Chief executive officers (CEOs) are typically paid great amounts of money in wages and bonuses by commercial companies. This is sometimes defended with an argument from peer comparison; roughly that “our” CEO has to be paid in accordance with what other CEOs at comparable companies get. At first glance this seems like a poor excuse for morally outrageous pay schemes and, consequently, the argument has been ignored in the previous philosophical literature. In contrast, however, this article provides a partial defence (...) of the argument from peer comparison. Moreover, it is demonstrated how a serious consideration of this argument sheds further light on both incentive- and desert-based theories of just pay. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy about justice, a contrast between empirical and transcendental approaches can be identified. Hillel Steiner represents an empirical approach: he argues for building an account of justice-as-rights out of the minimal inductive material of psychological linguistic and moral intuitions. From this opening, he ultimately concludes that persons have original rights to self-ownership and to an initially equal share of natural resources. Emmanuel Levinas represents a transcendental approach: he argues that justice arises from a transcendent ethical relation of responsibility-for-the-Other. (...) This relation underpins all subjective cognition, and makes rationality, reasoning, and rights possible.Analysis of each of these positions reveals certain problems. On the one hand, Steiner’s argument contains a number of latent methodological, conceptual, and structural presuppositions. These include the pretheoretical concepts of “person”, “equality”, and “consistency”. These presuppositions prefigure and condition the conclusions which Steiner reaches. On the other hand, Levinas fails to provide a convincing account of how the self comes to be an object of my own deliberations about morality and justice. This amounts to an annihilation of the subject which undermines his argument for the subject as a site of responsible action. As Steiner identifies, justice encompasses equal moral agents. Levinas’s hyperbolic description of the ethical relation’s asymmetry must therefore be revised.Nevertheless, what remains is the strength of Levinas’s argument for the priority of the ethical relation over thematization, rationality, and consciousness. The hidden presuppositions supporting Steiner’s work are evidence of Levinas’s plausibility in this respect. Steiner’s account of justice-as-rights requires a prior ethical relation in which we recognise one another as separate persons, each possessing an ethical status of their own; an attitude of justice motivates Steiner’s description of justice. This attitude is evident in language, which is communication before it is thought. In that individual rights can be conceived only on the basis of a relation of responsibility, rights are primordially the rights of the Other. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Avner de-Shalit has devised a methodology for coming closer to a settled view in political philosophy which he calls ‘public reflective equilibrium’, extending ideas of John Rawls and Michael Walzer. De-Shalit proposes that the philosopher should come to an understanding of views outside the academy through extended interaction with members of the public. These discussions can and do lead to changes in the philosophical theory, from the introduction of new concepts, to new framings of issues or even novel research (...) questions. De-Shalit and I used this approach in our work Disadvantage. Reflecting on our work, I raise five questions: Who speaks for the public? How do you know you are asking the right questions? How should the theorist respond to judgements based on false empirical beliefs? What should be done when the public do not speak with one voice? Is equilibrium a reasonable aspiration? (shrink)

This article explores, comparatively and critically, Sidgwick’s and Rawls’s reasons for rejecting desert as a principle of distributive justice. Their ethical methods, though not identical, each re...

Social justice is concerned with fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of living together in society. Regarding nursing care, social justice is concerned with who should receive its benefits, how much they should receive, and who should take up the burden of providing and paying for it. A specific thesis is offered: ‘Health care, including nursing care, should be distributed on the basis of need, free at the point of use, the cost being born by the community involved.’ This (...) thesis is shown to be incompatible with consequentialist (utilitarian) and libertarian approaches to social justice, but reasons are given for rejecting these theories. It is shown that it may be compatible with Rawl's liberal theory of justice and definitely compatible with a version of the teleological (Aristotelian) theory. The thesis is then defended against criticisms concerned with desert and responsibility: that the provident ought not to pay for the improvident, and that those who are responsible for their health do not deserve free care. There are answered by an epistemological argument concerning what we need to know before we can decide what people deserve, and an argument about social cohesion. The conclusion is that the thesis can be offered as a moral principle for a fair society. (shrink)