Justice and Reciprocity
(Oxford University Press, 2024)
304 pages
Description
"Justice and Reciprocity" examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls’s conception of ‘justice as fairness’. Reciprocity was central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn’t fully explicit about the concept or its diverse roles. The book’s main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is not simply a fact of human psychology or a duty to return benefits, but a limiting condition on general duties. Second, such conditions are a natural consequence of thinking of equality as a relational value. However, third, we can identify limits on this conditionality, which explain how some duties of justice can be unconditional. The book explores the ramifications of this argument in a series of debates about distributive justice in which Rawls’s theory has played an organizing role: the justice of productive incentives, duties to future generations, unconditional basic income, and global justice. In each domain, thinking about reciprocity as a limiting condition rather than simply a duty helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of justice as fairness, in some cases making the view more plausible, but in others underlining limits of the view that will be unappealing to egalitarians of a more unilateral bent. The overall aim of the book is to show that reciprocity involves more than returning benefits, and that limiting justice with reciprocity conditions need not make justice implausibly undemanding. In this way, I hope to rehabilitate reciprocity for egalitarianism.
Contents
1. Reciprocity and Egalitarianism [Preview]
2. Reciprocity as Motivation
3. Reciprocity as Duty
4. Reciprocity as Limiting Condition
5. Role Reversal and the Difference Principle
6. Cooperation, Competition, and Incentives
7. Future Generations
8. Unconditional Basic Income
9. Global Justice
10. Conclusion
Andrew Lister is Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies at Queen's University. See his blog here.
No comments:
Post a Comment