Showing papers on "Economic Justice published in 1983"

Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality

Abstract: * Complex Equality * Membership * Security and Welfare * Money and Commodities * Office * Hard Work * Free Time * Education * Kinship and Love * Divine Grace * Recognition * Political Power * Tyrannies and Just Societies

The Economics of Justice

Abstract: Richard A. Posner is probably the leading scholar in the rapidly growing field of the economics of law; he is also an extremely lucid writer. In this book, he applies economic theory to four areas of interest to students of social and legal institutions: the theory of justice, primitive and ancient social and legal institutions, the law and economics of privacy and reputation, and the law and economics of racial discrimination. The book is designed to display the power of economics to organize and illuminate diverse fields in the study of nonmarket behavior and institutions. A central theme is the importance of uncertainty to an understanding of social and legal institutions. Another major theme is that the logic of the law, in many ways but not all, appears to be an economic one: that judges, for example, in interpreting the common law, act as if they were trying to maximize economic welfare. Part I examines the deficiencies of utilitarianism as both a positive and a normative basis of understanding law, ethics, and social institutions, and suggests in its place the economist's concept of \"wealth maximization.\" Part II, an examination of the social and legal institutions of archaic societies, notably that of ancient Greece and primitive societies, argues that economic analysis holds the key to understanding such diverse features of these societies as reciprocal gift-giving, blood guilt, marriage customs, liability rules, and the prestige accorded to generosity. Many topics relevant to modern social and philosophical debate, including the origin of the state and the retributive theory of punishment, are addressed. Parts III and IV deal with more contemporary social andjurisprudential questions. Part III is an economic analysis of privacy and the statutory and common law rules that protect privacy and related interests-rules that include the tort law of privacy, assault and battery, and defamation. Finally, Part IV examines, again from an economic standpoint, the controversial areas of racial and sexual discrimination, with special reference to affirmative action. Both Part III and Part IV develop as a subtheme the issue of proper standards of constitutional adjudication by the Supreme Court.

Health Care Needs and Distributive Justice

Abstract: A theory of health care needs should serve two central purposes. First, it should illuminate the sense in which we—at least many of us—think health care is “special” and that it should be treated differently from other social goods. Specifically, even in societies in which poeple tolerate (and glorify) significant and pervasive inequalities in the distribution of most social goods, many feel there are special reasons of justice for distributing health care more equally. Some societies even have institutions for doing so. To be sure, others argue it is perverse to single out health care in this way, or that if we have reasons for doing so, they are rooted in charity, not justice. In any case, a theory of health care needs should show their connection to other central notions in an acceptable theory of justice. It should help us see what kind of social good health care is by properly relating it to social goods whose importance is similar and for which we may have a clearer grasp of appropriate distributive principles.

An Index of Inequality: With Applications to Horizontal Equity and Social Mobility

Abstract: Horizontal equity and social mobility are discussed in terms of a non-utilitarian social welfare function which takes account of the process by which an ex ante distribution is mapped into an ex post distribution (by the tax system, for example). An index of inequality is proposed which decomposes into two components, corresponding to vertical and horizontal equity respectively. A functional form for the social welfare function is derived for the purposes of empirical work, and an application to data for 5895 UK households is presented. The paper contains a theoretical application of the index to a model of optimal taxation. IT IS CONVENTIONAL to assess the merits of alternative public policies in terms of a trade-off between equity and efficiency. In practice, however, a change in, say, the tax system involves three effects. First, it may have incentive or disincentive effects leading to efficiency gains or losses. Secondly, it may alter the distribution of welfare levels. Thirdly, it may alter the ranking of individuals (or households) within the distribution. These three effects correspond to efficiency, vertical equity, and, we shall argue, certain aspects of horizontal equity, respectively, and any assessment of a tax change must take into account all three. The principal assumption of this paper is that government is concerned about the trade-off between these three effects. A strict utilitarian is concerned only with the consequences of an action, and in the evaluation of a particular reform a utilitarian measure of social welfare is defined over the vector of ex post utilities. No account is taken of the process by which the vector of ex ante utilities is mapped into the ex post vector, and no ethical status is awarded to the ex ante distribution. One does not have to adopt an entitlement theory of justice to believe that the utilitarian approach may ignore some relevant considerations, such as the fairness of the redistributive process. A striking example of this arises in the model used by Mirrlees [11] to examine optimal income taxation. In that model individuals have identical preferences (defined over consumption and leisure) and differ only in respect of their potential wage rates or ability levels. Clearly, in the absence of taxation individual utility is an increasing function of ability. Suppose the government uses redistributive lump-sum taxes to achieve the first-best optimum. Then as Mirrlees [11, 12] shows, the first-best optimum for a utilitarian social welfare

Bureaucratic Justice: Managing Social Security Disability Claims

Abstract: "Mashaw has taken ...the Social Security Administration's handling of disability claims ...and from it has drawn, not only a microsopic account and appraisal of SSA's methods and problems, but also a generalized and philosophic inquiry into the nature of the 'justice' such an agency, bureaucratically organized, can dispense. He provides an unorthodox redefinition of what the administrative law that matters is, and fresh insights inot why it matters and how it develops...Brilliant."-Harvey C. Mansfield, Perspective

Wealth and Virtue: Needs and justice in the Wealth of Nations : an introductory essay

Abstract: Since … according to Smith, a society is not happy, of which the greater part suffers – yet even the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority – and since the economic system (and in general a society based on private interest) leads to this wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the unhappiness of society. Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’ No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable… Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the greater, [the labourer's] accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy – and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Bk I, Chs. I and VIII) No clear definition of the identity of political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland can be given unless an account is offered of the central questions which Adam Smith was trying to answer when he wrote the Wealth of Nations . This in turn requires that we should be able to understand the relation between Smith's concerns as a moral philosopher, as a professor of jurisprudence and as a political economist.

Goods and Virtues

Abstract: Preface Introduction Goods and lives Relative virtues Dependent goods, dependent virtues, and the primacy of justice Admirable immorality Goods and reasons Stoicism and the limits of human good Conclusion Index

Justice, Equal Opportunity and the Family

Abstract: Three common assumptions of both liberal theory and political debate are the autonomy of the family, the principle of merit, and equality of life chances. Fishkin argues that even under the best conditions, commitment to any two of these principles precludes the third.

On Spatial Justice

Abstract: This essay reflects on the desirability and possibility of fashioning a concept of spatial justice from notions of social justice and territorial social justice. The contested meaning, rival formul...

Vice in a Vicious Society: Crime and Convicts in Mid Nineteenth-Century New South Wales

Abstract: Between 1788 and 1840 about 80,000 male and female prisoners were transported from the United Kingdom to New South Wales. The social consequences of this migration were most forcefully stated by a British select committee in 1838. The committee sounded the death knell of convict transportation to the colony when it concluded that the system not only failed to reform criminals, but also created societies "most thoroughly depraved, as respects both the character and degree of their vicious propensities". According to the committee's chairman. Sir William Molesworth, there existed in Australia "a state of morality worse than that of any other community in the world". Historians concur that the credibility of the Molesworth Committee was seriously undermined by the prejudices and preconceptions of its chairman and principal witnesses. But they tend to attack the committee's motives rather than to contradict its conclusions. Indeed, Molesworth's portrayal of New South Wales represented less a new departure than the climax of British perceptions of the colony. The committee shared with most accounts of the colony's moral condition two basic assumptions. First, it assumed the existence of a "criminal class". Persons who committed criminal offences were believed to form a class, detached from the working classes, which lived entirely off the proceeds of crime and which threatened social order. As fear of revolutionary violence subsided in Britain, concern with the "criminal" or "dangerous classes" faded. However, the belief that offenders were mainly drawn from a professional criminal subculture prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century. The conception of a "criminal class" provided part of the rationale for transportation, since it assumed that offenders were from a distinct group which could be exported. A second pervasive assumption was that criminality was contagious. Contemporaries summed up the demoralizing influence of criminals in the word "contamination". According to Sydney's superintendent of police, William Augustus Miles, "contamination" resulted because "a convict will talk over his deeds of guilt till crime becomes familiar and romantic". Others believed that the process of contamination was even more insidious. Chief Justice James Dowling, while offering some fatherly advice to his son, warned that, "Vice is so fascinating, that she cannot be looked upon without peril to the beholder .Some held as well that criminal traits were hereditary. Judge Alfred Stephen stated his conviction that "crime descends, as surely as physical properties and individual temperament". These same assumptions, if in a less virulent form, are reflected in the works of major writers on the convict period. Studies by C.M.H. Clark, L.L. Robson and A.G.L. Shaw tend to confirm that most convicts were drawn from a "criminal class". All three writers associate the typical convict with city-dwelling professional criminals. Central to their argument is the high proportion of convicts (estimated at two-thirds of all those transported) with prior convictions in Britain. The hardened and habitual criminals, more or less deserving of their fate, have become the textbook view of convicts exiled to Australia. The interpretations of Clark, Robson and Shaw serve to correct romanticized characterizations of the convicts. "Obvious victims", in the sense of Tolpuddle Martyrs or Canadian Rebels, comprised only a small percentage of the men and women transported. But the convicts' criminality remains debatable. The statistical data available hardly justify the conclusion that most convicts transported to New South Wales had prior convictions. In any case, changes in the judicial system, criminal law, police force and definitions of offences make prior convictions a very dubious indicator of the convicts' character. It should also be remembered that most people transported were convicted of simple larcenies, rather than robberies, burglaries or other offences usually associated with professional criminals. A study of crime in England's Black Country from 1835 to 1860 indicates that most persons prosecuted for criminal offences were normally employed, and although they occasionally supplemented their incomes by theft, they were not members of a "criminal class". Even assuming the reformatory nature of the transportation system, the high proportion of convicts with good records in the colonies appears as further mute testimony against their alleged recidivism. The concept of "contamination" is still more problematic, both because of its vague connotations in nineteenth-century usage, and because it is more subtly translated into historical interpretations. Some historians have accepted uncritically the demoralizing influence of convicts on the honesty and moral standards of the general population. More importantly, convict vices and values such as hard drinking, hard swearing and a hatred for the police are viewed as leaving a lasting imprint on Australian culture.Convict "contamination" becomes in effect a component in the development of a distinctively Australian ethos...

Athenian Popular Religion

Abstract: Most modern studies of Athenian religion have focused on festivals, cult practices, and individual deities. Jon Mikalson turns instead to the religious beliefs citizens of Athens spoke of and acted upon in everyday life. He uses evidence only from reliable, mostly contemporary sources such as the orators Lysias and Demosthenes, the historian Xenophon, and state decrees, sacred laws, religious dedications, and epitaphs. ""This is in no sense a general history of Athenian religion,"" Mikalson writes, ""even within the narrow historical boundaries set. It is rather an investigation of what might be termed the consensus of popular religious belief, a consensus consisting of those beliefs which an Athenian citizen thought he could express publicly and for which he expected fo find general acceptance among his peers."" What emerges in Mikalson's study is a remarkable homogeneity of religious beliefs at the popular level. The topics discussed at length in Athenian Popular Religion include the areas of divine intervention in human life, the gods and human justice, gods and oaths, divination, death and the afterlife, the nature of the gods, social aspects of popular religion, and piety and impiety. Mikalson challenges the common opinion that popular religious belief in Athens deteriorated significantly from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth century B.C. ""The error in understanding the development of Athenian religion has arisen, it seems to me, because scholars have failed to distinguish properly between the differing natures of the sources for our knowledge of religious beliefs in the earlier and later periods,"" Mikalson writes. The difference between those sources ""is more than simply one of years. It is a difference between poetry and prose, with all the factors which that difference implies.

The Biological Nature of the State

Abstract: The origin of the state, long at the center of political science, can be greatly illuminated by the contemporary approach in evolutionary biology known as “inclusive fitness theory.” Natural selection is now analyzed using cost-benefit models akin to rational actor models in economics, game theory, and collective choice theory. The utility of integrating these approaches is illustrated by using the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons to outline a general model for the evolution of political and legal institutions. This perspective also shows how traditional political philosophers explored “archetypical” problems that are easily translated into scientific terminology. It is thus possible to link biology to the study of human behavior in a nonreductionist manner, thereby generating new empirical hypotheses concerning the environmental correlates of social norms. Ultimately, such a unification of the natural and social sciences points to a return to the classical view that law and justice are not matters of pure convention, but rather are grounded on what is right “according to nature.”

Correlates of the Just World in Britain

Abstract: (1983). Correlates of the Just World in Britain. The Journal of Social Psychology: Vol. 121, No. 1, pp. 145-146.

Option for the Poor; a Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching

Abstract: Donal Dorr, an Irish missionary priest, has taught theology and philosophy in Ireland and has been a pastoral teacher many African countries as well as Brazil. His other books include Spirituality and Justice, Integral Spirituality, and The Social Justice Agenda.

Revolt Against Regulation: The Rise and Pause of the Consumer Movement

Abstract: "Michael Pertschuk brings an insider's insight to the tumultuous years of the sixties and seventies, when the consumer protection bells rang from Washington throughout the land. An engrossing story of corporate versus consumer battles over health, safety, and the economic rights of Americans. The future of consumer justice is given wisdom by this eyewitness account." (Ralph Nadar). "This is a book that should be ready by everyone with a stake in regulation of business by bureaucrats in Washington. Whether you agree or disagree with his point of view - and I often disagree - you can always count on Mike Pertschuk to be provocative, stimulating, and certainly controversial." (Howard H. Bell, President, American Advertising Federation). "There is a lot of businessmen [sic] to disagree with in this book. It's troublesome and disturbing - not the least because Mike Pertschuk is a tough adversary. But any businessman [sic] - or citizen - who wants to know exactly how the politics of regulation work would be well advised to read this book - and be prepared." (George Koch, President and Chief Executive Officer Grocery Manufacturers of America). "Must reading for everyone who is a student of the consumer movement, past, present, and future, and its interaction with the government, media, private sector, et al. It is a superb 'How To' manual on tactics, and presents a rare inside look at how things really get done in that place called Washington, D.C." (Calvin Pond, Vice President, Public Affairs Division Safeway Stores, Inc.). "Pertschuk's book is outstanding; it is a beautiful blend of personal, firsthand observation and political and policy analysis." (Aaron Wildavsky, University of California, Berkeley). "A rare picture of how government works...sprightly, lucid, and appealing ...remarkably candid and honest, not only in revealing the labyrinthian interplays of politics but in disclosing the author's own attitudes and motives...An extraordinary document." (Charles Lindblom, Yale University). "There is no more controversial figure in Washington than Michael Pertschuk..." (Senator John Danforth).

Current social psychological perspectives on justice

Abstract: In the context of a comparative review of four recently published books on justice, the author provides an assessment of the current state of the field. He specifically discusses the role of equity theory, the variety of distributive principles, the role of justice in social behaviour, the broadening of perspectives in the field, and some remaining gaps and weaknesses in the literature. In concluding, the work of the leading theorists in the area is evaluated.

Was Martin Luther King a Marxist

Abstract: Martin Luther King, Jr., has seldom figured in the Left's pantheon of Socialist heroes. To many of his contemporaries he seemed a typical product of the 'black bourgeoisie': a middle-class preacher from a middle-class family who pursued middle-class goals. Although an eloquent and courageous crusader for racial justice, his ultimate vision as expressed for example in his famous 'I Have A Dream' oration seemed to be the integration of the Negro into the existing structure of society; capitalism was not at issue. When he talked about the need for cleanliness, godliness and thrift, he sounded like Booker T. Washington, that epitome of bourgeois values who, at the turn of the century, had exhorted blacks to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. King's own admiration for Washington, whom many blacks viewed as an arch 'Uncle Tom', was widely-known and openly advertised. By the mid-1960s, at the height of his fame and success, King struck many of his contemporaries as an essentially conservative figure. He was always 'amenable to compromise', wrote one commentator, 'with the white bourgeois political and economic Establishment'. Lawrence Reddick, King's friend and biographer, had anticipated such verdicts years earlier. 'Neither by experience nor reading is King a political radical', he wrote in 1959. 'There is not a Marxist bone in his body.' True, King adopted a much more radical stance during the last two years of his life, but he never seemed to wander very far from the political mainstream. To the student radicals of the 'New Left', as well as to the angry advocates of 'Black Power', King remained a staid, unexciting figure, the ineffectual exponent of an outdated brand of liberalism.' It seems scarcely credible, then, that King was, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained, a self-confessed Marxist. Did the FBI's ubiquitous wiretaps really record the civil rights leader saying, 'I am a Marxist', and that he