Choice and circumstance

Ratio

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 296-312

  Steiner, Hillel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949465814     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00046     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. ix
2. See especially, Ronald Dworkin, 'What is Equality? Part I: Equality of Welfare', and 'What is Equality? Part II: Equality of Resources', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 10 (1981), 185-246, 283-345
3. also 'What is Equality? Part III: The Place of Liberty', Iowa Law Review, 73 (1987), 1-54
4. The second one is briefly explored in Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 224-5
5. In this sense, the present argument encompasses that set of persons' adversities that is specifically excluded from consideration in Derek Parfit's 'Equality and Priority', which addresses only those incurred 'through no fault or choice of theirs'; cf. note 5, p. 204, above
6. Allan Gibbard, 'Natural Property Rights', Nous, X (1976), 77-86, p. 84
7. cf. 'Egalitarianism: Partial, Counterproductive and Baseless', p. 290, above. But this seems insufficient to satisfy his own fundamental 'Moralised Rule of Pareto' - that no one may gain by imposing losses on others - inasmuch as such entitlement (i) denies to others the non-contractual liberty they previously had to use that resource and (ii) precludes that resource's non-contractual acquisition by any more productive user of it. David Miller similarly resists the idea of egalitarian entitlements to natural resources, arguing that, as production goods, 'their value depends upon the knowledge and capacities of the particular people who use them'
8. see 'Equality and Justice', pp. 226-7, above. But in standard economic theory, the value of a production good is quite independent of the value of the use to which it is put and is entirely a function of the most valuable use to which it could be put. Nor, in any case, is this sufficient to entitle its user to its value, though it does furnish grounds for entitling him/her to the value of that use, i.e. to the difference between value of the product and the value of that production good
9. An additional source of revenue for the global fund is (the full value of) dead persons' estates. The argument for a 100% levy on bequests is itself derived not from the historical entitlement structure as such, but rather from the choice-based conception of rights on which that structure relies; cf. Steiner, An Essay on Rights, ch's. 7(C) and 8
10. John Roemer, 'Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Examples', (Davis: University of California, June 1995)
11. 'Equality of Opportunity: A theory and examples', (Davis: University of California, December 1995)
12. a symposium containing a considerably abbreviated version of his argument, along with a set of varyingly critical replies, appears in John Roemer et al, 'Equality of Opportunity', Boston Review, XX (April/May 1995), 3-16. Hereafter, these are respectively cited as Roemer (1), Roemer (2) and Roemer (3)
13. An earlier version of this theory appears in 'A Pragmatic Theory of Responsibility for the Egalitarian Planner', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 22 (1993), 146-66
14. reprinted in John Roemer, Egalitarian Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
15. Roemer (1), pp. 2-3
16. Roemer (2), p. 11
17. A consequence is deemed adverse (benign) by virtue of its causing a person's condition to fall below (above) some statistically average point on a scale measuring opportunity for what Roemer, following, G.A. Cohen, designates 'advantage', as a generic term referring to outcomes which are defined over any of income, satisfaction, life expectancy, welfare or the probability of leading a life deemed successful; cf. Roemer (1), p. 3
18. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (ed.) Peter Laslett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 287-289
19. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (ed.) John Ladd, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 35-39
20. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (London: John Chapman, 1851), ch. VI
21. Henry George, Social Problems (London: Henry George Foundation, 1931), ch. IX
22. H.L.A. Hart, 'Are There Any Natural Rights?', Philosophical Review, lxiv (1955), 175-91
23. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), ch. 3
24. Lansing Pollock, The Freedom Principle (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), ch. 1
25. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, offers 'equal basic liberty' as lexically prime among the several rules constitutive of his conception of justice
26. Hillel Steiner,'Capitalism, Justice and Equal Starts', Social Philosophy & Policy, 5 (1987), 49-71, pp. 55-59