Egalitarianism: Partial, counterproductive, and baseless

Ratio

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 280-295

  Narveson, Jan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949137083     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00045     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. For example, if one tries, as does Professor Rawls, to mix liberty principles with equality principles, making the former 'lexically prior' to the latter, the effect of equality could be nil. See the author's 'A Puzzle about Economic Justice in Rawls' Theory,' Social Theory and Practice, 4 (1976), pp. 1-28
2. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), argues along these lines - but arrives, I think, at the wrong conclusions regarding social policy. What he shows, however, is that we can invoke a morality that is the same for all, despite the incommensurability in ways of life among those who are to be subject to that morality
3. David Conway's recent book, Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal (London: Macmillan, 1996), ably discusses communitarian and conservative critiques of this type
4. The contemporary locus classicus for the logic of this situation is David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Gauthier calls it the Lockean Proviso: see Ch. 7
5. Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), Ch. 18, pp. 245-268
6. Derek Parfit, 'Equality or Priority?' - The Lindley Lecture, (Lawrence, Kansas: Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 1991), p. 2
7. and 'Equality and Priority', this volume, p. 203
8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), esp. pp. 100-108
9. I have examined the idea of 'desert' in the context of deserving profits in business, in 'Deserving Profits', in Robin Cowan and Mario J. Rizzo, Profits and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); see especially pp. 61-68, and 73-85
10. See especially David Ramsay Steele, From Marx to Mises (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1992)
11. and Scott Arnold, Market Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)