THE ROLE OF A MERIT-PRINCIPLE IN DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2017

This paper proposes a genealogy of the concept of merit wants coined by Richard A. Musgrave in his Theory of Public Finance (1959). The concept of merit wants can only be understood as a complement to the concept of public goods. I suggest that Musgrave invented the concept to apprehend some considerations that have been left out in the process of consolidation of the concept of public good. The narrow definition of the latter could not account for important state responsibilities that have been asserted by many economists. I attempt to reconstruct Musgrave’s intellectual background. First, I select examples of arguments for state intervention from authors influential in Musgrave’s formative period (J.S. Mill, H. Sidgwick, E. Sax, H. Ritschl, G. Cassel, A. Wagner). Second, I argue that the invention of the concept in the 1950s reflected contemporary concerns for redistributive policies. I show that critics of the New Welfare approach (G. Colm, A. Hansen, W. Heller, H. Bowen) have held similar views, which were also in line with the liberal policy spirit of the post-war era in the United States.

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2017

In this paper I seek to assess the responses provided by several theories of sufficientarian justice in cases where individuals hold different conceptions of rationality. Towards this purpose, I build two test cases and study the normative prescriptions which various sufficiency views offer in each of them. I maintain that resource sufficientarianism does not provide a normatively plausible response to the first case, since its distributive prescriptions would violate the principle of personal good and that subjective-threshold welfare sufficientarianism as well as objective-threshold welfare sufficientarianism committed to the headcount claim do not provide normatively plausible responses to the second case, since their distributive prescriptions would violate the principle of equal importance. I then claim that an objective-threshold welfare sufficientarian view committed to prioritarianism under the threshold offers the normatively plausible response to both cases and therefore resists the challenge raised by scenarios that involve differential conceptions of rationality. ___________________________________________________________________________

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

W e pr esent the r esults ofa questionnair e study in Belgium,Bur kina Faso and I ndonesia f ocusing on the pr oblem ofthe j ust allocation ofan indivisible good. The f or mal axioms pr oposed in social choice theor y ar e helpf ul in str uctur ing the r esponse patter ns. I nter individual di er ences can be inter pr eted in a meaningf ul way in ter ms ofbasic intuitions about deser t,e ciency and compensation. Belgian students ar e most r esour ceegalitar ian,Bur kinese students attach a lar ge weight to innate capacities, I ndonesian students f ocus on actual pr oduction. The cr ucial no-envy cr iter ion is suppor ted by a maj or ity ofr espondents,but this maj or ity becomes small ifther e is an unavoidable conflict between no-envy and the "r esponsibility"r equir ement ofthe stand-alone upperbound.

PLoS ONE, 2014

Merit and justice play a crucial role in ethical theory and political philosophy. Some theories view justice as allocation according to merit; others view justice as based on criteria of its own, and take merit and justice as two independent values. We study experimentally how these views are perceived. In our experiment subjects played two games (both against the computer): a game of skill and a game of luck. After each game they observed the earnings of all the subjects in the session, and thus the differences in outcomes. Each subject could reduce the winnings of one other person at a cost. The majority of the subjects used the option to subtract. The decision to subtract and the amount subtracted depended on whether the game was one of skill or luck, and on the distance between the earnings of the subject and those of others. Everything else being equal, subjects subtracted more in luck than in skill. In skill game, but not in luck, the subtraction becomes more likely, and the amount larger, as the distance increases. The results show that individuals considered favorable outcomes in luck to be undeserved, and thus felt more justified in subtracting. In the skill game instead, they considered more favorable outcomes (their own as well as others') as signal of ability and perhaps effort, which thus deserved merit; hence, they felt less motivated to subtract. However, a larger size of the unfavorable gap from the others increased the unpleasantness of poor performance, which in turn motivated larger subtraction. In conclusion, merit is attributed if and only if effort or skill significantly affect the outcome. An inequality of outcomes is viewed differently depending on whether merit causes the difference or not. Thus, merit and justice are strongly linked in the human perception of social order.

Econometrica, 2006

The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of 'income equality'. We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resourceallocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a class of rules which equalize across individuals some index of resources and welfare. Consequently, we provide an ethical rationalization for the many applications in which such indices have been used (e.g., the 'human development index,' 'index of primary goods,' etc.)

2004

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We show that John Harsanyi's and Ronald Dworkin's conceptions of the veil, when modeled formally, recommend wealth allocations in conflict with the prominently espoused view that priority should be given to the worse off with respect to wealth allocation. It follows that those who believe that justice requires impartiality and priority must seek some method of assuring the former other than the veil of ignorance. We propose that impartiality and solidarity are fundamentals of justice, and study the relationship among these two axioms and priority. We characterize axiomatically resource allocation rules that jointly satisfy impartiality, solidarity, and priority: they comprise a class of general indices of wealth and welfare, including, as polar cases, the classical equal-wealth and equal-welfare rules. JEL numbers: D63.

2007

Standard welfarist axiologies do not care who is given what share of the good. For example, giving Wlodek two apples and Ewa three is just as good as giving Wlodek three and Ewa two, or giving Wlod ...

A Theory of Bioethics, 2021

Justice is a matter of giving individuals what they are due. Four broad concepts of justice can be distinguished. Retributive justice gives people what they are duefor example, punishmentin virtue of their wrongful acts. Restorative justice gives people what they are duefor example, compensationin virtue of past wrongs they experienced. Distributive justice gives people what they are due independent of past wrongful actions. It includes the distribution of valuable resources (such as medical care and job opportunities), the distribution of burdens (such as taxation and jury duty), and the assignment and enforcement of certain legal rights (such as regarding marriage and inheritance). Finally, in contrast to these concepts of substantive justice, there is also procedural justice, which concerns the fairness of the processes by which decisions regarding matters of substantive justice are made. Our main interest here is in distributive justice, though, as will become clear, restorative justice may also be relevant to some of the applications of our views on distributive justice. Beneficence concerns our duties to benefit other individuals. Being benefited is the converse of being harmed: someone is benefited when they are made better off than they would have been otherwise (Chapter ). We can distinguish three types of duties of beneficence. The imperfect duty of beneficence is a duty to contribute substantially, relative to one's ability, to assist individuals in need over the course of one's life. Individual agents have discretion over exactly how and when this duty is discharged. The perfect duty of beneficence or duty of rescue is a duty that all agents have to provide large benefits to others when they can do so at a sufficiently low cost to themselves. Finally, there are special duties of beneficence that attach to agents in virtue of their relationships and the roles they occupy, such as the special duties of parents to their children or of clinicians to their patients.