothesized that this is unlikely, and such measures are bound to be regressive in their effects, but in fact evidence from an evaluation conducted in five locations across England suggests otherwise. Drawing (...) on a normative framework which engages with both moral and political philosophy, this paper argues that the motivations and impacts associated with enforcement are more ethically complex, and less punitive, than they may at first appear. It demonstrates that the use of enforcement measures, when accompanied by appropriate support, can in fact lead to beneficial outcomes for some individuals involved in begging or street drinking in some situations. The outcomes for other members of the street population can, however, be very negative, and are highly unpredictable, such that the use of enforcement is always a high-risk strategy, even if ethically justifiable in certain circumstances. (shrink)

David Johnston 's Rejoinder to my defense of Hayek's critique of social justice, though it has the merit of attempting to deal with Hayek's claim that the very idea of social justice is incoherent, fails to undermine that defense. Johnston 's suggested counterexample to Hayek's claim that talk of an injustice presupposes an agency responsible for the injustice is not even prima facie plausible; he overlooks crucial disanalogies between the pursuit of social justice and the pursuit of other social goals; (...) and he fails to understand the distinction between Hayek's case against social justice and his case for the market. (shrink)