This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to ...

This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle. It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful. And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful. Instead, this article defends a solution (...) to the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons. This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income. And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder. It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle. (shrink)

The Fair Trade movement seeks to alter conventional trade relations through a system of social and environmental standards, certification, and labels designed to help shorten the social distance between consumers in the North and producers in the South. The strategy is based on working both ‘in and against’ the same global capitalist market that it hopes to alter, raising questions about if and how Fair Trade initiatives exhibit counter-hegemonic potential to transform the conventional agro-food system. This paper considers the multiple (...) levels at which Fair Trade alternatives operate to identify the different forms of social action that the movement engages with, and to clarify where the movement’s counter-hegemonic potentials are being realized. I suggest the Fair Trade movement is most successful in encouraging consumers and producers to commit acts of resistance and in supporting redistributive action that shifts resources from North to South. Up to now, however, Fair Trade alternatives appear to hold only a theoretical potential to provoke transformative change in the agro-food system. A reconceptualization of the Fair Trade model and how it is implemented could allow it to manifest more of its implicit, oppositional promise. (shrink)

I will, in this paper, set out the philosophical foundations and the basic structure of a new theory of justice. I will argue that both these foundations and the theory which is based upon them are intuitively attractive and theoretically sound. Finally, I will argue that both are supported by the fact that they lead to attractive implications such as the following: One can justify at least some governmental redistributive programs which presuppose that those receiving the wealth have a right (...) to it, without being committed to any form of egalitarianism. The justification for these redistributive programs respects property entitlements; it argues, in effect, that property entitlements and rights to some redistribution of wealth presuppose each other, rather than being in conflict with each other. The amount of redistribution to which each indigent person is entitled is directly proportional to the wealth of the society in question and inversely proportional to the number of indigents in the society in question. There are at this stage in the history of Western thought few entirely new ideas in philosophy. Too much has been written about the important issues to allow for entirely new approaches. My theory is no exception to these generalizations, for it draws upon the tradition of John Locke, of the agrarian reforms such as Paine, Spence, and Ogilvie, and of libertarian writers such as Robert Nozick. Nevertheless, I will argue, the resulting theory is a significant advance over the ideas of these earlier writers. (shrink)

The topic of the paper is the justness of the so-called global redistributive wars — wars whose prime purpose would be the correction of global economic and power structures that are said to cause suffering in poor countries. My aim is to comment on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument concerning the implications of Thomas Pogge’s theory of global poverty. Pogge has argued that affluent coun-tries uphold global institutional structures that have a significant causal role in leading to the poverty-related deaths of millions (...) of peo-ple who live in poor countries. According to Pogge, rich countries harm the citizens of poor countries. The argument by Lippert-Rasmussen is important, as it suggests that Pogge’s theory of the causes of global poverty, if correct, has a strange implication, namely, the implication that poor countries are or at least could be entitled to a military attack against rich countries. In this paper I will try to show that Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument is not fully compelling, and I will argue that it is not clear whether a global redistributive war would meet the principle of just cause. (The paper is here: http://www.kantiana.ru/upload/iblock/0ff/2014_12_01_raikka.pdf). (shrink)

Kevin M. Graham argues that political philosophy cannot fully understand race-related injustice without shifting its focus away from distributive inequities between whites and nonwhites and toward white supremacy, the unfair power relationships that allow whites to dominate and oppress nonwhites. Graham's analysis of the racial politics of police violence and public education in Omaha, Nebraska, vividly illustrates why the pursuit of racial justice in the United States must move beyond redistribution.

Kevin M. Graham argues that political philosophy cannot fully understand race-related injustice without shifting its focus away from distributive inequities between whites and nonwhites and toward white supremacy, the unfair power relationships that allow whites to dominate and oppress nonwhites. Graham's analysis of the racial politics of police violence and public education in Omaha, Nebraska, vividly illustrates why the pursuit of racial justice in the United States must move beyond redistribution.

Global income inequalities are met with increasing calls for direct supranational redistribution. This article argues that from the perspective of political feasibility, this approach should not be prioritised. We use the example of tax competition to show that supranational regulation that stops short of direct redistribution has better chances of being implemented. Moreover, as the case of tax competition illustrates, such regulation can help to shore up the capacity of nation states to redistribute internally, which indirectly tends to (...) reduce global inequalities, too. Against this background, we formulate the conditional subsidiarity principle of redistribution. It states that when the case for direct supranational redistribution is built on the alleged incapacity of the state to redistribute due to the pressures of globalisation, our first instinct should be regulatory reform in order to restore this capacity. Finally, the article asks whether two prominent proposals for global taxation – the global resource dividend and the financial transaction tax – pass the test of the conditional subsidiarity principle. (shrink)

Rawls’ theory is about prudence rather than justice. It is about the kind of political structure on which rational people would agree if they were preparing for the worst. Other strategies, such as confining redistribution to upholding a safety net, might also be plausible. Rawls’ theory is Georgism in persons: the income from individual abilities is regarded as if it is at the disposal of the collective and could be taxed as rent. This goes against the strong moral intuition (...) of self-ownership. However, Rawls’ question, where the worst off are as well off as they can be, is interesting. According to the Index of Economic Freedom, it actually may be under relatively unfettered capitalism. Unlike Rawls, Piketty is chiefly worried about the rich, seeking to impose confiscatory taxes on them. But the rich are not a fixed, unchangeable group of people who can effortlessly watch their capital accumulate. Capital is precarious, as is vividly illustrated in Balzac’s novel Père Goriot which Piketty quotes. Different as the approaches of Rawls and Piketty are, both of them agree that their ideal society has to be closed: It must become ‘socialism in one country.’. (shrink)

:Debates about libertarianism and redistribution often revolve around self-ownership. There are two main reasons for this: first, self-ownership is often featured in Lockean accounts of property that endow us with a claim to the resources that are up for redistribution. Second, self-ownership has sometimes been mustered as a way of resisting the additional labor that is said to be required by redistributive schemes. In this essay, I argue that these appeals to self-ownership are misguided. However, unlike most critics (...) of these appeals, I don’t wish to claim that redistribution is therefore vindicated. On the contrary, my main goal is to show that there are alternatives to invoking self-ownership that are more effective and that better capture the core intuition behind libertarian objections to redistribution. (shrink)

What does social justice require in contemporary societies? What are the requirements of social democracy? Who and where are the individuals and groups that can carry forward agendas for progressive social transformation? What are we to make of the so-called new social movements of the last thirty years? Is identity politics compatible with egalitarianism? Can cultural misrecognition and economic maldistribution be fought simultaneously? What of the heritage of Western Marxism is alive and dead? And how is current critical social theory (...) to approach these and other questions? Much of the most productive work done in recent social theory has revolved around such issues, in particular, around those concerning the relationship between the politics of recognition and the politics of distribution. After the intense theoretical focus over the last fifteen years or so on the issues of recognition politics—multiculturalism, multi-nationalism, identity politics, group-differentiated rights, the accommodation of difference, and so on—some social theorists have worried that attention has been diverted from important issues of distributive equality—systematic impoverishment, increasing material inequality, ‘structural’ unemployment, the growth of oligarchic power, global economic segmentation, and so on. While some critics seem to have adopted a blunt ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ line of criticism,1 others have attempted to develop an overarching, integrative theoretical framework adequate to the diverse issues concerning both economic and cultural justice. For example, Axel Honneth proposes that a suitably developed and normatively robust theory of intersubjective recognition can adequately integrate an analysis of apparently diverse contemporary struggles: those for a just division of labor and hence, a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as those for a culture free of identity-deforming disrespect and denigration. (shrink)

It has been argued that, in political theory and political practice, a concern with the distribution of economic opportunities and resources has recently been displaced by a preoccupation with the acknowledgement of cultural identities and differences. In their jointly authored book, Redistribution or Recognition?, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth present their very different reactions to this development. While Fraser argues that redistribution and recognition are two mutually irreducible elements of an account of social justice, Honneth contends that a (...) suitably differentiated account of recognition can provide the basis of a theory of justice on its own. This article critically assesses the relative merits of these two positions by focusing on their accounts of the nature of capitalism, the sort of social theories that are needed in light of these accounts, and the moral philosophies associated with these social theories. This assessment leads to a number of conclusions about the proper relationship between recognition and redistribution in a theory of social justice. (shrink)

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

In this article, we evaluate the capacity of liberal egalitarianism to rebut what we call the libertarian challenge of charity. This challenge states that coercive redistributive taxation is neither needed nor justified, since those who endorse redistribution can give charitably, and those who do not endorse redistribution cannot justifiably be coerced. We argue that contemporary developments in liberal political thought render liberalism more vulnerable to this libertarian challenge. Many liberals have, in recent years, sought to recast liberalism such (...) that it is more hospitable to cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity. This move has resulted in increased support for the claim that liberalism should be understood as a political rather than comprehensive doctrine, and that liberal institutions should draw their legitimacy from agreements made among members of an appropriately conceived deliberative community, rather than from controversial liberal principles like individual autonomy. We argue that, while this move may indeed make liberalism more compatible with cultural diversity, it also makes it more vulnerable to the libertarian challenge of charity. Not all versions of liberalism are troubled by the challenge, but those that are troubled by it are increasingly dominant. We also discuss G.A. Cohen's claim that liberal equality requires an ‘egalitarian ethos’ and argue that, if Cohen is right, it is difficult to see how there can be an adequate response to the libertarian challenge of charity. In general, our argument can be summarised as follows: the more that liberalism is concerned accurately to model the actual democratic wishes and motivations of the people it governs, the less it is able to justify coercively imposing redistributive principles of justice. (shrink)

In cooperative game theory with transferable utilities, there are two well-established ways of redistributing Shapley value payoffs: using egalitarian Shapley values, and using consensus values. We present parallel characterizations of these classes of solutions. Together with the axioms that characterize the original Shapley value, those that specify the redistribution methods characterize the two classes of values. For the class of egalitarian Shapley values, we focus on redistributions in one-person unanimity games from two perspectives: allowing the worth of coalitions to (...) vary, while keeping the player set fixed; and allowing the player set to change, while keeping the worth of coalitions fixed. This class of values is characterized by efficiency, the balanced contributions property for equal contributors, weak covariance, a proportionately decreasing redistribution in one-person unanimity games, desirability, and null players in unanimity games. For the class of consensus values, we concentrate on redistributions in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document}-person unanimity games from the same two perspectives. This class of values is characterized by efficiency, the balanced contributions property for equal contributors to social surplus, complement weak covariance, a proportionately decreasing redistribution in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document}-person unanimity games, desirability, and null players in unanimity games. (shrink)

Can the global poor wage a just redistributive war against the global rich? The moral norms governing the use of force are usually considered to be very strict. Nonetheless, some philosophers have recently argued that violating duties of global justicecanbe a just cause for war. This paper discusses redistributive wars. It shows that the strength of these arguments is contingent on the underlying account of global distributive justice. The paper focuses on the “doing harm argument,” under the assumption that the (...) alternative “allowing harm argument” is a more difficult route to justify redistributive wars. After highlighting several preliminary problems, the paper breaks down and assesses in depth the “doing harm argument”: the empirical premise, the rights violation that constitutes the wrong, liability and degrees of responsibility, and the conditions for justified self-defense. By drawing on principles reflected in criminal law, this paper argues that a general “doing harm argument” for redistributive wars is unconvincing, while a reinterpretation of that argument could theoretically give rise to a just cause for war. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to explore the ways through which the discourse on global justice can be expanded beyond the language of redistribution by utilizing the insights from the theory of recognition as proposed by Honneth. It looks into the potential contributions of recognition theory in the normative analysis of global poverty and inequality. Taking off from the argument that the focus on global redistributive justice is misleading, the paper makes three claims: firstly, any global justice discourse must take as (...) its point of departure the experience of suffering of the poor; secondly, suffering poverty, the global poor experience shame or humiliation, thereby, degrading their sense of self-worth and their capacity for independent agency; thirdly, the goal of global justice is not simply the poor’s equal access to resources but self-realization. In the end, the paper argues that the recognition paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing and theorizing global justice. (shrink)

Longtemps objet de prédilection des hitoriens de l'économie européenne, la croissance médiévale n'est plus au centre de leurs préoccupations. En la replaçant dans une perspective de long terme, du XIe au XVe siècle, et en s'interrogeant sur ce qui en elle relève proprement des processus de développement ou des dynamiques conjoncturelles, il est possible de replacer au centre du débat historique un moment essentiel de construction de l'économie-monde européenne. L'article insiste en particulier sur l'importance des processus sociaux de promotion des (...) activités productives et des groupes de travailleurs: ils ont rendu possible une intensification du travail, rémunérée par un ensemble complexe de mécanismes de redistribution des richesses qui sont l'une de créations originales des sociétés médiévales. (shrink)

Libertarians such as Nozick have argued that any redistributive tax scheme intended to achieve and maintain an egalitarian distributive pattern will violate self‐ownership. Furthermore, since self‐ownership is a central component of the idea of freedom, instituting an egalitarian distribution makes a society less rather than more free. All this turns on the claim, accepted by both libertarians and their critics, that a redistributive tax will violate self‐ownership because it must expropriate the fruit of a person’s labour. I show here that (...) there is no reason to accept this claim. The libertarian argument works only if the fruit of one’s labour must be understood to include everything that a person produces through his labour. But there is an alternative reading of the fruit of labour which identifies it with that subset of the total product of one’s labour which is due to his choices rather than luck. I argue that this reading is plausible, that there is nothing in the concept of self‐ownership which disallows it, and that if it is adopted, a redistributive tax need not automatically expropriate the fruit of one’s labour. Consequently there is no necessary inconsistency between redistributive taxation and self‐ownership, and so egalitarians can endorse the latter idea. (shrink)

I argue that taxation for redistributive purposes is a property rights violation, responding to arguments (due to Nagel, Murphy, Sunstein, and Holmes) claiming that individuals lack ownership of their pretax incomes.

Nancy Fraser has elaborated a framework for analyzing different forms of oppression using the categories of redistribution and recognition. This framework has come under criticism from Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, despite the fact that all three theorists similarly insist that justice is not reducible solely to economic justice and that struggles against ‘cultural’ forms of oppression are equally important. Drawing on the debate between these theorists, in this article I examine the ways in which their respective theoretical (...) frameworks are potentially problematic or do not go far enough in theorizing the complex interconnections among economics, politics and culture. For example, Fraser’s binary economy/culture and Young’s distinction between culture and structure are overly broad and potentially misleading. Butler and Fraser also appear to adopt undertheorized and economistic conceptualizations of ‘the economy’ and capitalism. In the course of my critique, I propose a somewhat different approach to analyzing the causes of various forms of oppression and the relation between different emancipatory struggles. Among other things, I argue that social relationships need to be disaggregated further, into more than just two categories, and that the economic and the cultural (as well as the political) should be analyzed as always complexly overdetermining each other. (shrink)

The growth of European colonial empires occurred during a period of intense international conflict. This article examines how the international position of colonial states altered the distribution of wealth within indigenous societies. Colonial administrators favored precolonial elites only if they were militarily and financially secure, a pattern that stems from balancing the advantages of working with these groups against their higher probability of revolt. This theory is tested using data on the wealth of Indian caste groups. In areas annexed at (...) times of European war, precolonial elites are poorer than other groups, whereas they remain richer in areas annexed at other times and in indirectly ruled areas. These results appear not to stem from preexisting differences between regions. The results highlight the variable impact of colonialism within societies, and the importance of the international system in shaping colonial and postcolonial outcomes. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 25-27.

Calls to expand temporary work programmes come from two directions. First, as global justice advocates observe, every year thousands of poor migrants cross borders in search of better opportunities, often in the form of improved employment opportunities. As a result, international organizations now lobby in favour of expanding ‘guest-work’ opportunities, that is, opportunities for citizens of poorer countries to migrate temporarily to wealthier countries to fill labour shortages. Second, temporary work programmes permit domestic governments to respond to two internal, contradictory (...) political pressures: (1) to fill labour shortages and (2) to do so without increasing rates of permanent migration. Temporary work programmes permit governments to appear ‘tough’ on migration, while responding to employer pressure to locate workers willing to work in low-skilled, poorly remunerated positions. The coincidence of national self-interest and global justice generates a strong case in favour of expanding guest-work. We evaluate the moral benefits and burdens of expanding guest-work opportunities, and conclude that although there are benefits to be gleaned from the perspective of global wealth redistribution, at present, temporary work programmes are generally unjust. We will argue that just temporary work programmes, in time, permit temporary workers to attain citizenship. This spells the end of traditional temporary work programmes, which require that workers return to their home country in time; instead, what is temporary is the employment obligation that must be fulfilled as a requirement to access citizenship. As long as this requirement is met, we endorse guest-work programmes as a tool to respond to global inequality. (shrink)

Museums are home to millions of artworks and cultural artifacts, some of which have made their way to these institutions through unjust means. Some argue that these objects should be repatriated (i.e. returned to their country or culture of origin). However, these arguments face a series of philosophical challenges. In particular, repatriation, even if justified, is often portrayed as contrary to the aims and values of museums. However, in this paper, I argue that some of the very considerations museums appeal (...) to in order to oppose repatriation claims can be turned on their heads and marshaled in favor of the practice. In addition to defending against objections to repatriation, this argument yields the surprising conclusion that the redistribution of cultural goods should be much more radical than is typically supposed. (shrink)

1. Birth within a particular state is a major determinant of a person’s life course: their life expectancy, health possibilities, income, level of education, employment opportunities, and the safet...

Immigration changed the ethnic composition of Western European societies. The new populations brought a series of culturally determined practices that challenged the liberal framework of values of the receiving states. Despite the existence of important variations between the official discourses and the actual policies finally implemented, the responses to those challenges varied with the models of integration defined by each country to deal with ethnic diversity. In this article, we study the policies designed and implemented by the United Kingdom and (...) France against “female genital mutilation” practices, analyzing how both British and French policies affected these types of practices. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 126, Issue 1, Page 25-35, Spring 2021.