공정을 권리와 기회의 공평한 분배와 그 절차의 문제로 보는 일반적 관점은 롤즈(John Rawls)의 정의론에 뿌리를 둔다. 롤즈의 ‘공정으로서의 정의(justice as fairness)’는 합리적인 사회계약을 통해 도달할 수 있는 ‘적절한 분배 절차’를 정의의 조건으로 제안한다. 그의 ‘분배적 정의’와 ‘절차적 공정성’은 정의의 구체적이고 사회적인 실현 방안을 모색하게 한다는 점에서 강한 설득력을 갖는다. 그러나 ‘공정성’은 단순히 권리와 기회의 분배 문제로, 또 단순히 절차적 문제로 환원할 수 없는 가치론적 물음을 야기한다. ‘공정한 분배’란 무엇인가? 분배의 공정성을 판단하게 하는 척도는 무엇인가? 어디에서, 누구를 위해 말해지는 공정인가? (...) 어떠한 공정인가? 이 글은 먼저 롤즈의 정의론에 대한 리쾨르(Paul Ricoeur)와 영(Iris Marion Young)의 비판을 검토하면서, 정의에 대한 숙고는 ‘분배 절차의 공정성’을 뛰어넘는 관계론적 성찰을 요청한다는 사실을 살피고자 한다. 나아가 데리다(Jacques Derrida)의 ‘해체가 곧 정의’라는 명제의 의미를 살피면서, 정의는 분배 절차의 공정성을 계산하는 일이 아니라 타자의 고유한 상황과 개별적인 고통에 주의를 기울이는 민감성을 통해서 추구되어야 하는 지향이라는 점을 보일 것이다. (shrink)

In theory and practice, the notion of fairness is far from simple. The principle is often elusive and subject to confusion, even in institutions of law, usage, and custom. In Fairness, Nicholas Rescher aims to liberate this concept from misunderstandings by showing how its definitive characteristics prevent it from being absorbed by such related conceptions as paternalistic benevolence, radical egalitarianism, and social harmonization. Rescher demonstrates that equality before the state is an instrument of justice, not of social utility (...) or public welfare, and argues that the notion of fairness stops well short of a literal egalitarianism. Rescher disposes of the confusions arising from economists' penchant to focus on individual preferences, from decision theorists' concern for averting envy, and from political theorists' sympathy for egalitarianism. In their place he shows how the idea of distributive equity forms the core of the concept of fairness in matters of distributive justice. The coordination of shares with valid claims is the crux of the concept of fairness. In Rescher's view, this means that the pursuit of fairness requires objective rather than subjective evaluation of the goods being shared. This is something quite different from subjective equity based on the personal evaluation of goods by those laying claim to them. Insofar as subjective equity is a concern, the appropriate procedure for its realization is a process of maximum value distribution. Further, Rescher demonstrates that in matters of distributive justice, the distinction between new ownership and preexisting ownership is pivotal and calls for proceeding on very different principles depending on the case. How one should proceed depends on context, and what is adjudged fair is pragmatic, in that there are different requirements for effectiveness in achieving the aims and purposes of the sort of distribution that is intended. Rescher concludes that fairness is a fundamentally ethical concept. Its distinctive modus operandi contrasts sharply with the aims of paternalism, preference-maximizing, or economic advantage. Fairness will be of interest to philosophers, economists, and political scientists. "[Fairness is] one of the most forceful conceptual analysis of fairness yet produced." -Ludwig Beckman, The Review of Metaphysics Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy and vice chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written more than seventy books in various areas of philosophy, including Complexity: A Philosophical Overview and Inquiry Dynamics, both published by Transaction. (shrink)

This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of (...) self-sacrifice or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. (shrink)

Recent advances in machine learning methods have created opportunities to eliminate unfairness from algorithmic decision making. Multiple computational techniques (i.e., algorithmic fairness criteria) have arisen out of this work. Yet, urgent questions remain about the perceived fairness of these criteria and in which situations organizations should use them. In this paper, we seek to gain insight into these questions by exploring fairness perceptions of five algorithmic criteria. We focus on two key dimensions of fairness evaluations: distributive (...) fairness and procedural fairness. We shed light on variation in the potential for different algorithmic criteria to facilitate distributive fairness. Subsequently, we discuss procedural fairness and provide a framework for understanding how algorithmic criteria relate to essential aspects of this construct, which helps to identify when a specific criterion is suitable. From a practical standpoint, we encourage organizations to recognize that managing fairness in machine learning systems is complex, and that adopting a blind or one-size-fits-all mentality toward algorithmic criteria will surely damage people’s attitudes and trust in automated technology. Instead, firms should carefully consider the subtle yet significant differences between these technical solutions. (shrink)

Distribution of responsibility is one of the main focus areas in discussions about climate change ethics. Most of these discussions deal with the distribution of responsibility for climate change mitigation at the international level. The aim of this paper is to investigate if and how these principles can be used to inform the search for a fair distribution of responsibility for climate change adaptation on the local level. We found that the most influential distribution principles on (...) the international level were in turn built on one or more of seven basic principles: (P1) equal shares, (P2) desert, (P3) beneficiary pays, (P4) ability, (P5) self-help, (P6) limited responsibility for the worst off, and (P7) status quo preservation. It was found that all the basic principles, but P1, P3, and P7, are to some extent translatable to local climate adaptation. Two major problems hamper their usefulness on the local level: (1) several categories of agents need to take on responsibility; and (2) emissions do not work as a base for all principles. P4, P5, and P6 are applicable to local adaptation without changes. P4 is of particular importance as it seems to solve the first problem. P2 is applicable only if the second problem is solved, which can be achieved by using risk of harm instead of emissions as the basis for desert. (shrink)

Highlighting a progression of exercises, this paper develops a pedagogical model aimed at giving students tools to deliberate about justice from within the Original Position and to debate the broader goals and limitations of justice as fairness. The approach focuses on the idea of a “distribution” of primary goods without relying on caricatures or being intimidated by the more technical features of the presentation. The series of exercises shows students how to move from more intuitive to less intuitive (...) deliberative situations—a move that depends on seeing a just distribution as a product of a pure procedure. In particular, the exercises show the importance of distinguishing carefully between a distribution and an allocation of goods. Finally, it suggests ways in which we may use the theory to engage with our own distributive practices in democratic societies by focusing on the moral significance of persons as equals. (shrink)

This issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy brings together fresh essays addressing three main genres of questions: questions about the nature of bioethical inquiry and the relevance of the humanities to medical practice; questions regarding the ethics of organ donation; questions bearing on the application of fairness to the distribution of medical resources.

In “Weighing Up Weighted Lotteries: Scarcity, Overlap Cases, and Fair Inequalities of Chance”, Gerard Vong addresses intriguing problems in which it is impossible to give an equal chance of receiving a good to a set of equal claimants, because goods can be distributed only via groups which have overlapping membership. Vong proposes a rule for distributing chances that he argues is sensitive to both comparative and absolute fairness. This comment discusses some formal difficulties with Vong’s proposal and argues that (...) it is better to separate the two concerns and to allow the tradeoffs between them to depend on characteristics of the goods to be distributed. (shrink)

Highlighting a progression of exercises, this paper develops a pedagogical model aimed at giving students tools to deliberate about justice from within the Original Position and to debate the broader goals and limita- tions of justice as fairness. The approach focuses on the idea of a “distribu- tion” of primary goods without relying on caricatures or being intimidated by the more technical features of the presentation. The series of exercises shows students how to move from more intuitive to less (...) intuitive deliberative situations—a move that depends on seeing a just distribution as a product of a pure procedure. In particular, the exercises show the importance of distinguishing carefully between a distribution and an allocation of goods. Finally, it suggests ways in which we may use the theory to engage with our own distributive practices in democratic societies by focusing on the moral significance of persons as equals. (shrink)

Distributive justice is known to have important emotional and affective outcomes. The present study explores the role of distributive justice as an antecedent to feelings of gratitude toward the organization. Borrowing from social exchange theory, we investigate the mediating role of gratitude in the relationship between “perceived fairness in distributive justice” and “employees’ organization citizenship behaviors.” Time-lagged, multi-source data was collected from 185 employees and their supervisors employed in a large manufacturing organization based in East India. Two significant findings (...) emerge. First, the results indicate that feelings of gratitude signal fair distribution of benefits such that the employees go beyond the call of the duty to invest in OCB. Second, engagement in such acts seems to nullify their social debts highlighted in the social exchange perspective. Thus, a strong moral emotion, gratitude is a powerful vehicle that drives employees to act in the organization’s interests because doing is desirable and rightful. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In this book Kristi A. Olson addresses the question of fair labor income distribution by proposing the solidarity solution, a new test she defines and defends. She takes as her starting point the envy test, discussed by the philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Philippe Van Parijs and by the economists Jan Tinbergen, Hal Varian, Marc Fleurbaey, Duncan Foley, and Serge-Christophe Kolm. According to the envy test, a distribution is fair when no one prefers someone else's circumstances to their own. (...) After rejecting the envy test, Olson distinguishes two types of envy: personal and impersonal. Impersonal envy makes a demand on others; personal envy, in contrast, does not. Using this distinction, Olson argues that fair labor-income bundles must be impersonal envy-free, but need not be personal envy-free. The book concludes by relating the solidarity solution to concrete problems such as the gender wage gap and taxation. (shrink)

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-two leading figures from philosophy and political theory present specially written critical assessments of the key issues in this flourishing area of research.

This paper addresses the fairness of microcredit interest rates. Since microfinance institutions provide credit for the poor at relatively high prices, the fairness of their interest rates has been repeatedly debated. We first apply Rawls' principles of justice to the case of microcredit interest rates and suggest some limitations related to the hypothesis of rationality of the borrowers and the level of inequality. We then suggest another framework based on the analysis of the distribution of the benefits (...) generated by the transaction to assess the fairness of interest rates. We conceptualize this as the distribution of the bargaining range between the borrowers' and the institutions' reservation price and discuss what these reservation prices could be in the context of microfinance. (shrink)

Philosophical disagreement about justice ranges over at least two questions. The most immediate is a substantial question, concerning the conditions under which particular distributive arrangements can be said to be just or unjust. The second, deeper, question concerns the nature of justice itself. What is justice? Here we can distinguish three views. First, justice as mutual advantage sees justice as essentially a matter of the outcome of a bargain. There are times when two parties can both be better off by (...) making some sort of agreement. Justice, on this view, concerns the distribution of the benefits and burdens of the agreement. Second, justice as reciprocity takes a different approach, looking not at bargaining but at the idea of a fair return or just price, attempting to capture the idea of justice as equal exchange. Finally justice as impartiality sees justice as ‘taking the other person’s point of view’ asking ‘how would you like it if it happened to you?’ Each model has significantly different consequences for the question of when issues of justice arise and how they should be settled. It is interesting to consider whether any of these models of justice could regulate behaviour between non-human animals. (shrink)

This paper addresses the fairness of microcredit interest rates. Since microfinance institutions provide credit for the poor at relatively high prices, the fairness of their interest rates has been repeatedly debated. We first apply Rawls' principles of justice to the case of microcredit interest rates and suggest some limitations related to the hypothesis of rationality of the borrowers and the level of inequality. We then suggest another framework based on the analysis of the distribution of the benefits (...) generated by the transaction to assess the fairness of interest rates. We conceptualize this as the distribution of the bargaining range between the borrowers' and the institutions' reservation price and discuss what these reservation prices could be in the context of microfinance. (shrink)

Spheres of Global Justice analyzes six of the most important and controversial spheres of global justice, each concerning a specific global social good. These spheres are democratic participation, migrations, cultural minorities, economic justice, social justice, and intergenerational justice. Together they constitute two constellations dealt with, in this collection of essays by leading scholars, in two different volumes: Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy and Fair Distribution. These essays illustrate each of the spheres, delving into their differences, commonalities, collisions and interconnections. (...) Unlike many writings on global justice, Spheres of Global Justice does not content itself with describing the painful and advantageous effects of the globalization process as being inches per secondo facto a global injustice or a just global order. Rather, this multidisciplinary collection of essays, from a pluralist inspiration, combines empirical analysis with theoretical approaches and ethical principles, paying close attention to two aspects of the effects of the globalization process. These aspects are the causal relationships that lead to such effects and the kinds of obligations, or of normative relationships between global rights and correlative duties, that applies to each specific individual case. This volume illustrates how diverse global obligations are, and how they can be, grounded in diverse relationships (identity, ability to provide help, causal responsibility, past injustices, protection of agency and promotion of independence, et cetera). These essays also demonstrate that an ethical global approach has not only international or transnational, but also domestic, local and interpersonal dimensions. (shrink)

This study analyses to what extend and under what circumstances layoffs are accepted in Germany. Principles of distributive justice and rules of procedural justice form the theoretical framework of the analysis. Based on this, hypotheses are generated, which are tested empirically in a telephone survey conducted between East and West Germans in 2004 (n = 3036). The empirical analysis accounts for the different points of views of implicated stakeholders and impartial spectators. Key findings are: (1) The management of a company (...) can increase the acceptance of layoffs if the employees get some participation rights. (2) For impartial spectators generous compensation for those made redundant leads to a higher degree of perceived fairness. But job alliances are not even preferred to layoffs without measures to soften the blow of job loss. (3) Implicated stakeholders accept job alliances and perceive wage cuts as more fair than layoffs. However, compensation does not have the expected impact. (shrink)

The authors argue that a free market paradigm facilitates wealth creation but does little to distribute that wealth in a just manner. In order to achieve the social goal of distributive justice, the concept of a fair market is introduced and explored. The authors then examine three drivers that can help improve the lives of all people, especially the poor: civil society, its institutions, and business. After exploring the roles these drivers might play in developing fair markets, we describe three (...) enablers that serve as catalysts for change: the effects of globalization, the impact of technology, and the emergence of entrepreneurial activity. We conclude by making recommendations for establishing fair markets and provide exemplars of two firms that embody the arguments made in the article. (shrink)

Due to constraints on institutional capacity and financial resources, the road to universal health coverage (UHC) involves difficult policy choices. To assist with these choices, scholars and policy makers have done extensive work on criteria to assess the substantive fairness of health financing policies: their impact on the distribution of rights, duties, benefits and burdens on the path towards UHC. However, less attention has been paid to the procedural fairness of health financing decisions. The Accountability for Reasonableness (...) Framework (A4R), which is widely applied to assess procedural fairness, has primarily been used in priority-setting for purchasing decisions, with revenue mobilization and pooling receiving limited attention. Furthermore, the sufficiency of the A4R framework’s four criteria (publicity, relevance, revisions and appeals, and enforcement) has been questioned. Moreover, research in political theory and public administration (including deliberative democracy), public finance, environmental management, psychology, and health financing has examined the key features of procedural fairness, but these insights have not been synthesized into a comprehensive set of criteria for fair decision-making processes in health financing. A systematic study of how these criteria have been applied in decision-making situations related to health financing and in other areas is also lacking. This paper addresses these gaps through a scoping review. It argues that the literature across many disciplines can be synthesized into 10 core criteria with common philosophical foundations. These go beyond A4R and encompass equality, impartiality, consistency over time, reason-giving, transparency, accuracy of information, participation, inclusiveness, revisability and enforcement. These criteria can be used to evaluate and guide decision-making processes for financing UHC across different country income levels and health financing arrangements. The review also presents examples of how these criteria have been applied to decisions in health financing and other sectors. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that established responses to the demandingness objection fail to acknowledge an alternative explanation of the intuitive pull of this objection for a significant subset of norms being subject to it. This is the class of imperfect collective duties, which give rise to conceptually distinct objections from fairness that nonetheless permeate many clear examples of intuitively problematic moral demands. Such duties obtain where it is morally required to attain a certain outcome O, yet obtaining O (...) does not require each moral agent to do as much as they individually can but instead requires a finite amount of effort that can be variously allocated to different agents – think of classic collective action problems such as protesting against an unjust policy, lobbying a government, donating to disaster relief, or hosting refugees. -/- In such cases, our collective ability to attain O grounds a collective duty C to attain O, but this collective duty can be translated into various schemes of individual duties P to contribute towards O. Accordingly, this decomposition of C raises a problem of distributive justice. In fact, many intuitive objections to unfair distributions in such cases can be readily accounted for with the conceptual apparatus of prominent theories of distributive justice, but not by standard theories of interpersonal morality. For instance, the moral relevance of the fact that performing a composite duty P is more burdensome for agent A than for agent B can readily be explained in luck-egalitarian terms. Yet both utilitarians and contractualists could not account for this fact independently of an appeal to the demandingness objection, provided that the moral importance of the outcome attainable through P still trumps reasons against it that are due to the burden borne by the agent. -/- Put briefly, then, we need to clearly distinguish objections that morality demands _too much_ of me from objections that morality demands too much _of me_. Doing so is likely to make accepting the demandingness of morality properly construed more intuitively plausible, perhaps as mitigated by certain existing responses. (shrink)

When there are equally strong claimants for a scarce good, lotteries are often argued to be a fair method of allocation. This paper reproduces four of the views on the fairness of lotteries that have been presented in the literature: the distributive view; the preference view; the actual consent view; and the expressive view. It argues that these four views cannot offer plausible explanations for the fairness of lotteries. The distributive view is argued to be inadequate because, even (...) though receiving expectations to a good is of value to the participants, this value cannot plausibly make a contribution to the satisfaction of a participant’s claim. Both the preference and actual consent views are argued to be implausible because they lead to accepting procedures as legitimate that fail to correspond with what a claim is. Finally, it is contended that the expressive view identifies a value that is relevant to respecting equal claimants, but that cannot plausibly be related to a procedure’s fairness. The paper concludes by maintaining that an equal treatment view can accept all the valid insights from these four views without needing to accept their untenable implications. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure. Although there are similarities between the documents, they vary considerably in how much weight their respective authors place on the different criteria that they propose. Since most (...) of the recommendations do not come with ethical justifications, analysing them requires that one traces back these criteria to their underlying theories of distributive justice. In the literature, COVID-19 triage has been portrayed as a value conflict solely between utilitarian and egalitarian elements. While these two accounts are indeed the main antipodes, I shall show that in fact all four classic theories of distributive justice are involved: utilitarianism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and communitarianism. Detecting these in the documents and classifying the suggested criteria accordingly enables one to understand the balancing between the different approaches to distributive justice—which is crucial for both managing the current pandemic and in preparation for the next global health crisis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn light of the large recent inflow of refugees to the EU and the Commission’s efforts to relocate them, I raise the question of what a fair distribution of refugees between EU countries would look like. More specifically, I consider what concerns such a distributive scheme should be sensitive to. First, I put forward some arguments for why states are obligated to admit refugees and outline how I believe the EU should respond to the refugee crisis. This involves, among (...) other things, resettling a proportion of refugees from countries neighbouring Syria in the EU. Second, I consider how the intake into the EU should be distributed between member states, that is, the shares different countries can be expected to admit. I discuss the relevance of a number of different factors that may be claimed to affect such shares, including population size, GDP, number of refugees admitted so far, unemployment rate, country-specific costs and cultural ‘closeness’. Third, I consider whether the distributive scheme should be restricted to reflect specific states’ responsibility for creating refugees in the first place, levels of racism and xenophobia, and whether other states are required to pick up the slack if some refuse to admit their fair share. (shrink)

In this article, I develop and defend a prioritarian principle of justice for the distribution of educational resources. I argue that this principle should be conceptualized as directing educators to confer a general benefit, where that benefit need not be mediated by improved academic outcomes. I go on to argue that it should employ a metric of all-things-considered flourishing over the course of the student's lifetime. Finally, I discuss the relationship between my proposed prioritarian principle and the meritocratic principle (...) that it is presumed to supplement. (shrink)

This paper presents an exercise in the formalization of political principles, by taking as its theme the concept of distributive justice that Karl Marx advanced in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. We first summarize the content of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Next, we transcribe the core of Marx’s presentation of the concept of distributive justice. Following, we present our formalization of Marx’s conception. Then, we make use of that formal analysis to confront Marx’s principle of distributive justice (...) with John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness, and the principles of distributive justice that derive from it. Finally, we discuss methodological issues relative to, and implications of, the way of formalizing political principles introduced here. (shrink)

In this article I explore two accounts of the Fallacy of Many Questions made famous by the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" The accounts are from the works of Lennart Aqvist and Noel Belnap, and the two authors differ in their accounts of the fallacy. Then I give my own account based on understanding a facet of erotetic logic, i. e., the logic of questions.

In a controlled laboratory experiment, we found evidence for our predictions that participants who received fair distributive treatment were more likely to lie to give a supervisor a good performance evaluation than those treated unfairly, and those who received unfair distributive treatment were more likely to steal money from a supervisor than those treated fairly. We further proposed that the presence of an ethical code of conduct would moderate these relationships such that when the code was present these relationships would (...) be weaker than when the code was absent, but we failed to find support for these moderating effects. Our findings suggest that the relationship between distributive justice and unethical behavior is likely more complex than previously considered. Both researchers and managers may benefit from a broader understanding of the factors that motivate and inhibit unethical behaviors intended to benefit and harm supervisors and/or organizations. (shrink)

Drawing on the Huainanzi (The Master of Huainan), this article delineates an ancient Chinese understanding of distributed leadership. Accordingly, distributed leadership advocates the distribution of task that combines responsibility and authority; and the harmonious co-existence of the empowerment of others and positional authority. The distribution of responsibility and authority is undertaken by an exemplary leader who inspires others through one’s moral character and influence. Furthermore, distributed leadership infuses responsibility with positional, social and moral authority; harmonises the personal and (...) interpersonal qualities of leaders; and reinforces rational persuasion with role-modelling by the leaders. The notion of distributed leadership that is informed by the Huainanzi contributes to the existing literature by addressing a prominent challenge and a prevailing misconception concerning this leadership construct. In addition, the proposed account guides leaders to revamp organisational structure, implement staff deployment policies and lead on the basis of fairness and moral leadership. (shrink)

Cosmopolitans hold that our duties of distributive justice to others do not stop at borders. Darrel Moellendorf is among those who defend the view that principles of distributive justice are applicable beyond borders. He suggests as a principle of international justice the global difference principle, which allows inequalities in the distribution of wealth and resources only if they are to the greatest advantage of the least advantaged individuals. In this paper, I try to indicate that Moellendorf’s argument for the (...) global difference principle is far from sustaining it. Instead, I argue for a minimum floor principle of distributive justice on the basis of the idea that each person ought to have an equal standard of living with respect to the fulfillment of their basic interests. I also propose the principle of contribution backed up by the principle of fair equality of opportunity, aiming to equalize background conditions of a competition for socially favored positions, as the basic principles of a complete account of global distributive justice.Kozmopolitanisti drže da se naše dužnosti distributivne pravednosti prema drugima ne zaustavljaju na granicama. Darrel Moellendorf je među onima koji brane gledište da su načela distributivne pravednosti primjenjiva s onu stranu granica. Kao načelo međunarodne pravednosti on predlaže globalno načelo razlike, koje nejednakosti u raspodjeli bogatstva i resursâ dopušta samo ako su one u najveću korist najlošije stojećih individua. U ovome članku pokušavam pokazati da Moellendorfov argument u prilog globalnog načela razlike to načelo nimalo ne potkrepljuje. Umjesto toga argumentiram u prilog načela distributivne pravednosti minimalne razine na osnovi zamisli da bi svaka osoba trebala imati jednaki standard življenja s obzirom na ispunjenje njezinih osnovnih interesa. Ujedno kao osnovna načela potpunog opisa globalne distributivne pravednosti predlažem načelo doprinosa poduprto načelom pravične jednakosti mogućnosti, koje stremi izjednačavanju pozadinskih uvjeta natjecanja za društveno favorizirane pozicije. (shrink)

The present research isolates the fairness assessment of the process used by the retailer to set a price, as well as the distributive fairness of the price compared to the price that others are offered, and examines the combined effect of procedural fairness and distributive fairness on overall price fairness. Two experimental studies examine procedural and distributive fairness effects on overall price fairness. In study 1, procedural fairness and distributive fairness are (...) manipulated and found to interact to bring about overall price fairness. In study 2, suspicion toward the seller is found to mediate the relationship between procedural fairness and overall price fairness when the price is disadvantageous. (shrink)

The main aim of this study is to analyse how time use, individual resources, distributive justice and gender ideology influence perceptions of fairness concerning housework and gender equality. The analyses are based on survey data as well as on an interview study, both including Swedish couples. The quantitative results show that it is only factors connected to time use that are significantly correlated to both perceptions of fairness concerning division of household labour and gender equality. Although the qualitative (...) results in part confirm this picture, they also illustrate the complexity of concepts like fairness and equality. The interviews show that there are several factors and mechanisms at work in influencing perceptions of fairness and equality that were not possible to see from the quantitative analysis alone. (shrink)

Traditional contractarian theories based upon the theory of rational choice suffer from a number of well-known problems. For example, in positing the initial choice problem, the outcome selected by rational agents depends upon the specification of the choice situation, the range of alternatives the agents may choose from, and the nature of the rational agents themselves. Modifying any one of these three parameters likely alters the choice outcome, creating difficulties for social contract theorists who attempt to base a theory of (...) normativity upon such a choice. I describe a new form of contractarian theories, which I call evolutionary contractarianism. Although evolutionary contractarianism still seeks to ground a theory of normativity in the individual choices of rational agents, it recognizes both that agents are, at best, only boundedly rational, and that the dynamics of interaction between rational agents cannot be ignored. I explicitly concentrate on developing an evolutionary contractarian theory for norms of fair division in two bargaining games, laying a general framework which may in principle be extended to norms of fair division in other contexts. (shrink)

Distributional fairness of corporate distributions is an important social issue linked to accounting for equality. Value added and the information contained in the value added statement can conceptually be regarded as a reflection of how the company is managed for all stakeholders. We investigate value added information published in sustainability reports to determine if the information provided is useful for assessing distributional fairness between stakeholders. We find that the value added information disclosed lack conciseness, comparability and understandability. The (...) divergence is considerable and the explanations of the disclosed information so limited that the usefulness of the value added disclosures must be questioned. Our results suggest several obfuscating techniques in the disclosure of value added information, including disclosing information that is conceptually compromised, resulting in comparability issues and disclosing information that can’t be verified by reconciling back to the financial statements. Our findings have clear ethical and moral implications as they stress the societal issue of distributional fairness. It seems that companies are either reluctant to provide value added information that is useful, or deliberately use value added disclosures to obfuscate. Information reflecting distributional fairness is therefore compromised. (shrink)

For a significant number of patients, there exists no, or only little, interest in developing a treatment for their disease or condition. Especially with regard to rare diseases, the lack of commercial interest in drug development is a burning issue. Several interventions have been made in the regulatory field in order to address the commercial disinterest in these conditions. However, existing regulations mainly focus on the provision of incentives to the sponsors of clinical trials of orphan drugs, and leave unanswered (...) the overarching question about the rightful place of orphan drugs in resource allocation systems. In this article, we analyse the ethical aspects of funding research and development in the field of rare diseases. We then propose an ethical framework that can help health policy makers move forward in the difficult matter of fairly allocating resources for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases. (shrink)

Three recent research reports by Topping and Trickey, by Fair and colleagues, and by Gorard, Siddiqui and Huat See have produced data that support the conclusion that a Philosophy for Children program of one-hour-per-week structured discussions has a marked positive impact on students. This article presents data from a follow up study done three years after the completion of the study reported in Fair et al.. The data show that the positive gains in scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test were (...) still present and had not faded after three years. Given the strength of these confirmations of the positive durable impact of the P4C program of structured discussions and given the relatively low cost of implementing the P4C program, it is recommended that it become a standard part of the school curriculum. (shrink)

The ideal of distributive justice as a means of ensuring fair distribution of social opportunities is a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory. Feminists from various disciplines have developed arguments to support the redistribution of the work of care through institutional mechanisms. I discuss the limits of such distribution under the conditions of theories that do not idealize human agents as independent beings. People’s reliance on care, understood as a response to needs, is pervasive and infuses almost all human (...) interaction. I argue that the effect of care on shaping the social opportunities of all individuals is huge, although often invisible. Much of the optimism of theories of distributive justice comes from ignoring or downplaying the way in which care influences most factors of social success. Jonathan Wolff distinguished between three types of resources whose fair distribution is important: internal, external and structural. Care, I argue, does not fit well in any of these types. Inseparably interwoven with relational realities, care cuts across these categories and thus poses a challenge to the feasibility of equal chances. I focus on the under-analyzed issue of bad care and show how difficult it is to dismantle legacies of bad care. Their effect on even close-to-ideal social arrangements is too significant to be disregarded, yet very difficult to tackle through institutional mechanisms. A commitment to certain elements of individual ethics – as opposed to merely political institutions – is required in order to bridge the gap between ideal theories of justice and feasible practical aims. (shrink)

We report the results of a questionnaire study on the fair distribution of indivisible goods. We collected data from three different sub ject pools, first- and second- year students ma joring in economics, law students, and advanced economics students with some background knowledge of fairness theories. The purpose of this study is to assess the empirical relevance of various fairness criteria such as inequality aversion, the utilitarian principle of maximizing the sum of individual payoffs, the Rawlsian “maximin” (...) principle of maximizing the payoff of the worst-off individual, and the criterion of envy-freeness. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that Rawls’s duty of assistance offers an incomplete picture of our international social and economic responsibilities. I will start by presenting the two main interpretations of the ‘Rawlsian circumstances of egalitarian distributive justice’ – the first requiring the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of cooperation, the second the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of interaction with the will – and then show that none of them rules out the applicability of international principles of egalitarian (...) distributive justice. My argument will draw on societies’ participation in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). So, in the second section I will show that even though this organization is not endowed with a centralized coercive authority, its participants are asked to accept significant constraints on their behaviour and are therefore owed a special justification for these constraints. I will also suggest that the alleged voluntariness of this organization may not only be contested (especially when developing societies are involved), but may also not be sufficient to rule out requirements of distributive equality. In the third section, I will show that, as any system of cooperation, the WTO gives rise to requirements of fairness and that, given the purpose it claims to serve, not all inequalities that can be traced back to so-called ‘domestic’ factors can be considered justified. More specifically, I will argue that the fairness of the WTO requires that all its participants be given a fair chance of benefiting from global market competitions, and that this is likely to entail significant egalitarian distributive duties among societies. (shrink)

Healthcare package decisions are complex. Different judgements about effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and disease burden influence the decision-making process. Moreover, different concepts of justice generate different ideas about fair distribution of healthcare resources. This paper presents a decision model that is used in medical school in order to familiarise medical students with the different concepts of justice and the ethical dimension of making concrete choices. The model is based on the four-stage decision model developed in the Netherlands by the Dunning Committee (...) and the discussion that followed its presentation in 1991. Having to deal with 10 medical services, students working with the model learn to discern and integrate four different ideas of distributive justice that are integrated in a flow chart: libertarian, communitarian, egalitarian and utilitarian. (shrink)

Causation has traditionally been analyzed either as a relation of nomic dependence or as a relation of counterfactual dependence. I argue for a third program, a physicalistic reduction of the causal relation to one of energy-momentum transference in the technical sense of physics. This physicalistic analysis is argued to have the virtues of easily handling the standard counterexamples to the nomic and counterfactual analyses, offering a plausible epistemology for our knowledge of causes, and elucidating the nature of the relation between (...) causation and physical science. (shrink)