Distributive Principles Research Articles

Employees’ perceived effectiveness of the performance management system at a North-West provincial government department

Orientation: The implementation of the performance management system (PMS) within a specific North-West provincial government department appears to be ineffective.Research purpose: To measure employees’ perceived effectiveness of the PMS.Motivation for the study: Employees’ experiences of employee PMSs may be different from that which it intends. The motivation for this study was to quantify employees’ perceptions of PMS effectiveness.Research approach/design and method: The researchers used a quantitative research approach and collected data using self-administered e-mail questionnaires on a total population of 247 employees at a North-West provincial government department.Main findings: Utilising two measurement constructs, namely, performance management accuracy and fairness, the study revealed that employees perceived the PMS as effective. However, some deficiencies were identified. The major shortcomings related to the lack of coaching provided and manager’s non-compliance with procedural, distributive and procedural justice principles. The overall mean score of the perceived accuracy was slightly above the midpoint of the range, indicating that employees perceived PMS as accurate, and were generally satisfied with the implementation of the system. However, employees perceived the PMS as unfair.Practical/managerial implications: A perception of effective and accurate PMS does not translate into perceptions of fairness. When employees feel unfairly treated during the appraisal system, morale and performance are likely to be adversely affected. Coaching and/or training related to PMS remains imperative.Contribution/value-add: This study contributes to the body of knowledge by quantifying the perceptions of employees regarding the factors that determine the effectiveness of PMS, namely, accuracy and fairness. It contributes towards the theory and practice regarding employees’ perceived effectiveness of the PMS.

What Is Enough? Sufficiency, Justice, and Health

Carina Fourie and Annette Rid’s edited volume What Is Enough? Sufficiency, Justice, and Health comprises fifteen original contributions which explore the possibility of a sufficientarian approach to healthcare priority setting and resource allocation. Sufficientarianism is a well-established theory of distributive justice, which tells us that justice requires that each person has “enough,” and assigns particular importance to a threshold level of goods under which no person must fall. Sufficiency is under-explored as a distributive principle in the healthcare context, and this book makes a strong case for its inclusion among more familiar principles of justice such as utility, priority to the worst off, and equality.

Sufficientarian-Libertarianism and Basic Income

Le présent essai soutient une position qui s’inscrit dans le courant dit « libertarien » tout en explorant les implications de la politique qui prône un revenu de base et suscite présentement un débat vivace à travers le monde, y compris au Japon. Il existe diverses formes d’éthique libertarienne. Ici, dans la lignée de Nozick, la « propriété de soi » et la clause lockéenne sont reconnus comme deux rouages essentiels de l’argumentation qui conduit à leur ajustement en vue d’une éthique spécifique. Nous examinons comment Nozick défend la « propriété de soi » : son argumentation respecte la séparabilité des personnalités et elle accorde une grande importance à l’élaboration libre par chacun d’un mode de vie lui convenant. Une fois révisées la nature du droit dit « d’appropriation » et de la clause dite « lockéenne », nous réinterprétons cette position centrale des libertariens en considérant la position fondamentale de Nozick comme prenant appui sur une conception égalitariste de la notion de dispositions suffisantes. Les avantages de cette position sont dus non seulement à l’adéquation entre la théorie et un principe de distribution, mais encore à l’image de l’individu doté d’une propriété de soi réaffirmée, dans la vision libertarienne que Nozick déploie. Cette approche fournit les bases de la morale d’une activité libre exercée sur les marchés : ce point est essentiel pour les auteurs libertariens, qui refusent toute aliénation de la propriété privée et toute redistribution. Une version simplifiée du revenu de base une fois définie en l’adaptant à des cadres variés, dont le cadre japonais nous mène à conclure que le revenu de base, quoique séduisant, est partiellement conforme aux thèses libertariennes et qu’une version minimale serait à retenir.

Students’ critical incidents of fairness in classroom assessment: an empirical study

Conceptualizing fairness through social psychology theory has recently been called for in classroom assessment (CA) literature. This study used two open-ended questionnaires to explore university students’ critical incidents of fairness and unfairness and their affective and behavioral reactions to experiences of un/fairness. The findings showed that students’ perceptions of CA fairness were comprised of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice principles. Collectively, students considered the distribution of outcomes, the procedures for outcome distributions, the interpersonal relationships, and the communication procedures in conceptualizing fairness. Students also reported positive feelings such as happiness, satisfaction, feeling valued, and hopefulness when describing fair incidents, while they tended to report negative feelings such as anger, upset, disappointment, and embarrassment as responses to unfair incidents. Students also reported increased classroom engagement and greater adaptation in responses to fairness incidents, while they reported class disengagement, inaction, and dissent as responses to unfair incidents. Building on these empirical findings, a more comprehensive conceptualization of fairness in CA contexts is proposed.

Why Habermas needs distributive equity principles: Heath's critique, game theory, and collective action problems

Why Habermas needs distributive equity principles: Heath's critique, game theory, and collective action problems

Mitigations: The Forgotten Side of the Proportionality Principle

In the first change to the Model Penal Code since its promulgation in 1962, the American Law Institute in 2017 set blameworthiness proportionality as the dominant distributive principle for criminal punishment. Empirical studies suggest that this is in fact the principle that ordinary people use in assessing proper punishment. Its adoption as the governing distributive principle makes good sense because it promotes not only the classic desert retributivism of moral philosophers but also crime-control utilitarianism, by enhancing the criminal law’s moral credibility with the community and thereby promoting deference, compliance, acquiescence, and internalization of its norms, rather than suffering the resistance and subversion that is provoked by perceived violations of blameworthiness proportionality. Such a principle has been commonly used as the basis for criticizing improper aggravations, such as the doctrines of felony murder and “three strikes,” but the principle also logically requires recognizing a full range of deserved mitigations, not as a matter of grace or forgiveness but as a matter of entitlement. And given ordinary people’s nuanced judgments about blameworthiness proportionality, maintaining moral credibility with the community requires that the criminal law adopt an equally nuanced system of mitigations. Such a nuanced system ideally would include reform of a wide variety of current law doctrines as well as, especially in the absence of such specific reforms, adoption of a general mitigation provision that aims for blameworthiness proportionality in all cases. Such a general mitigation ought not be limited to cases of “heat of passion” or limited to cases of murder, as today’s liability rules commonly provide. It ought to be available whenever the offense circumstances and the offender’s situation and capacities meaningfully reduce the offender’s blameworthiness, as long as giving the mitigation does not specially undermine community norms.

Pay Gaps Between Domestic and International Fishers: an Economic or Ethical Issue?

Through the global market for maritime labour, multi-national crews now work on fishing vessels which were once serviced by domestic crews only. The remuneration and working conditions for non-domestic crews are causing concern, with allegations of unequal and poor pay levelled at the industry. This paper presents evidence from Scotland, a nation where a significant proportion of crews on fishing vessels originate from outside of the UK, a large number of whom come from outside the European Economic Area. Their level of remuneration is significantly lower than their Scottish counterparts, even when employed on the same boats to carry out the same work. The question arises whether the remuneration and inferred pay differences are justifiable economic consequences of local and global labour markets, or whether they constitute a failure of maritime governing institutions to prevent unjust pay discrimination. After exploring the economic and ethical arguments for keeping or removing remuneration differentials, the paper concludes that ‘equal share’ is the most just distributional criterion for international fishers’ remuneration. Although we recognise that other distributive justice principles will continue to be defended on economic grounds, the paper argues that policy makers need to find ways of redressing the power imbalances between employers and employees that contribute to unequal pay.

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Harming the Beneficiaries of Humanitarian Intervention

This paper challenges one line of argument which has been advanced to justify imposing risks of collateral harm on prospective beneficiaries of armed humanitarian interventions. This argument - the ‘Beneficiary Principle’ (BP) - holds that non-liable individuals’ immunity to being harmed as a side effect of just armed humanitarian interventions may be diminished by their prospects of benefiting from the intervention. Against this, I defend the view that beneficiary status does not morally distinguish beneficiaries from other non-liable individuals in such a way as to permit exposing them to greater risks of being harmed. The argument proceeds in four steps. I first show that the BP can neither be grounded in liability-based nor in lesser-evil justifications for harming. I then argue that a standalone justification for unintended harming based on beneficiary status would face at least two critical challenges. The first concerns the BP’s applicability to collectives; the second questions the normative weight we can plausibly ascribe to beneficiary status when beneficiaries are such by virtue of being victims of wrongful threats of harm. I argue that standing to benefit is morally irrelevant when the benefit consists in the mitigation or prevention of wrongful harms, and consequently suggest that the BP may only serve as a distributive principle in allocating risks of harm if it is disambiguated in a number of critical aspects and applied in a more narrowlydefined set of circumstances.

Human Rights, Constitutional Justice and International Economic Adjudication: Legal Methodology Problems

International economic law (IEL) developed since ancient times based on private and public, national and transnational regulation of economic transactions and related economic policies. International human rights law (HRL) emerged only in the 20th century based on different (e.g. deontological rather than utilitarian) rationalities; it continues to be developed by different international fora, but depends on economic law for generating economic goods and services necessary for protecting human rights. Section I discusses the increasing ‘constitutionalization’ of HRL and IEL at national and regional levels of governance and its implications for the settlement of trade and investment disputes. Section 2 discusses ‘constitutional justice principles’ as legal basis for impartial third-party adjudication requiring ‘judicial administration of justice’ and treaty interpretations ‘in conformity with the principles of justice’ and human rights accepted by all UN member states. Section 3 elaborates in more detail problems of ‘systemic interpretation’ and ‘constitutional interpretation’ in IEL. Section 4 gives an overview of procedural human rights dimensions in IEL adjudication, like the human right of access to justice and the emerging common law of transnational adjudication. Section 5 discusses procedural and substantive human rights problems in WTO and investment adjudication. Section 6 criticizes trade and investment adjudication for neglecting HRL and constitutional, distributive, corrective and commutative justice principles.

The varieties of impartiality, or, would an egalitarian endorse the veil?

Social contract theorists often take the ideal contract to be the agreement or bargain individuals would make in some privileged choice situation (i.e., an ‘original position’). Recently, experimental philosophers have explored this kind of decision-making in the lab. One rather robust finding is that the exact circumstances of choice significantly affect the kinds of social arrangements experimental subjects (almost) unanimously endorse. Yet prior work has largely ignored the question of which of the many competing descriptions of the original position subjects find most compelling. This paper aims to address this gap, exploring how attractive experimental subjects find various characterizations of these circumstances of choice. We find evidence suggesting that no one choice situation can fulfill the role that social contract theorists have hoped it would play. We also find that, contrary to what some prominent social contract theorists have expected, there is no robust relationship between an individual’s ranking of distributive principles and their ranking of various descriptions of the original position. In conclusion, we discuss the broader implications of these results for political philosophy.

Dissecting the politics of “Obamacare”: The role of distributive justice, deservingness, and affect

AbstractPolitical conservatives (vs. liberals) are commonly thought to oppose government‐based policies that promote equal distribution of resources, preferring that resources be distributed based on merit. In a sample of American adults (n = 436), distributive fairness perceptions, deservingness, and affective reactions related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were examined to better understand the ideological differences in ACA attitudes. Participants completed measures of political orientation, ACA knowledge and attitudes, deservingness, distributive justice principles (i.e., need, equality, merit), anger, and sympathy. Identifying as politically liberal (vs. conservative) and greater knowledge on the ACA predicted greater ACA support. Preferences for the distributive justice principles of equality and need (but not equity) mediated the relation between political orientation and ACA attitudes. Further, conservatives perceived less deservingness and in turn experienced greater anger and opposition to the ACA. Additional exploratory analyses also suggest that the positive path between deservingness and ACA support is moderated by political orientation such that it is stronger among political liberals than conservatives. Implications of the ideological chasm in relation to the ACA are considered.

Decade-Long Changes in Disparity and Distribution of Transit Opportunity in Shenzhen China: A Transportation Equity Perspective

Efficiency and equity have always been the two points of focus of transport projects. Compared with efficiency, equity is easily overlooked in the evaluation of transport projects. Many studies emphasize that defining and operationalizing costs and benefits and the distributive principle are critical parts in the assessment of transportation equity. However, the scope and time frame of the assessment target are also critical. In this paper, we took China’s fastest urbanizing city, Shenzhen, as a case study to assess transport equity by comparing accessibility among groups. First, the public transport system was divided into bus and subway, and the residents were divided into two groups: urban village and nonurban village. Second, we adopted an enhanced potential opportunity model to measure residents’ bus and subway accessibility and summarized them as transit opportunity. Third, we used the Dagum Gini coefficient decomposition and kernel density estimation method to explore the fair distribution of transit opportunity among groups and districts from 2011 to 2020. Decade-long changes in disparity and distribution of transit opportunity gave us a clear picture. On the one hand, the development of Shenzhen public transport system had a positive effect. All populations are benefiting, and their accessibility is increasing. On the other hand, it also had a negative effect to exacerbate inequality between populations. For the absolute value of the opportunity, Shenzhen’s urban village populations do have fewer transportation opportunities than nonurban villages, and this gap between them will be wider more and more. The public transport system is more inclined to improve the population with high initial opportunity and make them higher. The results illustrated the importance of examining transportation equity over an extended period and could provide information on urban development strategies.

Justice without Retribution: An Epistemic Argument against Retributive Criminal Punishment

Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions. Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s enthroning retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty.” While retributivism provides one of the main sources of justification for punishment within the criminal justice system, there are good philosophical and practical reasons for rejecting it. One such reason is that it is unclear that agents truly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done in the sense required by retributivism. In the first section, I explore the retributivist justification of punishment and explain why it is inconsistent with free will skepticism. In the second section, I then argue that even if one is not convinced by the arguments for free will skepticism, there remains a strong epistemic argument against causing harm on retributivist grounds that undermines both libertarian and compatibilist attempts to justify it. I maintain that this argument provides sufficient reason for rejecting the retributive justification of criminal punishment. I conclude in the third section by briefly sketching my public health-quarantine model, a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. I argue that the model is not only consistent with free will skepticism and the epistemic argument against retributivism, it also provides the most justified, humane, and effective way of dealing with criminal behavior.

Legal Punishment and Free Will: An Epistemic Argument Against Retributivism

Within the United States, one of the most prominent justifications for legal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong — this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions. Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s enthroning retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty.” While retributivism provides one of the main sources of justification for punishment within the criminal justice system, there are good philosophical and practical reasons for rejecting it. One such reason is that it is unclear that agents truly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done in the sense required by retributivism. In Section 1, I explore the retributivist justification of punishment and explain why it is inconsistent with free will skepticism. In Section 2, I then argue that even if one is not convinced by the arguments for free will skepticism, there remains a strong epistemic argument against causing harm on retributivist grounds that undermines both libertarian and compatibilist attempts to justify it. I maintain that this argument provides sufficient reason for rejecting the retributive justification of legal punishment. I conclude in Section 3 by briefly sketching my public health-quarantine model, a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. I argue that the model is not only consistent with free will skepticism and the epistemic argument against retributivism, it also provides the most justified, humane, and effective way of dealing with criminal behavior.

Back to the Future: The Potential of Intergenerational Justice for the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals

The establishment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) bolstered momentum to achieve a sustainable future. Undeniably, the welfare of future generations is a fundamental value of sustainable development since the publication of the Brundtland report. Nevertheless, SDGs and their targets are meagre on intergenerational justice concerns. The 15-year target horizon of the SDGs might be beneficial for implementation reasons. However, such a short-term perspective is far from innocuous in justice terms. It jeopardises the establishment of long-term goals, which protect both present and future people. This article advocates for clearer stances on intergenerational justice. What type of distributive principles could and should dictate the present socio-economic development? Looking at intragenerational justice principles contained in SDGs does not provide a full answer since they express conflicting visions of what constitutes a fair development. Furthermore, a fair distribution of the development benefits and burdens among present and near future people does not necessarily guarantee the wellbeing of more distant generations. I propose an intergenerational sufficientarian perspective as a way of extending the beneficial impacts of SDGs to both close and distant future generations. Hopefully, it facilitates the translation of the SDGs into policies that promote fairer implementation strategies.

(Not) talking about justice: justice self-recognition and the integration of energy and environmental-social justice into renewable energy siting

ABSTRACTRenewable energy often provokes heated debate on climate change, energy security and the local impacts of developments. However, how far such discussions involve thorough and inclusive debate on the energy and environmental-social justice issues associated with renewable energy siting remains ambiguous, particularly where government agendas prioritise renewable energy and planning systems offer limited opportunities for public debate on value-based arguments for and against renewable energy developments. Using the concept of justice self-recognition, we argue for greater attention to public discussion of the justice dimensions of renewable energy to assist in developing mechanisms to integrate distributive and procedural fairness principles into renewable energy decision-making. To explore how justice is currently invoked in such contexts, we examine recent U.K. policies for renewable energy and public submissions to applications for small-scale wind energy projects in Cornwall, U.K. The analysis of public comments revealed that justice concerns were rarely discussed explicitly. Comments instead did not raise concerns as justice issues or focused implicitly on distributive justice, stressing local aesthetic, community and economic impacts, clean energy and climate change. However, the findings indicated limited discussion of procedural or participatory justice, an absence that hampers the establishment of coherent procedures for deciding acceptable impacts, information standards, public participation and arbitrating disputes. We conclude by suggesting procedural reforms to policy and planning to enable greater public expression of justice concerns and debate on how to negotiate tensions between energy and environmental-social justice in renewable energy siting decisions.

Conservation versus Equity: Can Payments for Environmental Services Achieve Both?

This paper investigates the trade-off between conservation and equity considerations in the use of payments for environmental services (PES) that implicitly incorporate different distributive justice principles. Using a public good experiment with heterogeneous participants, we compare the effects on additional area conserved and distribution of earnings of two PES schemes: an equal payment and a payment based on Rawls distributional principle, which we refer to as maxi-min payment scheme. The main findings of the framed field experiment conducted in Jambi province (Indonesia) indicate that the introduction of a maxi-min PES scheme can function as a multi-purpose instrument. It realigns the income distribution in favor of low-endowed participants and does not necessarily need to be compromised by lower environmental additionality at the group level.

Saving Life, Limb, and Eyesight: Assessing the Medical Rules of Eligibility During Armed Conflict

Medical rules of eligibility permit severely injured Iraqi and Afghan nationals to receive care in Coalition medical facilities only if bed space is available and their injuries result directly from Coalition fire. The first rule favors Coalition soldiers over host-nation nationals and contradicts the principle of impartial, needs-based medical care. To justify preferential care for compatriots, wartime medicine invokes associative obligations of care that favor friends, family, and comrades-in-arms. Associative obligations have little place in peacetime medical care but significantly affect wartime medicine. The second rule suggests liability for collateral harm that is unsupported by international law and military ethics. Absent liability, there are pragmatic reasons to offer medical care to injured local civilians if it quells resentment and cements support for Coalition forces. In contrast to peacetime medicine, military necessity and associative obligations outweigh distributive principles based on medical need during war.

Climate justice after Paris: a normative framework

ABSTRACTThis paper puts forward a normative framework to differentiate between the climate-related responsibilities of different countries in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. It offers reasons for applying the chief moral principles of ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘capacity’ to climate finance instead of climate change mitigation targets. This will (i) provide a normative basis to realize the goal of climate change mitigation while allowing for developing and newly industrialized countries to develop economically and (ii) offer an account of the distributive principles that can regulate climate finance. This is a real-world interpretation of the 1992 UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that takes into account the progress accomplished at the COP21 in Paris and offers a solution to the still unsolved problem of differentiated responsibilities. This paper offers an application of this proposal to the Green Climate Fund.