Social Justice and Individual Ethics in an Open Society
Subtitle: Equality, Responsibility, and Incentives (Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Springer
Published: April 20, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 307
ISBN-13: 9783540416364
Subjects: Practical & applied ethics; Social theory; Sociology; Incentives in industry; Social Justice (Ethics); Business & Economics; Social justice; Politics/International Relations; Moral and ethical aspects; Economics - General; General; Business & Economics / Economics / General; Political Philosophy; Responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism; Social Democracy; Sozialdemokratie; Welfare Economics; Development - Economic Development; Economics - Theory; Ethics & Moral Philosophy
First sentence: Responsibility-sensitive egalitarians consider it unjust for individuals to be disadvantaged relative to others because of personal characteristics for which they are not responsible.
Description: "Can the need for incentives justify inequality? Starting from this question, Frank Vandenbroucke examines a conception of justice in which both equality and responsibility are involved. In the first part of the inquiry, which explores the implementation of that conception of justice, the justification of incentives assumes that agents make personal choices based only upon their own interests. The second part of the book challenges the idea that a normative conception of distributive justice can be based on that traditional assumption, i.e. that personal choices are not the subject matter of justice. Thus, Vandenbroucke questions the Rawlsian idea that the primary subject of a theory of justice is the basic structure of society, and not the individual conduct of its citizens. For a society to be really just, the ethos of individual conduct has to serve justice. Non-mathematical readers can skip the formal model proposed in Chapter 3 and understand the rest of the book."--Jacket.