Online research in philosophy

Desert plays an important role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice, but an unimportant role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice. Saul Smilansky has recently put forward a defense of this asymmetry. In this study, I argue that it fails. Then, drawing on an argument of Richard Arneson’s, I suggest an alternative consequentialist rationale for the asymmetry. But while this shows that desert cannot be expected to play the same role in distributive justice that it can play in retributive justice, it does not fully vindicate the asymmetry, since desert can still play an important role in the former.

The theory of justice pioneered by John Rawls explores a simple idea--that the concern of distributive justice is to compensate individuals for misfortune. Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society--all of us regarded collectively--to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it. Some are lucky to be born wealthy, or into a favorable socializing environment, or with a tendency to be charming and intelligent and persevering and the like. These people are likely to be successful in the economic marketplace and to achieve success in other important ways over the course of their lives. On the other hand some people are, as we say, born to lose. Distributive justice stipulates that the lucky should transfer some or all of their gains due to luck to the unlucky.

There are two main motivations for undertaking this thesis on Sen’s capability approach and microfinance. One is to evaluate Sen’s capability approach by considering moral philosophy (utilitarianism and John Rawls’ theory of justice) and developmental ethics contexts. The other is to analyse the impact of microfinance on poverty reduction in accordance with Sen’s approach. This thesis argues that Although Sen’s capability approach has drawbacks, both as a general moral theory and as a theory of justice, it does bring up important aspects of development and poverty reduction. When the empirical evidence is combined with criteria from the capability approach, microfinance is a relative failure as a poverty-reducing approach. The evidence that micro-loans reduce poverty is weak, and there are moral arguments against the group lending approach that is used to assure repayments. Other services sometimes associated with microfinance – savings and insurance — do help the poor, however. However, we should notice that the conclusion I propose here does not exclude the possibility that perhaps microfinance does help promote some other freedoms that are of significance locally.

Many theorists claim that justice is a question-begging concept that has no inherent substantive content. They point to disagreements among justice theorists themselves about basic aspects of the justice theory, such as the nature of corrective justice and the distinction between it and distributive justice, as even further reason to dismiss the concept of justice or to fill it with their preferred theoretical content. Yet most persons perceive that the concept of justice is not an empty shell. Since ancient times it has been thought to encompass not merely a formal equality (treating like cases alike), but also a substantive equality grounded in the equal dignity of each human being which requires giving each person his or her "due" - what is his or hers as a matter of right - a requirement that is usually understood to be in direct conflict with the basic principles of aggregate social welfare theories such as utilitarianism or its modern variant, economic efficiency. The elaboration of this substantive equality and its implications for morality, justice, and law form the core of the natural-law or natural-right theories of law. In this article I build upon a summary and critique of John Finnis's natural law theory (1) to delineate the basic assumptions and principles of the natural law theory regarding the foundations of and relationships among morality, justice, and law; (2) to demonstrate the agreement of major natural law theorists, from Aristotle through Aquinas and Kant to Finnis, on these basic assumptions and principles; (3) to distinguish these basic assumptions and principles from those of the competing theories of utilitarianism and economic efficiency; and (4) to clarify the nature of and distinctions between the two basic divisions of substantive justice: distributive justice and interactive justice. I use the term "interactive justice" instead of the usual term, "corrective justice," since the former term is much more informative and precise in conveying the distinct nature and domain of this type of justice, whereas the latter term almost always misleads people into one or both of two related misconceptions: (1) that "corrective" justice is concerned solely with the correction of wrongful injuries and has nothing to say about the nature of the underlying wrongs or the prevention of their occurrence, and (2) that it is merely a remedial corollary of distributive justice which corrects deviations from the distributively just distribution. Distributive justice and interactive justice separately address the two fundamental problems of human existence, and they employ quite different criteria of equality to resolve those problems. Together, they seek to assure the attainment of the common good (the full realization, to the extent practicable, of each person's humanity) by providing each person with her fair share of the social stock of instrumental goods (positive freedom via distributive justice) and by securing her person and her ex

This essay disputes G. A. Cohen's claim that John Rawls's argument for the difference principle involves an argument from moral arbitrariness to equality and then an illicit move away from equality. Moreover, the claim that an argument from moral arbitrariness establishes equality as the essential distributive justice ideal is found wanting.

When faced with multiple claims to a particular good, what does distributive justice require? To answer this question, we need a substantive moral theory that will enable us assign relative moral weights to the parties' claims. But this is not all we need. Once we have assessed the moral weight of each party's claim, we still need to decide what method of distribution to employ, for there are two methods open to us. We could take the winner-take-all approach, and award the good to the party with the strongest claim. On the other hand, we could divide the good proportionally, according to the relative strength of each party's claim. Because the choice between these two methods of distribution can have a dramatic impact on the resulting pattern of distribution, the choice presents a question of justice. But this is a question of justice that is often overlooked. As a result, we currently employ the principle of proportionality far less often than justice actually requires. If we focus on the question of distributive method, however, we are not only better able to understand how certain reasons enter into our all-things-considered moral judgments, we are also able to explain some perplexing but common aspects of our moral beliefs: how rights can be said to have peremptory force, yet still be balanced against other important interests; how justice can sometimes require compromise, yet sometimes require victory; and how a moral theory can avoid being too demanding while still being demanding enough. Key Words: autonomy • equality • indivisibility • inviolability • weighted lotteries • rights.

Here is a picture of a society that one might suppose to be ideally just in its distributive practices: All members of the society are equally free to live in any way that they might choose, and institutions are arranged so that the equal freedom available to all is at the highest feasible level. What, if anything, is wrong with this picture? One might object against the insistence on equal freedom for all and propose that freedom should instead be maximinned, or leximinned, or maximized, or distributed according to some alternative norm. In this essay I wish to set aside the choice of distributive norm. The question for this essay is whether freedom in any sense is the aspect of people's condition that is the right basis of interpersonal comparison for a theory of distributive justice. I approach this question by analyzing some rival conceptions of freedom.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the recent debate about responsibility and distributive justice. It traces the recent philosophical focus on distributive justice to John Rawls and examines two arguments in his work which might be taken to contain the seeds of the focus on responsibility in later theories of distributive justice. It examines Ronald Dworkin's ‘equality of resources’, the ‘luck egalitarianism’ of Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen, as well as the criticisms of their work put forward by Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, and Jonathan Wolff. Key concepts such as responsibility (individual and collective), luck (thin and thick; brute and option), control, desert, and equality of opportunity are delineated, and the implementation of responsibility-sensitive accounts of justice is considered. The chapters of this book are positioned in relation to the wider literature on responsibility and distributive justice, and a brief outline of the chapters is provided.

Some of the best philosophers do not hold academic appointments in philosophy departments. Wouldn't you rather have the ghost of Frank Ramsey (the Cambridge mathematician who died in the 1920s) as a hall mate instead of some of your current colleagues? Confining our attention to the living, we find some economists among the more philosophically inclined intellectuals. The best of these fellow traveling economistphilosophers are the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and also John Roemer. In the early 1980s Roemer did brilliant work on the analytical foundations of Marxist theory. He has also accomplished an imaginative retooling of the Lange-Lerner models of market socialism. For the past dozen years or so Roemer has been thinking and writing about distributive justice. This work has culminated in the two impressive books that are the subject of this review essay. Theories of Distributive Justice is explicitly a bridge-building effort. Roemer announces that his aim is to provide a philosophical perspective on recent writings by economists that are relevant to the topic of distributive justice and to provide an economist's perspective on recent writings by philosophers on distributive justice. He further announces that his primary aim is to facilitate traffic in one direction--to interpret and formulate the ideas of contemporary philosophers on distributive justice so as to introduce them to economists with a view to increasing the philosophical sophistication of work by economists on these normative issues. I endorse this aim. But since I am not a trained economist, I shall not attempt to assess the extent to which this project is successfully completed. This review explores the adequacy of Roemer's survey of contemporary theories of justice and the philosophical interest of his own contributions to debates about distributive justice. These Roemerian contributions appear interspersed among critical discussions in Theories of Distributive Justice as well as in the more recent monograph Equality of Opportunity. 1..

Amartya Sen is a renowned economist who has also made important contributions to philosophical thinking about distributive justice. These contributions tend to take the form of criticism of inadequate positions and insistence on making distinctions that will promote clear thinking about the topic. Sen is not shy about making substantive normative claims, but thus far he has avoided commitment to a theory of justice, in the sense of a set of principles that specifies what facts are relevant for policy choice and determines, given a full characterization of any situation in terms of these relevant facts, what ought to be done in that situation. Moreover, Sen has expressed skepticism about the existence of a fully adequate theory in this sense. According to Sen there is a plurality of moral considerations that bear on choice of action and policy and no particular reason to think that weights can be attached nonarbitrarily to each consideration to yield a theory.1 “Sen’s proposal is that distributive justice entails equalizing midfare levels across persons,” writes John Roemer.2 “Other things being equal,” one has to add by way of correction to Roemer’s formulation. Sen holds that we should be concerned with the extent of people’s capability or freedom to attain midfare as well as the midfare level actually reached. Sen holds that distributive values..