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- Richard J. Arneson (2000). Economic Analysis Meets Distributive Justice. Social Theory and Practice 26 (2):327-345.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..Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Progressives have advocated reforms of rules governing corporations to achieve greater distributive justice, but Maitland (2001) hasargued that corporate rules are distributively neutral and that changing the rules will have no long run impact on distributive justice. These different conclusions stem from the use of two different methods of economic analysis, partial equilibrium and general equilibrium models. A change in the rules governing corporations in a “large” sector of the economy is appropriately analyzed using a general equilibrium analysis, supporting the conclusion that changes in the rules may affect distributive justice in the long run. However, a partial equilibrium analysis of a change in the rules of corporations affecting a “small” part of the economy such as asingle firm or even all firms in a small state supports the claim that such changes cannot affect distributive justice.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Why is it that we think today so very differently about distributive and retributive justice? Why is the notion of desert so neglected in our thinking about distributive justice, while it remains fundamental in almost every account of retributive justice? I wish to take up this relatively neglected issue, and put forth two proposals of my own, based upon the way control functions in the two spheres.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Leading scholars from the social sciences discuss recent theoretical and empirical studies of justice in this book. They examine the nature of justice from the current perspectives of philosophy, economics, law, sociology, and psychology, and explore possible lines of convergence. A critical examination of theories of justice from Plato and Aristotle, through Marx, to Rawls and Habermas heads a collection which addresses the role of economics and the law and which evaluates contemporary sociological and psychological stances in relation to justice, distributive and procedural.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... What is the appropriate criterion to use for distributive justice? Is it efficiency, need, contribution, entitlement, equality, effort, or ability? Globalization and Economic Ethics maintains that far from being rival principles of distributive justice, efficiency and need satisfaction are, in fact, complementary norms in our emerging knowledge economy. After all, human capital plays the central role in effecting and sustaining long-term efficiency in the Digital Age. This book explores the vital link between human capital formation and allocative efficiency using the properties of the market and the knowledge economy as analytical tools.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The nomological net for the construct of organizational justice was investigated. The estimated true score correlation between procedural and distributive justice (N = 4,696, K = 16) was 0.66. The patterns of correlations of both procedural and distributive justice with job satisfaction, OCB, commitment, and productivity were also meta-analytically estimated. Procedural justice was associated to a greater extent than distributive justice with organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors and productivity. Distributive and procedural justice correlated similarly with job satisfaction. Partial correlations and variance reduction ratios suggested that relationships between distributive justice and work attitudes and behaviors were mostly mediated by procedural justice perceptions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This book presents fifteen essays, written over the past dozen years, on egalitarianism. The essays explore contemporary philosophical debates on this subject, using the tools of modern economic theory, general equilibrium theory, game theory, and the theory of mechanism design. Egalitarian Perspectives is divided into four parts: the theory of exploitation; equality of resources; bargaining theory and distributive justice; and market socialism and public ownership. The first part presents Roemer's influential reconceptualisation of the Marxian theory of exploitation as a theory of distributive justice. The second part offers a critique of Ronald Dworkin's equality-of-resources theory, and puts forward a new egalitarian proposal based upon a specific method of measuring individual responsibility. The third part introduces a novel application of the theory of mechanism design to the study of political philosophy, and raises new concerns about the limitations of that application. The fourth part presents the author's views on market socialism and public ownership, and demonstrates that Professor Roemer is at the forefront of refining new theories and conceptions of market socialism.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Justice is a key guiding ethical principle in bioethics. When justice is addressed in bioethics the focus is primarily on the fair distribution of resources, that is, distributive justice. In this thesis, I argue that a distributive conception of justice is unable to adequately address many of the relevant issues of justice within bioethics. These issues are better understood and addressed using a social conception of justice. Social justice is concerned with ensuring that the norms and rules of social structures are fair and equitable. I argue that social and distributive justice are not only compatible, but also complementary. As a result, both conceptions of justice need to be applied to bioethical issues if we are to achieve a truly just outcome. As a case study, I apply this analysis to the controversial issue of the inclusion of pregnant women in clinical research trial.
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| | Scholar | More options ... 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..
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| | Other links: philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu | Scholar | More options ... 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.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In today’s society, a peculiar understanding of distributive justice has developed which holds that “social justice must be distributed by the coercive force of government.” However, this is a perversion of the ideal of distributive justice. The perspective of distributive justice which should be considered is one with its roots [...].
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| | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Richard J. Arneson, Economic Analysis Meets Distributive Justice
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