Freedom of occupational choice

Ratio

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 440-453

  Otsuka, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949171201     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2008.00412.x     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. See, for example, Robert van der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs, 'Universal Grants versus Socialism: Reply to Six Critics', Theory and Society, 15 (1986): 723-57, at pp. 727 and 757 n. 12
2. Cohen offers a critique of such a freedom-based defence of an unconditional basic income in G. A. Cohen, 'Notes on the Universal Grant Proposal', Basic Income Studies, 1 (2006): 1-3
3. It is worth recalling that, in a different context, Cohen endorses an 'offensive tastes' objection to welfare egalitarianism, which he characterizes as follows: The offensive tastes criticism of welfarism is that the pleasure a person takes in discriminating against other people or in subjecting others to a lesser liberty should not count equally with other satisfactions in the calculus of justice. From the point of view of justice, such pleasures deserve condemnation, and the corresponding preferences have no claim to be satisfied, even if they would have to be satisfied for welfare equality to prevail. (G. A. Cohen, 'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice', Ethics, 99 (1989): 906-44, at p. 912.) Note that Cohen draws no distinction between those who can and those who cannot help but have their offensive tastes. Presumably he thinks such preferences have no claim to be satisfied even if they are incorrigible
4. In his reply to an earlier version of this paper, Cohen advanced the view that it would be unjust to force an inegalitarian into a different occupation because it is not legitimate to impose on people ideas of justice with which they can reasonably disagree. . . . In other words, one cannot 'suppose that all the urgency and dignity of justice applies to one's own political interpretation of justice' (Williams, In the Beginning was the Deed, p. 125), even if one thinks it correct. So one can't coerce the disbeliever in equality
5. ('Reading: Reply to Mike Otsuka', manuscript, pp. 13-14)
6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 53
7. See Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
8. See also Michael Otsuka, 'Prerogatives to Depart from Equality', in Anthony O'Hear, ed., Political Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 95-111
9. See Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 1, sec. II
10. See also Otsuka, 'Prerogatives to Depart from Equality'
11. See Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality, pp. 15-22
12. Warren Quinn, 'Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing', Philosophical Review, 98 (1989): 287-312, at pp. 308-10
13. Cf. Scanlon: 'It may be true, as Nozick claims, that there is a continuum of interferences extending from taxation to forced labor, each foreclosing a few more options than the preceding. But the fact that there is such a continuum is no reason why we must be indifferent between any two points along it.' (Thomas Scanlon, 'Nozick on Rights, Liberty, and Property', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1976): 3-25, at pp. 7-8.)