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Nozick's entitlement theory of justice
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... The admission that acquisition must be legitimized by fulfilment of a condition concerning other people's welfare implies that general welfare is at least as fundamental as other criteria. So, entitlement theory is dependent on welfare as well as desert theory (Arrow, 1978; Davis, 1982; Mack, 1982). In fact, Locke's whole approach included utilitarian presumptions: the case for private property rested on it being a necessary condition for economic improvement; and his principle of original acquisition was not held to cover unused or misused holdings -it did not convey absolute rights (O'Neill, 1982: 317). ...
A major review and synthesis of contemporary debates on the ethics of distribution, redistribution and socio-economic development, including discussion of the views of Robert Nozick, F.A. von Hayek and Deepak Lal, and the extension of these debates into the fields of international relations and international cooperation.
The study of social justice asks: what sorts of social arrangements are equitable ones? But also: how do we derive the inequitable arrangements we often observe in human societies? In particular, in spite of explicitly stated equity norms, categorical inequity tends to be the rule rather than the exception. The cultural red king hypothesis predicts that differentials in group size may lead to inequitable outcomes for minority groups even in the absence of explicit or implicit bias. We test this prediction in an experimental context where subjects divided into groups engage in repeated play of a bargaining game. We ran 14 trials involving a total of 112 participants. The results of the experiments are significant and suggestive: individuals in minority groups do indeed end up receiving fewer resources than those in majority groups.
The last paragraph of Kenneth Arrow’s Nobel Lecture is characteristic of the man:
The philosophical and distributive implications of the paradox of social choice are still not clear. Certainly there is no simple way out. I hope that others will take this paradox as a challenge rather than as a discouraging barrier (Arrow 1973a; 1974).
Seit geraumer Zeit ist der moderne Sozialstaat1 in den Brennpunkt der öffentlichen Diskussion und in das Kreuzfeuer wissenschaftlicher und politischer Kritik geraten. Das auffällige und soziologisch erklärungsbedürftige Phänomen daran ist die beobachtbare Konvergenz in den Grundzügen der Kritik am modernen Wohlfahrtsstaat, wie sie von konservativer, liberaler und marxistischer Seite angemeldet wird.
The concept of rights, long a staple of political thought, has undergone a revival since the Second World War and has again been subject to critical examination by philosophers. Indeed, the dozen or so years from 1966 to the present have seen an unusual number of important studies in the theory of rights. This philosophical interest has coincided with an increased awareness of rights, and their problematic character, both in the national political arena and in the world of international affairs. Witness the various rights movements of the sixties and seventies and the passage of civil rights legislation, with attendant judicial and bureaucratic monitoring, on the domestic side; internationally we have had the two United Nations Covenants (1966, entered into force 1976), the Helsinki agreement, the recent Belgrade and Madrid conferences, the rights movement in Socialist states, and of course the Carter administration’s expressed concern for human rights.
‘Development ethics’ is attracting increasing attention. An association has existed since 1984 which now uses the acronym IDEA (International Development Ethics Association). Already fairly well established in the Americas, it is extending more widely. IDEA’s president recently published a survey article in ‘World Development’ (Crocker, 1991a), citing a notable number of relevant publications.
It is no part of economics, certainly not of modern post-1870 economics, to argue the purpose of the economy’s production.1 The purpose of the economy is the welfare of the consumers, public and private. In no sense is mere production as such a proper measure, rather, it has to be production for the ends that people want. Output, income, and consumption are important aims and preconditions for achieving other goals of individuals; that is, they are only a part of what people live for.
In simple action theory, when people choose between courses of action, they know what the outcome will be. When an individual is making a choice "against nature," such as switching on a light, that assumption may hold true. But in strategic interaction outcomes, indeterminacy is pervasive and often intractable. Whether one is choosing for oneself or making a choice about a policy matter, it is usually possible only to make a guess about the outcome, one based on anticipating what other actors will do. In this book Russell Hardin asserts, in his characteristically clear and uncompromising prose, "Indeterminacy in contexts of strategic interaction ... Is an issue that is constantly swept under the rug because it is often disruptive to pristine social theory. But the theory is fake: the indeterminacy is real." In the course of the book, Hardin thus outlines the various ways in which theorists from Hobbes to Rawls have gone wrong in denying or ignoring indeterminacy, and suggests how social theories would be enhanced--and how certain problems could be resolved effectively or successfully--if they assumed from the beginning that indeterminacy was the normal state of affairs, not the exception. Representing a bold challenge to widely held theoretical assumptions and habits of thought, Indeterminacy and Society will be debated across a range of fields including politics, law, philosophy, economics, and business management.
We argue that political theory, regardless of whether it is “positive” or “ normative” in nature, is structured and unified by social choice theory. We point out that the central conclusions of social choice theory are context- free and thus apply to any aggregation of multiple factors. The generality of the basic framework of social choice theory implies its results are relevant to any consideration of trade-offs and, because any interesting theory must deal with a situation in which there are at least two plausible predictions or prescriptions, these results unify all interesting theories of politics.
Two psychological theories of moral behavior and justice--Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development and Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory--and two normative frameworks for justice are presented and evaluated in this paper. Moral Foundations Theory derives its fundamental ideas from the works of David Hume, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Grahm, etc. The two normative frameworks are: Transcendental Institutionalism Framework, and Realization- Focused Comparative Framework. Transcendental Institutionalism derives its inspiration from the works of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls, while the Realization-Focused Comparative Framework originated from the works of political philosophers, mathematicians, and economists such as Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Kenneth Arrow, and Amartya Sen. Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development shows increasing role for reason as a person goes through various stages of moral development. The Moral Foundations Theory provides a primary role to instincts and emotions while the last two frameworks provide a greater role to reason and reasoning than to emotions and instincts. The strengths and weaknesses of each theory or framework are evaluated, and where appropriate, one theory is compared with other justice and moral conceptualizations. While descriptive theories are useful in understanding moral behavior and justice, normative theories are required to determine rules for collective action. Arguments are presented that the Transcendental Institutionalist Framework is superfluous and should be replaced entirely by the Realization-Based Comparative Framework for practical attempts to reduce manifest injustice and to enhance justice. This research reaches across several disciplines to discuss and evaluate descriptive and normative theories of moral behavior and justice. In particular, the Social Choice Theory, while well-known in economics and political science, is not well known in other disciplines. This study brings the Social Choice Theory to the forefront for situations where a group or society wants to select among various alternatives by basing its decisions on the individual preferences of its members using principles of justice. As an example, attempts to form a government of the people, for the people, and by the people would also fall within the domain of the Social Choice Theory.
Robert Nozick's book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia provides one of the most influential statements of the argument that the welfare state is lacking in moral justification because it infringes property rights. Most previous criticisms of Nozick's work have been concerned to reject the concept of abstract individual rights that forms his starting point. While sound, these criticisms may have little influence on those who find the concept of abstract rights plausible. In this paper Nozick's assumptions about rights are accepted and it is shown that a much more extensive state than Nozick's minimal defensive agency can be supported. Under the specified conditions this stage does not violate these rights. If so much of the argument of those who accept abstract rights is undermined.
The conclusions on libertarianism Robert Nozick reaches are appropriate for a bygone era. In a modern market economy, libertarianism requires that employable people have the option of taking up a publicly provided income instead of employment. This is the only way to compensate the involuntarily unemployed that a market economy requires and to ensure that all employment is voluntary. Taxation on voluntary exchanges is unobjectionable because it alters prices, not property, and no one has a right to a particular price. The best way to provide state incomes for the capable unemployed is through a negative income tax.RésuméLes conclusions de libertarisme que tire Nozick valentpour une époque révolue. Dans une économie de marché moderne, le libertarisme exige que les gens aptes au travail puissent opter pour un revenu de source publique plutôt que pour un travail. Voilà le seul moyen de compenser les sans-emploi involontaires que requiert l'économie de marché et de s'assurer que chacun travaille volontairement. Imposer les échanges volontaires est acceptable parce que cela affecte les prix, non la propriété, et que nul n'a droit à un prix prticulier. Le meilleur moyen pour l'État defournir un revenu aux sans-emploi aptes au travail passe par un impôt sur le revenu négatif.
Self-ownership is the moral principle that one ought to be left free to do whatever one chooses so long as non-consenting other persons are not thereby harmed, in specified ways. The principle is foundational for one tradition of political liberalism running from Locke to Nozick. This paper aims first to clarify this principle, in part by contrasting it with a kindred principle of ‘self-benefit’, and secondly to develop its implications for justified private property ownership. These implications are more meagre than is usually supposed. The principle is indeterminate in ways that undermine its claim to adequacy. Finally, further reasons for rejecting the self- ownership principle are suggested.
The publication in 2000 of Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner's elegant two-volume collection of essays on Left-Libertarianism formally marks the emergence over the past two decades of a theory of distributive justice that seeks to harness the premises of the libertarian right to the political agenda of the egalitarian left. Its proponents have sided with the libertarian right in favor of a strong right of self-ownership, which - like those on the right - they have taken to imply (contra the left) that individuals have a right to the differential value of their talents. But they have sided with the egalitarian left in holding that individuals have no right to a disproportionate share of the external resources of the world - a view (borrowing further from the right) that they have housed in Locke's famous proviso that each may appropriate only so much of the world's resources as leaves others with "enough, and as good" a share. This marriage of self-ownership of one's talents with an egalitarian sharing rule for the external resources necessary to exploit them has led many left libertarians to quite egalitarian policy prescriptions - in many cases indistinguishable from what has issued from left/liberal egalitarian quarters. This review essay assesses the two halves of the left libertarian project: a commitment to self-ownership, coupled with a strong reading of the Lockean proviso. It argues that "self-ownership" cannot do the work that left libertarians have assigned to it, any more than it could do the cognate work for the right. As a result, left libertarians, like their counterparts on the right, are pulling some very thick conclusions out of some very thin premises, a process that leaves them the latitude to find in the principle of "self-ownership" pretty much whatever they are looking for. It argues as well that the robust interpretation of the Lockean proviso that left libertarians have deployed to distance themselves from the right assumes a view of fairness that threatens to collapse left libertarianism into more conventional strains of egalitarianism on the left.
It was widely thought, at the time, that Arrow's 1951 Impossibility Theorem sounded the death-knell for welfare economics in its Edgeworth-Pigou and Pareto–Bergson versions. Yet the social-welfare theory of social choice behavior is today the subject of more research than ever. It is as though a couple once written off as incompatible had turned up again, older and wiser yet still going at it with the same hopefulness as before. Herewith a guide, selective and informal in view of the space and time available, to this renascent field.
This chapter highlights the question whether second-best saving is greater or smaller than first-best saving when given future saving is non-optimal from the standpoint of the present generation. The chapter presents the postulation that all generations expect each succeeding generation to choose the saving ratio that is second-best in its eyes. This somewhat game-theoretic model leads to the concept of an equilibrium sequence of saving-income ratios having the property that no generation acting alone can do better and all generations act so as to warrant the expectations of the future saving ratios. The chapter presents a comparison of this equilibrium and the first-best optimum. The concept and calculation of the second-best optimum is of interest even if that analysis does not explain actual national saving because society as a whole has no notion of such an optimum.
It has been conjectured that no system of voting can preclude strategic voting--the securing by a voter of an outcome he prefers through misrepresentation of his preferences. In this paper, for all significant systems of voting in which chance plays no role, the conjecture is verified. To prove the conjecture, a more general theorem in game theory is proved: a game form is a game without utilities attached to outcomes; only a trivial game form, it is shown, can guarantee that whatever the utilities of the players may be, each player will have a dominant pure strategy.
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