This text explores the place to locate the cut between those inequalities for which it is fair to hold one responsible, and those for which it is not. The argument traces a thread of intellectual history, identifying a rejection of strong property rights which we inherit from Locke, and find in contemporary defenders of entitlements such as Nozick.
"Luck egalitarianism"--the idea that justice requires correcting disadvantages resulting from brute luck--has gained ground in recent years and is now the main rival to John Rawls's theory of distributive justice. Health, Luck, and Justice is the first attempt to systematically apply luck egalitarianism to the just distribution of health and health care. Challenging Rawlsian approaches to health policy, Shlomi Segall develops an account of just health that is sensitive to considerations of luck and personal responsibility, arguing that people's health and the health care they receive are just only when society works to neutralize the effects of bad luck. Combining philosophical analysis with a discussion of real-life public health issues, Health, Luck, and Justice addresses key questions: What is owed to patients who are in some way responsible for their own medical conditions? Could inequalities in health and life expectancy be just even when they are solely determined by the "natural lottery" of genes and other such factors? And is it just to allow political borders to affect the quality of health care and the distribution of health? Is it right, on the one hand, to break up national health care systems in multicultural societies? And, on the other hand, should our obligation to curb disparities in health extend beyond the nation-state? By focusing on the ways health is affected by the moral arbitrariness of luck, Health, Luck, and Justice provides an important new perspective on the ethics of national and international health policy.
This volume presents new essays investigating a difficult theoretical and practical problem: how do we find a place for individual responsibility in a theory of distributive justice? Does what we choose affect what we deserve? Would making justice sensitive to responsibility give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality?
Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice.
How should we decide which inequalities between people are justified, and which are unjustified?One answer is that such inequalities are only justified where there is a corresponding variation in responsible action or choice on the part of the persons concerned. This view, which has become known as 'luck egalitarianism', has come to occupy a central place in recent debates about distributive justice. This book is the first full length treatment of this significant development in contemporary political philosophy.Each of its three parts addresses a key question concerning the theory. Which version of luck egalitarian comes closest to realizing luck egalitarian objectives? Does luck egalitarianism succeed as a view of egalitarian justice? And is it sound as an account of distributive justice in general?The book provides a distinctive answer to each of these questions, along the way engaging with the leading theorists identified in the literature as luck egalitarians, such as Richard Arneson, G. A. Cohen, and Ronald Dworkin, as well as the most influential critics, including Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, Samuel Scheffler, and Jonathan Wolff.Key Features*Presents a critical survey of already classic debates about responsibility, equality and justice*Provides a sustained engagement with luck egalitarianism's critics*Stakes a distinctive position on the key questions regarding luck egalitarianism
Can the need for incentives justify inequality? Starting from this question, Frank Vandenbroucke examines a conception of justice in which both equality and responsibility are involved. In the first part of the inquiry, which explores the implementation of that conception of justice, the justification of incentives assumes that agents make personal choices based only upon their own interests. The second part of the book challenges the idea that a normative conception of distributive justice can be based on that traditional assumption, i.e. that personal choices are not the subject matter of justice. Thus, Vandenbroucke questions the Rawlsian idea that the primary subject of a theory of justice is the basic structure of society, and not the individual conduct of its citizens. For a society to be really just, the ethos of individual conduct has to serve justice. Non-mathematical readers can skip the formal model proposed in Chapter 3 and understand the rest of the book.
In this lively and accessible book, Matt Matravers considers the role of responsibility in politics, morality and the law. In recent years, responsibility has taken a central place in our lives. In politics, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush have claimed that individual responsibility is at the centre of their policy agendas. In morality and the law, it seems just that people should be rewarded or punished only for things for which they are responsible. Yet responsibility is a hotly contested concept. Some philosophers claim that it is impossible, while others insist on both its possibility and importance. This debate has become increasingly technical in the philosophical literature, but it is seldom connected to our practices of politics and the law. Matravers asks, What are we doing when we hold people responsible in deciding questions of distributive justice or of punishment?. By addressing this question, he not only shows how philosophy can help in thinking about current political and legal controversies, but also how we can keep hold of the idea of responsibility in an age in which we are increasingly impressed by the roles of genetics and environment in shaping us and our characters.
The Anatomy of Justice argues for a reorientation in liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice. Gina Schouten argues that the orientation she proposes supports compelling resolutions to longstanding disputes and difficulties internal to egalitarianism, as well as compelling defenses of liberalism against feminist and egalitarian critics. On the orthodox approach, a theory of liberal egalitarian justice comprises a set of normative principles to guide the design and workings of social institutions. Schouten argues that we should instead think of theory's most important product as evaluative discernment. Theorizing should aim to discern with as much precision as possible the achievements, or values, by realization of which a society can be more rather than less just. Schouten offers a weighted specification of the values of justice, which she calls “the anatomy of justice,” and she makes the case for the anatomy by letting it flex its muscles. First, the anatomy of justice resolves difficulties internal to liberal egalitarianism, in part by deflating longstanding debates, like the debate about whether equality is fundamentally a distributive or a relational value. Second, the anatomy provides systematic and plausible guidance for addressing injustice. By precisifying the values of justice, the anatomy supports a unified liberal egalitarianism that could be developed to describe the ideally just society, but that also, and more importantly, provides guidance for improving an unjust society. That's because the very same values that are optimally realized in a just society also provide guidance in circumstances of profound injustice, even if the normative principles those values underpin differ across circumstances. Because the anatomy offers a modular framework for theorizing justice across (just and) unjust circumstances, it is more broadly and concretely helpful than normative theory is often thought to be. Finally, the anatomy underpins compelling defences against criticisms of liberalism from the left. The book aims to demonstrate that feminist liberal egalitarianism is viable and valuable for progressive politics. To make the case, Schouten shows that the anatomy of justice serves as a possibility proof for what liberal egalitarianism can do. She assembles the fundamental, definitive commitments of liberal egalitarianism in a novel way to reveal liberalism's radical potential.
Today, many people agree that the EU lacks solidarity and needs a social dimension. This debate is not new, but until now the notion of a 'social Europe' remained vague and elusive. To make progress, we need a coherent conception of the reasons behind, and the agenda for, not a 'social Europe', but a new idea: a European Social Union. We must motivate, define, and demarcate an appropriate notion of European solidarity. We must also understand the legal and political obstacles, and how these can be tacked. In short, we need unequivocal answers to questions of why, what, and how: on that basis, we can define a clear-cut normative and institutional concept. That is the remit of this book: it provides an in-depth interdisciplinary examination of the rationale and the feasibility of a European Social Union. Outstanding scholars and top-level practitioners reflect on obstacles and solutions, from an economic, social, philosophical, legal, and political perspective.
