Does social justice matter? Brian Barry's applied political philosophy

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 391-412

  Arneson, Richard J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34250312122     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/511732     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (12)

1. Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005). References to this book will take the form of page numbers in the text.
2. See Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) and the references to her further work cited in this book.
3. For criticism of equality of opportunity views that are not forgiving in this way, see Marc Fleurbaey, "Equal Opportunity or Equal Social Outcome?" Economics and Philosophy 11 (1995): 25-55.
4. On priority, see Derek Parfit, Equality or Priority? (Lawrence: Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 1995)
5. reprinted in The Ideal of Equality, Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
6. For an argument that equality of money (and by extension any equality of condition) lacks intrinsic moral significance, see Harry Frankfurt, "Egalitarianism as a Moral Ideal," Ethics 98 (1987): 21-43.
7. Barry discusses evidence of marginal tax rates on labor supply. He is right that current evidence does not show a significant effect, but there is an issue as to whether conclusions drawn from rates currently employed in various locales can be extrapolated to hold when the rates enforce the much greater extent of equality that Barry envisages. At any rate, we should also consider the effect of taxes on taxable income. On this issue, see Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 137-38, and the references they cite therein.
8. John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 120.
9. Barry tentatively proposes a sizable unconditional basic income grant as a means to move toward equality within a country, and he criticizes earned income tax credits for low-income persons on the ground that they amount to subsidies to employers of low-wage labor and boost these employers' bargaining power, their ability to impose bad bargains on their low-wage workers. Suppose that the criticism is correct. Still, more needs to be said as to why the basic income grant is the best implementation of Barry's version of social justice. An alternative would be to make the state the employer of last resort, offering decent low-skill, low-wage employment on worthy projects for which there is no market demand to any who want such work.
10. Jeanne-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1775)
11. in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 23-109.
12. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), sec. 81.