Considerations Of Distributive Justice Research Articles

What is the standard of care in experimental development economics?

A central feature of experimental development economics is the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the effectiveness of prospective socioeconomic interventions. The use of RCTs in development economics raises a host of ethical issues which are just beginning to be explored. In this article, I address one ethical issue in particular: the routine use of the status quo as a control when designing and conducting a development RCT. Drawing on the literature on the principle of standard care in medical research ethics, as well as considerations of distributive justice in non-ideal circumstances, I argue that the practice of using the status quo as a control is ethically justifiable. However, I add an important qualification based on the natural duty of rescue to address the concern that my account is overly permissive.

Defensive Liability: A Matter of Rights Enforcement, not Distributive Justice

The Moral Responsibility Account of Liability to Defensive Harm (MRA) states that an agent becomes liable to defensive harm if, and only if, she engages in a foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. Advocates of the account contend that liability to defensive harm is best understood as an aspect of distributive justice. Individuals who are liable to some harm are not wronged if the harm is imposed on them, and liability to defensive harm thus helps ensure that harm is borne by whoever has least of an objection of justice against being burdened with it—or so advocates of the MRA insist. In this paper, I argue that liability to defensive harm is not grounded in considerations of distributive justice. While it depends on the wider societal context what allocation of a burden is distributively most just, liability to defensive harm is a distinctly localised affair. I propose that liability to defensive harm is best understood as part of the enforcement dimension of our rights to non-interference. Framing liability in this way does not invalidate the MRA. It does, however, render subjective impermissibility accounts of liability particularly promising.

How to support equal standing in local health equity?

Attempts to decrease socioeconomic health disparities face various challenges, which include ethical questions about prioritization and value‐conflicts. To deal with these questions in a way that takes equal standing as a central value, this paper explores the potential of a relational egalitarian capability approach to local health equity policies. Especially for local health equity policies, a relational egalitarian capability approach seems promising as it offers more perspectives for action and evaluation additional to considerations of distributive justice. To scrutinize if this approach can offer an adequate normative basis for health equity policies and be a helpful ethical guide in practice, five desiderata are identified that a relational egalitarian capability approach to local health equity should fulfil. These desiderata stem from a consideration of political‐ethical pluralism and scarcity of time and resources as non‐ideal conditions characterizing public policy practice, as well as of three questions that any capability approach should answer to be applicable in practice. For each of the five desiderata, a brief outline is given of what relational egalitarian theories and the capability approach offer in response to the questions implied by these desiderata. Ultimately, these questions need to be answered in relation to specific policies in particular contexts.

‘Sharing in need’: How allocator and recipient's hunger shape food distributions in a dictator game

Do people in need share less with others? And what if the recipient is in need too? In two experiments, we addressed these questions by testing whether fasting-induced and self-rated hunger influence allocations in a dictator game in which allocators distribute food (cookies) between themselves and a recipient. In line with rational choice theory, which posits that a deprived good should increase in value (Smith, 1759; Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944), findings from the current studies consistently showed that participants shared fewer cookies when they were, and/or perceived themselves to be, in a food-deprived state. Across studies, participants moreover seemed to project their own hunger onto the recipient's state, as emotional perspective taking accounts propose, but this did not vary between fasting and control conditions, and did not translate into actual sharing differences, suggesting that these formed no basis for other-regarding decisions. Whether or not participants accounted for the recipient's hunger when redistributing foods, depended on whether they possessed actual knowledge of the recipient's deprivation state, such that participants engaged in greater sharing when they knew the recipient had been fasting (Study 2), but not in the absence of such knowledge (Study 1). Taken together, the results involving the need state of the recipient seem to provide most support for the need principle, that suggests that people share out of distributive justice considerations, where they take into account the recipient's need (Deutsch, 1975).

Ethical Issues in the COVID Era: Doing the Right Thing Depends on Location, Resources, and Disease Burden.

Ethical Issues in the COVID Era: Doing the Right Thing Depends on Location, Resources, and Disease Burden.

Health equity and distributive justice considerations in critical care resource allocation

Amid the possibility of resource shortages in health care during a public health crisis, guiding principles established by several groups advocate for allocating life-sustaining treatments on the basis of a patient's chances of survival, resulting in an approach of saving the most lives possible.1 To assist in this approach, many triage frameworks use acute illness scores to predict short-term mortality.1 The sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA)2 score has received attention as a mortality prediction tool during the COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to be used by hospitals in some manner as a triage tool.

A Sceptic’s Guide to Justice in International Tax Policy

AbstractWhat, if any, are the moral norms governing the international taxation regime if the sceptic is right to think that considerations of distributive justice do not apply beyond the state? I sketch an answer to this question by examining Tsilly Dagan’s illuminating recent book International Tax Policy: Between Competition and Cooperation. In her work, Dagan identifies the position of Thomas Nagel, an influential global justice sceptic, as predominant among commentators in legal scholarship and policy debates on international taxation. According to Nagel, multilateral cooperation is appropriately conceived as a bargain between mutually self-interested states. In tracing the implications of his position for international tax policy Dagan argues that even a sceptic like Nagel is committed to identifying some considerations of distributive justice beyond the state to ameliorate the harmful effects of tax competition. In response I argue that Dagan is correct to claim that the global justice sceptic is committed to seeing cooperation in international tax policy as constrained by moral norms, but that these norms are what Nagel calls humanitarian duties rather than duties of justice. I establish that Dagan’s argument that Nagel is committed to a duty of justice to promote distributive justice abroad faces some significant obstacles and suggest that Dagan can ground her argument in a humanitarian duty that Nagel does accept. The upshot of the argument is that even if the sceptic is right to think that considerations of distributive justice do not apply beyond the state, multilateral tax cooperation is governed by a duty of states to prevent human rights deficits where they can.

Income Inequality Tolerance and Preferences for Redistribution in Turkey

In this paper, the extent to which redistribution is desired by the Turkish and its determinants are estimated. For this purpose, the 2009 Social Inequality Module of the International Social Survey Programme is used. Finding the attitudinal differences between urban and rural region residents, and understanding whether these can be attributed to educational differences is additionally aimed. The estimations indicate that pro-redistribution preferences are shaped by distributive justice considerations captured by the question on just payment at work. Having no or low educational qualification, living in urban regions and small cities also play an important role. Being in the lowest income categories is also associated with higher demand for redistribution. The attitudinal difference between rural and urban residents cannot be attributed to differences in the educational levels, differences in cultural values and/or income levels seem to play an important role. This study’s finding that women are more tolerant of income inequality than men is the opposite of the previous finding based on the 2011 WVS data, and of the more usual finding in other studies. Hard work has a non- significant effect in the present study although it was one of the determinants of pro-redistribution preferences previously. The impact of income is similar to previous analysis’ finding. However, mixed results were found in the previous analysis relative to the effect of living in a specific region. The effects are more homogeneous with ISSPA data, as all of the regions with significant coefficients have relatively reduced support for redistribution than Istanbul.

Distributive justice and proprietary remedies over bribes

It is often said that distributive justice has no place in private law. However, distributive justice considerations feature strongly in cases involving the remedies imposed over bribes gained in breach of fiduciary duty. This paper argues that courts should exercise structured discretion, guided by principles of distributive justice, in ascertaining the appropriate remedy. The distributive factors of desert, needs and equality should inform the determination of what remedy is apposite to provide justice in the circumstances.

<br>(Tensions and Difficulties in the Clean Air Law's Permitting Regime)

תקציר בעברית: המאמר בוחן כמה מתחים ובעיות במשטר הרישוי של חוק אוויר נקי עבור מקורות פליטה נייחים גדולים.סוגיה ראשונה היא המתח בין הוראה מרכזית בחוק, לפיה היתרי פליטה אמורים להיות מבוססים על הטכניקה המיטבית הזמינה (טמז), לבין הוראות אחרות בחוק ובתקנות המזכירות ניתוחי עלות-תועלת. המאמר מסביר את השיקולים של צדק חלוקתי המצדיקים חובת שימוש בתקנים מבוססי ישימות (טמז), וטוען שראוי שהיתרים לזהם יתבססו על אלה גם כאפשר הטכניקה המיטבית אינה יעילה כלכלית.שאלה נוספת היא אם ישימותה הכלכלית והטכנית של טכנולוגיה כלשהי צריכה להיקבע ביחס לפירמה המבקשת את היתר הפליטה או ביחס למגזר התעשייתי כולו. גם כאן שיקולי צדק חלוקתי תומכים בלשון החוק, הדורשת מבחן מבוסס מגזר, בניגוד לפרקטיקה המתפתחת של המשרד להגנת הסביבה.סוגיה שלישית היא השאלה אם הטמז צריכה להיקבע על בסיס תרומתה להפחתה של פליטת מזהמים לאוויר או שמא על בסיס תרומתה לאיכות הסביבה בכללותה. המאמר טוען שעל רישוי בחוק אוויר נקי לדרוש צמצום מרבי של פליטות לאוויר דווקא, מאחר ודרישה להתחשב בסביבה בכללותה מותירה למאסדר שיקול דעת כמעט מוחלט.בנוסף לסוגיות היסודיות האלה, המאמר בוחן כמה בעיות טכניות במשטר הרישוי המתפתח, במיוחד בתקנות ומסמכי ההנחיות שהוצאו עי המשרד להגנת הסביבה.English Abstract:This paper, written for a journal issue on Israel's Clean Air Law of 2008, explores several tensions and problems in the law's permitting regime for major stationary sources.One major issue is the tension between the statute's direction that permits be based on best available technology, and elements of the law and regulations issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection that refer to cost-benefit analysis. The article explains the distributive justice justifications for feasibility (BAT) standards and argues that permits should adhere to these standards even when the best technology is not cost-efficient.Another issue is whether a technology's economic and technical feasibility should be determined in relation to the firm applying for a permit or in relation to the industrial sector. Here, too, distributive justice considerations support the statutory language pointing to a sector-based analysis, against the developing practice of the Ministry.A third major issue is whether BATs should be determined by their mitigation of air pollution or rather by their contribution to environmental quality as a whole. Here the article argues that permitting under the statute require maximum reductions in air pollution, since a standard taking into account the environment as a whole leaves the regulator with essentially unbridled discretion.In addition to these fundamental issues, the article examines several technical problems with the developing permitting regime, particularly in the regulations and guidance documents that have been issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Virtue and Meaningful Work

ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries.

Poverty, Distributive Justice, and Punishment

Should poverty be a mitigating factor, if it affects neither the strength of temptations to commit a crime an offender faced nor his mental capacity to refrain from committing the crime? I argue that it should, because of distributive justice. I argue for this conclusion in two steps. First, I argue that we can improve distributive justice by mitigating poor offenders. Second, I argue that there are no strong objections against taking into account considerations of distributive justice in the sentencing process. I also compare my argument with an argument made by Jeffrie Murphy and explain how some objections against Murphy’s argument do not apply against my argument.

Risk Management and Risk Transfer:Distributive Justice in Finance

Questions of distributive justice in risk management arise with varying intensity in different market settings. This article argues that perfect financial markets provide a context in which questions of distributive justice are seldom salient. In such markets, all traders have access to the same information about the item being traded, and traders are generally anonymous. For the most part, the author argues, these conditions justify ignoring questions of distributive justice. In imperfect markets, managing risk becomes relevant to distributive justice. Differential information between trading parties can quickly lead to a situation in which one party exploits another, particularly when the advantageous information is gained via a privileged position or illegitimate means. As the degree of market imperfections increases, so does the importance of considerations of distributive justice. In nonfinancial markets generally, and in labor markets particularly, a firm’s efforts to manage risk often affect others in ways that may be unjust. Finally, firms’ risk management activities can create risks for parties far beyond those who actually manage the risk or participate in the risk management process. These affected parties can even include the public at large. <b>TOPICS:</b>Financial crises and financial market history, risk management

An Aristotelian Approach to Cognitive Enhancement

There is an underlying tension between the notion of cognitive enhancement and the idea that knowledge presupposes creditable agency. By drawing on an Aristotelian theory of action, it becomes clear that cognition is routinely considered as a human activity susceptible to kinds of appraisal, to which mere physiological processes, such as digestion, are not. In essence, we appreciate knowledge as a distinctive achievement. It includes good epistemic outcomes that are also epistemically creditable, as opposed to others that, although attributable to an epistemic agent, are, nevertheless, epistemically null. In contrast, the term “cognitive enhancement” is related primarily to physiological and, more specifically, neuronal processes. It covers various medical techniques, including pharmacological interventions, brain stimulation and genetic manipulation that can modify neuronal functions and, possibly, convey certain epistemic benefits.1 Examples are prolonged attention span and memory retention. As a result, the issue of cognitive enhancement is typically addressed within its dedicated field of neuroethics.2 Considerations of distributive justice, such as fair access to enhancing procedures often come to the forefront of the discussion.3 Further concerns pertain to prospective effects on personal identity and individual freedoms.4 Although such concerns will not be directly addressed in the following discussion, their relevance to the existing debate will be indicated in conclusion. The following analysis builds upon an Aristotelian theory of action as applied to epistemic pursuits.5 In this respect, it shares some background assumptions with virtue epistemology, such as a general understanding of knowledge as an apt, creditable performance.6 This, however, does not confine the conclusions to this particular theory of knowledge. They are consistent with any theory, which distinguishes between the successful exercise of someone’s intellectual abilities and sheer epistemic luck.

Runaway Climate Change: A Justice‐Based Case for Precautions

Runaway Climate Change: A Justice‐Based Case for Precautions

Risk Management and Distributive Justice

This paper surveys the relationship between risk management, particularly financial risk management, and questions of distributive justice. Risk management proceeds by mitigation or transfer. When risk is transferred, questions of distributive justice are often relevant, but they are seldom addressed or even acknowledged by risk managers. Questions of distributive justice in risk management arise with varying intensity in different market settings. This paper argues that perfect financial markets provide a context in which questions of distributive justice are seldom salient. In such markets, all traders have access to the same information about the item being traded and traders are generally anonymous. For the most part, I argue, these conditions justify ignoring questions of distributive justice. In imperfect markets, managing risk becomes relevant to distributive justice. Differential information between trading parties can quickly lead to a situation in which one party exploits another, particularly when the advantageous information is gained by some privileged position or by some illegitimate means. As the degree of market imperfections increases, so does the importance of considerations of distributive justice. In non-financial markets generally, and in labor markets particularly, the firm’s efforts to manage risk often affect others in ways that may be unjust. Finally, the risk management activities of firms can create risks for parties far beyond those who actually manage the risk or participate in the risk management process. These affected parties can even include the public at large.

Distributive Justice in the Enforcement of Contracts

The paper discusses the relationship between a rule and its exception. In our case the rule regarding enforcement as the principal remedy for breaking a contract and the exception whereby the remedy of enforcement is denied on the ground of justice and the injured party is to be remedied through damages. Enforcement as a primary remedy is basically predicated on a moral principle, based on autonomy and trust. What should be the underlying principles behind the justice exception? Among the Aristotelian notions of justice - corrective, distributive, retributive - the last two constitute the contents of corrective justice in the present context. In fact denial of enforcement creates a forced sale of the injured party's entitlement to the party in breach. Such a move is based on distributive justice. No definitive theory stands behind the complex notion of distributive justice. The suggested theories are based on dignity, fairness, wealth-maximization, effort, investment, personal choice and need. Distributive elements of morality should take into account also retributive elements, such as fault and deterrence, so that retributive justice is actually a factor in the application of distributive justice in enforcement. The elements composing distributive justice may be grossly grouped into two categories reflecting, again, morality and efficiency, and the claim of the paper is that a commitment to the supremacy of enforcement should also lead to the supremacy of morality in the application of distributive justice to enforcement, with efficiency as a second role player. Some case-law classics serve as illustrations. The paper concludes with a brief survey demonstrating how Israeli case law - holding a declared commitment to the supremacy of enforcement - coped with cases of building a construction incompatible with the terms of the contract. A comparison is made with property rule, and the cases are scrutinized according to considerations of distributive justice which were actually applied and those that should have applied to preserve the original entitlement of the injured party and the supremacy of enforcement.

Cooperation, Pervasive Impact, and Coercion: On the Scope (not Site) of Distributive Justice

It is widely known that in A Theory of Justice Rawls restricted the scope of distributive justice to the domestic context of a single polity. This restriction implies that citizens have responsibilities of distributive justice to each other that they do not have to foreigners. Rawls’s readers widely thought that he had motivated this anticosmopolitan restriction, despite his commitment to the equal moral worth of all, on the basis of two assumptions. First, he assumed that principles of distributive justice come into play only within the context of society’s “basic structure.” Only persons with a shared basic structure have claims upon and responsibilities to each other arising from considerations of distributive justice. Second, Rawls famously assumed that there is no global basic structure, that the societies whose basic structure is the subject of justice are “more or less self-sufficient association[s]” whose boundaries correspond to those of contemporary polities. This was the argument that Rawls’s readers thought was implicitly backing the restriction of justice’s scope in his Theory of Justice: since “the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society,” and since there is no global basic structure, the scope of justice is domestic.

Justice and Third Party Risk: The Ethics of Xenotransplantation

abstract The question of when it is permissible to inflict risks on others without their consent is one that we all face in our everyday lives, but which is often brought to our attention in contexts of technological innovation and scientific uncertainty. Xenotransplantation, the transplantation of organs or tissues from animals to humans, has the potential to save or improve the lives of many patients but gives rise to the possibility of infectious agents being transferred from donor animals into the human population. As well as being an important ethical issue in its own right it therefore provides a useful vehicle for exploring the more general question of how to balance the benefits of a practice against the risks to third parties. This paper focuses on the Rawlsian, justice‐based analysis of the risks of xenotransplantation proposed by Robert Veatch. It argues that Veatch is right to take considerations of distributive justice into account, but that his particular approach is flawed. It is hoped that consideration of Veatch's arguments, and of the underlying assumptions will suggest better ways of executing a justice‐based approach.

Issues of Fairness in International Trade Agreements

In this article, we first describe the characteristics of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that are the basis of the framework of the multilateral trading system. We then provide an overview of concepts of fairness in trade agreements. Thereafter, we offer a critique of the efficiency criterion in assessing multilateral trade agreements, taking issue with T.N. Srinivasan's (2006) analysis and then elaborate on our conception of fairness as reflected in agreements covering market access. We also address considerations of distributive justice, in contrast with Srinivasan's contention that distributive justice has no role to play in the design and negotiation of multilateral trade agreements. Finally, we question bilateral trade agreements from the standpoint of fairness, drawing on the example of the U.S. bilateral FTA negotiated in 2005 with Central America and the Dominican Republic.