Top

Published in:

2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. Liberty and Just Deserts: Slaves, Dynasties, and Moral Agents

Author : Joseph de la Torre Dwyer

Published in: Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

As the reader might fear that the Just Deserts proposal runs roughshod over individual liberty in an effort to redistribute, this chapter addresses two potential objections. First, many modern liberals are perfectly comfortable with taxes but reject lump-sum endowment taxes as described in the last chapter—allegedly this constitutes illegitimate coercion or force in a way that typical income taxes do not. Second, conservative libertarians generally argue that, today, only outcomes agreed to by valid consent by each individual may produce distributive justice. Thus, this chapter further clarifies the scope of individual endowment in order to overcome the liberal objection and further shows that we may adjust the canonical parameters to guarantee that no individual is ever “coerced” to earn more than they would choose under a laissez-faire policy. The chapter then sketches an argument that conservative libertarianism provides dynasties, not individuals, with freedom while unearthing the luck-egalitarian side of Locke and undercutting Nozick’s appropriation rule due to its indeterminacy.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

previous chapter Efficiency and Just Deserts: Economists’ Big Trade-Off

next chapter Economy and Desert

Otsuka (2003), 2.

Sadurski (1985), 123.

For this view of liberty, cf. Sugin (2011).

My criticism applies equally to “Lovely” and “Lonely.” Van Parijs (1995), 64.

Note in all cases, pace Sher, that it is irrelevant whether “most people” have a set of tastes or distastes, but it is Laurel’s endowment (tastes and talent) that is “morally significant.” Sher (1987), 108.

Pace Anderson, the principle of desert is strictly devoid of paternalism but there is nothing forbidding us from supplementing a principle of desert with one of sufficiency. Anderson (1999); One may notice this solution resembles that of Fleurbaey, “Min Egalitarian-Equivalence.” Fleurbaey (2008), 115.

Technically, Nozick states three axioms but I find them equivalent to one. Putting it in more economic terms, it is singularly by looking at flows that we can determine whether stocks are just. Nozick (2013), 151.

Taking a more extreme stance than Nozick, Hayek states that the distribution of economic resources via market mechanisms is not even a subject of justice. “There can be no distributive justice where no one distributes.” Hayek (1978), 58.

Gibbard (1976); Grunebaum (1987); Cohen (1995); Roemer (1996).

Nozick (2013), 166.

McLeay et al. (2014).

Fernholz and Fernholz (2014); Molander (2016), Ch. 4; Nash (1950); Piketty (2014).

Roemer (1996), 207.

Bowles et al. (2005b); Mazumder (2005).

I have used 300 as a ratio of S&P 500 CEO pay to average worker pay, 0.6 as the coefficient of intergenerational income elasticity (assumed such, perhaps unrealistically, to be constant across the distribution from mean to tails), and a range of the mean ±10% as “similarity.” Cf. Davis and Mishel (2014); Mazumder (2005).

Piketty (2014), 351.

Olsaretti (2004), 91.

Locke (1997 (1689)), secs. 25–51.

For example, Locke famously finds liberty even in the absence of autonomous effort. Locke (1690), bk. II, chapter XXI.

Locke (1997 (1689)), sec. 27.

Also, cf. Steiner (2009).

Vallentyne (2000), 5.

Nozick (2013), 175.

“For on reflection it is seen that no labor really ‘produces’ any material thing, but only adds to its value...” Sidgwick (1999), 51; for a similar suggestion, cf. Brody (2000), 35–36.

Otsuka (2003), chap. 1.

Vallentyne (2000), 8–10.

Sadurski (1985), 123.

Gibbard (2000), 25–26.

Of course, a judgement of “worse off” always depends upon the chosen comparator and there are other comparators beyond the Lockean proviso. Lamont (1997), 29.

Otsuka (2003), 120.

Rawls (1999 (1971)), 89.

Cf. Pojman and McLeod (1999), 5.

26 U.S. Code § 63 - Taxable Income Defined. 2000.

Aaberge, Rolf, Magne Mogstad, and Vitorocco Peragine. 2011. Measuring Long-Term Inequality of Opportunity. Journal of Public Economics 95 (3): 193–204.CrossRef

Abramovitz, Mimi. 1996. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Adler, Matthew. 2011. Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRef

Allaire, J.J., et al. 2018. rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R. R package version 1.11.

Almås, Ingvild, et al. 2011. Measuring Unfair (in)Equality. Journal of Public Economics 95 (7–8): 488–499.CrossRef

Alperovitz, Gar, and Lew Daly. 2008. Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back. New York, NY: The New Press.

Alstott, Anne, and Bruce A. Ackerman. 1999. The Stakeholder Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Anderson, Elizabeth. 1999. What Is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109 (2): 287–337.CrossRef

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2015. The Fundamental Disagreement Between Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians. In Distributive Justice and Access to Advantage: G. A. Cohen’s Egalitarianism, ed. Alexander Kaufman, 21–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. 2nd ed. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Arneson, Richard J. 1989. Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare. Philosophical Studies 56 (1): 77–93.CrossRef

Arneson, Richard J. 1990. Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare. Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (2): 158–194.

Arneson, Richard J. 2003. The Smart Theory of Moral Responsibility. In Desert and Justice, ed. Serena Olsaretti, 233–258. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arneson, Richard J. 2004. Luck Egalitarianism Interpreted and Defended. Philosophical Topics 32 (1/2): 1–20.CrossRef

Arneson, Richard J. 2007. Desert and Equality. In Egalitarianism: New Essays on the Nature and Value of Equality, ed. Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, 262–293. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Atkinson, Anthony Barnes. 2015. Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRef

Atkinson, Anthony Barnes, and Joseph E. Stiglitz. 1980. Lectures on Public Economics. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.

Baker, Michael, and Gary Solon. 1999. Earnings Dynamics and Inequality Among Canadian Men, 1976–1992: Evidence from Longitudinal Income Tax Records. Working Paper 7370. NBER - National Bureau of Economic Research.

Barrett, Malcolm. 2018. ggdag: Analyze and Create Elegant Directed Acyclic Graphs. R package version 0.1.0.

Barry, Brian. 1965. Political Argument. New York, NY: Humanities Press.

Barry, Brian. 1991. Liberty and Justice: Essays in Political Theory. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BEA - Bureau of Economic Analysis. 2015. Table 6.6D. Wages and Salaries Per Full-Time Equivalent Employee by Industry. http://bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=9&step=1#reqid=9&step=3&isuri=1&904=2005&903=201&906=q&905=2014&910=x&911=0.

Becker, Gary S. 1988. Family Economics and Macro Behavior. American Economic Review 78: 1–13.

Beckert, Jens. 2008. Inherited Wealth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRef

Bedau, Hugo. 1967. Radical Egalitarianism. In Nomos IX, ed. R. Pennock and J. Chapman, 3–27. Palo Alto, CA: Atherton Press

Behrman, Jere R., and Paul Tarbman. 1985. Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the United States: Some Estimates and a Test of Becker’s Intergenerational Endowments Model. The Review of Economics and Statistics 67 (1): 144–151.CrossRef

Benshalom, Ilan, and Kendra Stead. 2010. Values and (Market) Valuations: A Critique of the Endowment Tax Consensus. Northwestern University Law Review 104 (4): 1511–1558.

Benus, Jacob, and James N. Morgan. 1975. Time Period, Unit of Analysis, and Income Concept in the Analysis of Income Distribution. In The Personal Distribution of Income and Wealth. National Bureau of Economic Research Studies in Income and Wealth, ed. James D. Smith, vol. 39. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Björklund, Anders, Markus Jäntti, and John E. Roemer. 2011. Equality of Opportunity and the Distribution of Long-Run Income in Sweden. Discussion Paper 5466. Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA).

BLS - Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2014. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm.

BLS - Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2015. National Compensation Measures. In Handbook of Methods. Washington, DC: BLS - Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Title: Liberty and Just Deserts: Slaves, Dynasties, and Moral Agents
Author: Joseph de la Torre Dwyer
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21125-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-21126-4

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21126-4_6