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Liberty, Desert and the Market
Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither argument is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics.
Preferences and Well-Being
Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people's lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being.
The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice
Distributive justice has come to the fore in political philosophy: how should we arrange our social and economic institutions so as to distribute benefits and burdens fairly? Thirty-eight leading figures from philosophy and political theory present specially written critical assessments of the key issues in this flourishing area of research.
Desert and Justice
Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values. Does justice require that individuals get what they deserve? What exactly is involved in giving people what they deserve? Does treating people as responsible agents require that we make room for desert in the economic sphere, as well as in the attribution of moral praise and blame and in the dispensing of punishment? How does respecting desert square with considerations of equality? Does desert, like justice, have a comparative aspect? These are questions of great practical as well as theoretical importance: this book is unique in offering a sustained examination of them from various perspectives.
Challenging the Challengers
These books attack free markets and libertarianism, alleging that their fundamental assumptions are philosophically indefensible. Olsaretti challenges the thesis that free markets produce distributively just outcomes. At most, however, she shows that limited, desert-based justifications of free-market outcomes fail to satisfy her questionable desiderata, and that particular entitlement-based justifications are inadequately supported when they confound voluntariness and freedom. Attas challenges libertarianism itself, claiming that it is fundamentally wrong, and that libertarian notions of property rights are unsustainable. But he considers only arguments based on defective notions of self-ownership and confused notions of freedom; other, more robust justifications of liberty and property are ignored. Though both of these books fail to demonstrate the strong conclusions they assert, they highlight the dangers of substituting polemic for philosophy. Free markets, property and liberty need, and deserve, rigorous philosophical defences.
Forms of Justice
What is justice? Great political philosophers from Plato to Rawls have traditionally argued that there is a single, principled answer to this question. Challenging this conventional wisdom, David Miller theorized that justice can take many different forms. In Forms of Justice, a distinguished group of political philosophers takes Miller's theory as a starting point and debates whether justice takes one form or many. Drawing real world implications from theories of justice and examining in depth social justice, national justice, and global justice, this book falls on the cutting edge of the latest developments in political theory. Sure to generate debate among political theorists and social scientists, Forms of Justice is indispensable reading for anyone attentive to the intersection between philosophy and politics.
Distributive Justice and Access to Advantage
Major scholars assess G. A. Cohen's contribution to the debate on the nature of egalitarian justice.
Rescuing Justice and Equality
In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawls’s theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawls’s constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality.
Justice and the Meritocratic State
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 sets forth a theory of economic justice—meritocracy—which rests upon a desert principle and is distinctive from existing work in two ways. First, meritocracy is grounded in empirical research on how human beings think, intuitively, about justice. Research in social psychology and experimental economics reveals that people simply donâ...
