Economic Justice

About: Economic Justice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41600 publications have been published within this topic receiving 661535 citations.

The reality of moral expectations: A sociology of situated judgement

Abstract: The paper offers a modelling of the sense of justice as it is displayed in ordinary situated disputes. While this model accounts for a plurality of legitimate forms of evaluation which are used in the process of critique and justification, it escapes a relativism of values by demonstrating that all these forms satisfy a set of common requirements. The reasonable character of the everyday sense of justice is also anchored in a reality test involving the engagement of objects which qualify for a certain form of evaluation. The paper discusses this model in relation to competing theories of justice, and models of social action and interaction.

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.

Rational Choice, Behavioral Economics, and the Law

Abstract: Jolls, Sunstein, and Thaler wish to use the insights of behavioral economics to improve economic analysis of law, which they believe to be handicapped by its commitment to the assumption that people are rational.1 The editors of the Review have asked me to comment on JST's paper, no doubt because of my identification with rational-choice economics. Since JST complain with some justice that economists and economically minded lawyers do not always make clear what they mean by "rationality," let me make clear at the outset what I mean by the word: choosing the best means to the chooser's ends. For example, a rational person who wants to keep warm will compare the alternative means known to him of keeping warm in terms of cost, comfort, and other dimensions of utility and disutility, and will choose from this array the means that achieves warmth with the greatest margin of benefit over cost, broadly defined. Rational choice need not be conscious choice. Rats are at least as rational as human beings when rationality is defined as achieving one's ends (survival and reproduction, in the case of rats) at least cost. No doubt my definition lacks precision and rigor. But it is good enough to indicate the difference in approach between rational-choice economics and behavioral economics.