Andrew Lister

This article reconsiders the reciprocity objection to unconditional basic income based on the idea that reciprocity is not only a duty but a limiting condition on other duties. If the objection were that unconditionality invites people to neglect contributory obligations arising from a duty of reciprocity, people could ask to opt out of eligibility for the benefit so as to avoid liability to contribution. While market failure provides a reason for mandatory participation in social insurance, it will not justify the generous (if conditional) income support egalitarians favour. To sustain the objection, we need to think of reciprocity a limit on duties of assistance and fair-sharing. In this form, the objection resists the inherited assets response, which holds that we can’t have a duty reciprocate benefits we receive from nature or from previous generations.

This paper mounts a partial defense of the basic structure objection to the egalitarian criticism of productive incentives. The defense is based on the claim that some duties of justice are subject to a reciprocity condition. The paper develops this position via an examination of the debate between Andrew Williams and G. A. Cohen on publicity and incentives. Reciprocity is an intrinsic feature of a relational conception of social justice, not simply a requirement of stability. Not all duties are conditional on reciprocity because some duties are owed to third parties, as well as to their primary targets. Some forms of exploitation may be unconditionally wrong, but not the specific kind of exploitation at stake when talented individuals accept market wages.

This paper compares Joseph Heath’s critique of the just deserts rationale for markets with an earlier critique due to Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. Heath shares their emphasis upon the role of luck in prices based on supply and demand. Yet he avoids their claim that the inheritance of human capital is on a moral par with the inheritance of ordinary capital, as a basis for unequal shares of the social product. Heath prefers to argue that markets do not tend to reward talent as such. The paper raises some doubts about this factual claim, and argues that sweeping the issue of talent under the rug threatens to make our theory of justice less egalitarian than it would otherwise be. The paper also addresses the objection that claims of unfairness based on the arbitrariness of the distribution of innate abilities will undermine self-respect.

Jason Brennan and John Tomasi have argued that if we focus on income alone, the Difference Principle supports welfare-state capitalism over property-owning democracy, because capitalism maximizes long run income growth for the worst off. If so, the defense of property-owning democracy rests on the priority of equal opportunity for political influence and social advancement over raising the income of the worst off, or on integrating workplace control into the Difference Principle's index of advantage. The thesis of this paper is that even based on income alone, the Difference Principle is not as hostile to property-owning democracy as it may seem, because the Difference Principle should not be interpreted to require maximizing long run income growth. The main idea is that it is unfair to make the present worst off accept inequality that doesn't benefit them, for the sake of benefitting the future worst off, if the future worst off will be better off than they are anyway.

Theories of public reason face a dilemma. If their standard of reasonableness is low, the view will be unacceptably anarchic and self-refuting, while if it is high, the exclusion of unreasonable views will manifest unequal treatment. This paper shows how to avoid this dilemma by distinguishing two models of public reason. The coercion model is vulnerable to the worry about anarchy but not self-defeat, while the reasons model is vulnerable to self-defeat but not anarchy. The coercion model can avoid anarchy without idealizing heavily via aggregation of individual policies into packages. The reasons model can avoid self-refutation by making acceptance of public reason one of the conditions for counting as fully reasonable, which is a natural constraint if the justification of the principle is relational.

This paper (forthcoming in Politics, Philosophy & Economics) traces John Rawls’s debt to Frank Knight’s critique of the ‘just deserts’ rationale for laissez-faire, in order to defend justice as fairness against some prominent contemporary criticisms, but also to argue that desert can find a place within a Rawlsian theory of justice, when desert is grounded in reciprocity. The first lesson Rawls took from Knight was that inheritance of talent and wealth are on a moral par. Knight highlighted the inconsistency of objecting to the inheritance of wealth while taking for granted the legitimacy of unequal reward based on differential productive capacity. Rawls agreed that there was an inconsistency, but claimed it should be resolved by rejecting both kinds of inequality, except to the extent they benefitted the worst off. The second lesson Rawls learned from Knight was that the size of one’s marginal product depends on supply and demand, which depend on institutional decisions that cannot themselves be made on the basis of the principle of rewarding marginal productivity. The paper claims that this argument about background justice overstates its conclusion, because the dependence of contribution on institutional set-up is not total. Proposals for an unconditional basic income may therefore have a strike against them, as far as a reciprocity-based conception of desert is concerned. If we follow Knight’s analysis of the competitive system, however, too does the alternative of leaving determination of income up to the market.

This paper addresses the question of when, why, and how duties are appropriately held to be conditional on reciprocity – compliance on the part of others – focusing on the duties associated with the principle of public reason. There are three main ways to conceive of public reason: as unilaterally binding moral principle, as a moral principle that requires assurance of compliance on the part of others, or as social norm compliance with which provides assurance about other duties that are conditional on reciprocity. The paper maintains that public reason in the fundamental sense cannot be a norm intended to stabilize commitment to justice, but is instead a moral principle, albeit one that is conditional on reciprocity because grounded in the idea of mutual respect despite ongoing moral disagreement. It need not follow, however, that public reason is binding only if some minimum proportion of citizens accept the principle, for we can build reciprocity into the principle by stipulating that unanimous acceptability is required only with respect to points of view accepting the principle. If compliance with law is assured at the requisite level (in part through enforcement), then the duties of public reason associated with authorship of law should only be considered conditional on reciprocity in this ‘internal’ sense, which is not proportional but bi-lateral.

This paper aims to clarify what it means for a normative theory to be fact-sensitive, and what might be wrong with such sensitivity, by examining the ways in which "justice as fairness" depends upon facts.  While much of the fact-sensitivity of Rawls's principles consists of innocent limitations of generality, Rawls's appeal to stability raises a legitimate worry about defining justice down in order to make "justice" stable.  If it should turn out that the correct principles of justice are inconsistent with human nature, it might be important for us to recognize that as a feature of human psychology we regret, rather than revising our principles for the sake of stability in a way that obscures the fact that there is anything to regret. Whether or not Rawlsian principles are in fact watered down depends on how one interprets the role of reciprocity in the theory.  Reciprocity can be seen as a fact about human psychology that limits the extent to which justice can be realized where assurance of compliance on the part of others is lacking.  Or it can be seen as a fact about justice, to wit, that its point is to create a relationship of mutual recognition and respect, making strictly unilateral compliance pointless.

Abstract

This comment examines the idea of ‘neutrality of treatment’ that is at the heart of Alan Patten’s defense of minority cultural rights in Equal Recognition. The main issue I raise is whether neutrality of treatment can do without an ‘upstream’ or foundational commitment to neutrality of justification.

Résumé

Ce commentaire se penche sur le concept de « neutralité de traitement » au coeur de la défense des droits des minorités culturelles qu’offre Alan Patten dans son livre Equal Recognition. La principale question que je pose est celle de savoir ce que peut la neutralité de traitement si elle ne repose pas sur un engagement fondamental, en amont, quant à la neutralité de justification.

Jonathan Quong's Liberalism Without Perfection elaborates a generally Rawlsian conception of public justification in order to defend antiperfectionist liberalism.  This critical response raises questions about the link between the two parts of the project.  On the hand, it is possible to reject that demand that reasons for political decisions pass a qualified acceptability requirement even if one is strictly opposed to paternalism.  On the other hand, the commitment to public justifiability does not rule out all perfectionism, if there are some claims about the good that are not reasonably rejectable.

Critics of luck egalitarianism and the "distributive paradigm"  have argued that equality is fundamentally a matter of the character of relationships between persons rather than a pattern in the distribution of material goods. Critics of cosmopolitanism have claimed that principles of distributive justice apply only between persons who are related in particular ways – by co-citizenship, for example.  It is natural to suppose that views that are relational in ground and content will also be relational in scope, limiting egalitarianism to those participating in the relationships in question.  The purpose of this paper is to explore a neglected possibility, which is that the concern for distributive justice might be universal rather than contingent on a morally optional relationship, but limited in the demands it places upon us where a reasonable assurance of reciprocity is lacking.  Principles of distributive justice apply wherever people are interacting, even if they have no choice but to interact, but are grounded in the goal of constituting relationships of mutual recognition as equals, and so partly conditional on compliance by others.  On this view, there is no unilateral duty to share the benefits of cooperation fairly, only a unilateral duty to help establish institutions that will permit fair sharing with a reasonable assurance of reciprocity.

This is the slightly modified text of a lecture that addressed the odd proximity of Hayek and Rawls. The lecture eventually became a paper published in Critical Review (link below).  The CR version backtracks a bit on Hayek's Rawlsian tendencies, particularly with respect to the difference principle, which is less egalitarian when applied intergenerationally (Hayek, Bleeding Heart Libertarians) than intragenerationally (Rawls).

Hayek called the idea of social justice a "mirage", but also said that the differences between himself and Rawls ware "more verbal than substantial." From the left, the argument has been made that if Hayek can agree with Rawls, there's something wrong with Rawls. From the right, Ayn Rand referred to Hayek's views as "poison." In the middle, some hold out hope for a "Rawlsekian" synthesis. The intellectual prospects for such a synthesis are quite good, I think, because at the level of normative principle, Hayek is in many ways a Rawlsian. I will outline four main areas of convergence: the importance of 'pure procedural justice', the irrelevance of merit, the use of a veil of ignorance, and the principle the inequalities should benefit everyone. Hayek manages manages to avoid reaching egalitarian conclusions by making implausible slippery slope arguments about the lack of politically stable intermediate possibilities, between a minimal, nightwatchman state and the totalitarian order that would be necessary to achieve perfect equality, and by equivocating about the meaning of central normative concepts and principles.

The Order of Public Reason is Gerald Gaus's important new statement of justificatory liberalism. However, the book is much more than a refinement of Gaus's political philosophy, as it also attempts to explain and justify social morality. The initial purpose of this essay is to explain how the overall argument is meant to hang together. The paper also identifies four points at which the argument might be challenged, primarily as it relates to justificatory liberalism's "tilt" in favor of classical liberalism, as against social justice liberalism.

This paper tries to reconcile reciprocity with a fundamentally `subject- centred' ethic by interpreting the reciprocity condition as a consequence of the fact that justice is in part a relational value. Duties of egalitarian distributive justice are not grounded on the duty to reciprocate beneﰉts already received, but limited by a reasonable assurance of compliance on the part of those able to reciprocate, because their point is to constitute a valuable relationship, one of mutual recognition as equals. We have unconditional duty to help establish just global institutions, institutions which would allow us to share fairly in the burdens and beneﰉts of global economic cooper- ation, but no unilateral duty to share fairly, where such institutions are not in place. Since non-contribution on the part of those unable to contribute involves no failure of recognition, the disabled do not fall outside the scope of distributive justice.