Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a distinctive aim for the economic domain—rather than a mere implication of more general egalitarian or progressive principles—rests on minimal state, right-libertarian foundations. As such, racial equality is a strange focus for the left.

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarily unequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem where subjects either know or do not know their endowments, we find impartial behavior to be a stable pattern. Subjects either compensate for initial inequalities fully or not at all in both conditions, and they do so more often when they do not know their endowment than when they know it. Moreover, the type and the size of the good to be distributed also affect the frequency of impartial behavior.

All children have rights to care, education, food, shelter, and more besides. The creation of children is, therefore, the creation of costly entitlements. But who, other than the parents, can be expected to share these costs? And how much can they be expected to contribute? To date, political theorists have only attended to the first question. But without a well-reasoned answer to the second question, we won’t know whether sharing should be generous or very little, equal or unequal. In this paper, I provide the first examination of the extent of cost sharing required if children are public goods. I argue that viewing children as public goods places important limits on the total costs to be fairly shared by non-parents. This casts doubt on the view, assumed by many political theorists, that the costs of all children’s entitlements must be equally shared between parents and non-parents.

Public sector allocative decisions should reflect, as far as possible, the preferences of those affected by the decisions. Conventional benefit–cost analysis (BCA) will simply aggregate individuals’ private willingness-to-pay (WTP) over all affected individuals to estimate the total benefits of a policy that delivers a public good. Given the nature of a public good, it is not unreasonable to consider that an individual may have altruistic preferences over the consumption of the public good by others. In this paper, we set out the theoretical underpinnings for a new citizen-based WTP, informed by political philosophy. Our model extends the standard social utility model (Bergstrom, 2006) of WTP for a public good when individuals are altruists by incorporating a Veil of Ignorance (VoI; Harsanyi, 1955). Our findings show that our WTP (Citizen) correctly includes altruistic as well as distributional preferences of individuals in society into WTP for use in a BCA. When WTP (Citizen) are aggregated for use in a BCA, equal weight is given to each individual’s preference and the BCA will correctly identify potentially Pareto-improving projects in a consistent manner.

Recently, convergence liberals, such as Kevin Vallier, argue that the principle of social insurance could be publicly justified. Our paper challenges this marriage of convergence liberalism and welfare state. We begin by examining Vallier’s three reasons for the principle of social insurance: risk aversion, injustice and the promotion of political trust. We then argue that all these reasons are intelligibly objectionable. After examining five possible responses that convergence liberals may offer, this paper concludes that the principle of social insurance is not conclusively justified in the convergence conception of public justification.

In her groundbreaking paper “Having too much” Ingrid Robeyns introduces the principle of “limitarianism,” arguing that it is morally impermissible to have more resources than needed for leading a maximally flourishing life. This paper focuses on one component of limitarian theory, namely the nature of the riches threshold, and critiques Robeyns’ absolute threshold, that limits wealth above what is needed for satiating human flourishing. The paper then suggests an alternative, relative threshold for determining excessive wealth, and also argues that limitarianism is best understood as a set of wealth-limiting principles, each with its own threshold, justifications, and conditions for operation.

Standard accounts of what makes exploitation wrong ground its wrong in distributive unfairness: when A exploits B he wrongs her by taking a greater share of the benefits from their interaction than he ought. I argue that this standard account does not succeed; distributive unfairness is neither the sole, nor the primary wrong of exploitation. I assume that distributive unfairness is pro tanto wrong. However, I argue that in situations where transactors’ consent to a transaction is morally valid, it is also morally transformative and overrides distributive unfairness’s pro tanto wrong. Thus, wrongful exploitation requires morally invalid consent.

A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within the context of economic exchange more generally, there are natural principles concerning such exchanges which generate puzzles for that view. The puzzles, I argue, are especially acute for meritocrats who conceive of justice in wages in terms of desert. Additionally, I argue that appealing to dignity (rather than desert) offers better hope of explaining the kinds of injustices in wages that motivate the appeal to desert. In that case, no explanatory gap is left by abandoning the idea that wages can be deserved either, and so, I argue, we have good reason to doubt it.

Research on the relationship between performance and trust is commonplace in social sciences, yet trust in child protection systems (CPS) remains an emerging area of study. This research delves into how three dimensions of performance – distributive justice, procedural fairness, and functional effectiveness – affect trust in CPS in England and Norway, drawing insights from organisational and social psychology literature. A cross-sectional survey collected data from 981 individuals in England and 1,140 in Norway. Results suggest that procedural fairness and the competences indicator of functional effectiveness significantly and positively impact trust in CPS in both countries. Resources significantly influence trust in Norway’s CPS, while distributive justice has no impact on trust in either country’s CPS. These findings hold theoretical and practical implications for trust in CPS.

Almost everyone believes that freedom from deprivation should have significant weight in specifying what justice between generations requires. Some theorists hold that it should always trump other distributive concerns. Other theorists hold that it should have some but not lexical priority. I argue instead that freedom from deprivation should have lexical priority in some cases, yet weighted priority in others. More specifically, I defend semi-strong sufficientarianism. This view posits a deprivation threshold at which people are free from deprivation, and an affluence threshold at which people can live an affluent life, even though their lives may be even further improved beyond that point. I argue that freedom from deprivation in one generation lexically outweighs providing affluence in another generation; in all other cases, freedom from deprivation does not have lexical priority.

When reading contemporary theories of distributive justice, one could easily get the impression that questions of fiscal design are normatively speaking merely instrumental for realizing the distributive ideal. Once the overall conception of justice is settled upon, questions of how the state should arrange its institutions and policies are settled if they effectively and efficiently promote the preferred distribution. I argue that such pure instrumentalism is mistaken in the context of fiscal policy. As a result, there is nothing problematic or morally arbitrary about accepting domain-specific principles of fiscal justice.

This paper introduces a theory of ownership that is rooted in Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship – The Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership. Its central idea is that natural resources are not available to us automatically as other approaches to justice implicitly assume. Before we can use a resource, we need to do preparatory work in the form of making an entrepreneurial judgement on it. This fact, as I argue, makes it possible to put private ownership as a natural right on a firm normative ground and answer many traditional challenges to private property.