Chapter 5 examines the conditions under which people are informed of the pocketbook consequences of a given redistributive policy and act according to their material self-interest in spite of what fairness reasoning prescribes. When stakes are transparent and high, people will disregard their fairness concerns and take the self-interested position instead. This mechanism has the most consequences for policy attitudes shaped by reciprocity beliefs. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 2, on redistribution to issues, many people are cross-pressured, that is, inclined, against their “objective” material interest, to support or oppose a given policy out of fairness concerns. For these individuals, reasoning as an income maximizer can result in a dramatic departure from what fairness reasoning would prescribe. Chapter 5 examines how this simple argument helps explain variations in the income gradient, i.e., differences in the extent to which the rich and the poor disagree on redistributive issues.

Chapter 4 asks to what extent people, when seeking to do the fair thing, also end up doing the self-interested thing. This question raises the possibility that fairness reasoning and the fairness beliefs people hold can lead them to opinions that, on average, align with their economic interest. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the tension between fairness reasoning and material self-interest is most acute in the case reciprocity beliefs and support for redistribution to policies and less so for proportionality beliefs and support for redistribution from policies. Specifically, while proportionality beliefs correlate with someone’s earning potential and risk exposure, reciprocity beliefs do not. As a result, there is a large share of low-income individuals who find a decline in redistribution to fair despite being more likely to be adversely affected by it. Conversely, there is a large share of high-income individuals who find an increase in redistribution to fair despite being unlikely to benefit from it. One reason for the latter is the robust correlation between reciprocity beliefs, on the one hand, and liberal-authoritarian values, on the other.

States and international organizations are central to global governance, and are significant formative agents of justice (and injustice), in advancing, sifting, or undermining principles. Despite their formal authority, states and international organizations cannot be relied upon to promote global justice. States in practice often veil their material self-interest in the language of justice. International organizations too can promote their own interest, as well as adhering rigidly to dominant discourses such as neoliberalism that restrict the kind of justice they can advance. Thus states and international organizations should primarily act as effectors of global justice whose task is to ensure the outcomes determined in more extensive deliberation are implemented. Some of their problematic formative agency aspects can be ameliorated by deliberative democratic means. The Open Working Group that finalized the content of the Sustainable Development Goals is indicative of the possibilities here, as it embodied novel deliberative features that curbed polarization, overcame impasse, and facilitated common-interest justifications. Engagements with civil society of the kind now glimpsed in global climate governance can open international organizations to deliberating competing conceptions of justice. This chapter concludes by showing how states and international organizations might expand their deliberative engagements.