Entitlement Theory Research Articles

Rawls ve Nozick Bireysel Haklar, Tercihler ve Yetenekler Üzerine

Bu çalışmada, John Rawls’un yeniden dağıtım teorisi ile Robert Nozick’in yetkilenme teorisinin bir karşılaştırması sunulacaktır. Bir tarafta Rawls’un hem toplumsal sözleşme teorileri arasındaki yeri bakımından hem de önerdiği yeniden dağıtım teorisi bakımından önemli olan adalet tezi yer alırken; diğer yanda Rawls’a adeta meydan okuyan ve yeniden dağıtım ve sözleşmeyi reddederek bireyi ve bireyin kendi üzerindeki tahakkümünü öne çıkaran Nozick’in yetkilenme teorisi yer alır. İki teoriyi toplumsal işbirliği ve bireycilik, sosyal-dağıtıcı adalet ve bireysel adalet, tercihlere/yeteneklere duyarlılık ve bireysel haklar kavramları bağlamında karşılaştırmak mümkündür. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışmanın amacı iki düşünürün teorilerini hem kendi içlerindeki tutarlılık bakımından değerlendirmek hem de bireysel haklar ve tercihlere/yeteneklere duyarlılık açısından ele almaktır. Bu karşılaştırma iki görüşün toplumun temel yapısını belirleyen kabullerini göstermek ve genel olarak toplumsal birliktelik veya işbirliği ve bireycilik karşıtlığına örnek olması bakımından önemlidir. Aynı zamanda, bu karşılaştırma bireysel hakların ve tercihlerin sınırlarını gösterebilmek açısından da bir öneme sahiptir. Bu amaçla, öncelikle Rawls’un yeniden dağıtım teorisi daha sonra Nozick’in yetkilenme teorisi ele alınacaktır. Son olarak, bireysel hak ve tercihlere/yeteneklere duyarlılık kavramlarının iki düşünürün teorilerindeki yerleri ve kabulleri karşılaştırılarak sunulacaktır. Bu bağlamda, bu konuda görünen karşıtlığın iki teorinin kavramsal arka planları göz önünde bulundurulduğunda tam anlamıyla bir karşıtlık teşkil edip etmediği sorgulanacak ve Nozick’in eleştirilerine karşı Rawls’ın birey ve hak kavramsallaştırmasının tutarlılığı ve uygulanabilirliği savunulacaktır.

An African Communitarian Response to Robert Nozick's Political Philosophy

Robert Nozick’s attempt to contribute to the existing corpus on the best possible way to achieve a good human community conducive for the realization and flowering of human well-being must be seen as a bold step to change the political cum socio-economic landscape of the world environment. This is expected of every political philosopher, to deploy his/her wealth of philosophical arsenal towards changing our world and making it conducive for the achievement of the summum bonnum. However, Nozick’s political thoughts have far reaching implications for human well-being and the establishment of a good human community. The paper through the analytical and critical methods of a philosophical research, argues against certain positions which Nozick has taken in his political thoughts. The paper claims that Nozick’s thought sparks an extreme form of unbridled individualism and that Nozick's entitlement theory lacks the human feelings of sympathy, co-existence, acceptance, care and concern requisite for building a good human community. The paper finally advocates for a political thought and arrangement that tries to minimize the plights and the sufferings of the disadvantaged and worse off members of the human community made possible through the virtues of sympathy, love, compassion, acceptance, co-existence and care espoused in African Communitarian idea of justice. DOI : 10.7176/JPCR/47-02 Publication date: December 31 st 2019

Why Does Price Fixing Persists? The Role of Fairness

The assumption that consumer welfare and efficiency is the sole concern of antitrust law conflicts with what people view as unfair about antitrust law. The present article advances the understanding of antitrust law by providing some theoretical considerations and empirical results of people's tendency to judge price-fixing as unfair when they feel that firms obtain a benefit at the expense of consumers. This is due to the fact that buyers perceive transaction terms as rights; and, sellers have a right to profit according to the reference frame of the initial transaction. People's attitudes towards price-fixing were obtained through experimental surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States. The empirical results suggest that the dual entitlement theory captures a tendency of people to judge price fixing based on the rule of fairness. The main implication is that antitrust authorities should not take for granted that people view price-fixing as something harmful and should emphasize people's moral intuitions of price-fixing as a limitation for actual compliance antitrust programs. The suggestion is for antitrust authorities to focus corporate compliance programs on people's intuitions of price-fixing as a way to improve compliance in the prevention of cartel agreements.

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.

Hypatia's silence

AbstractHartry Field distinguished two concepts of type‐free truth: scientific truth and disquotational truth. We argue that scientific type‐free truth cannot do justificatory work in the foundations of mathematics. We also present an argument, based on Crispin Wright's theory of cognitive projects and entitlement, that disquotational truth can do justificatory work in the foundations of mathematics. The price to pay for this is that the concept of disquotational truth requires non‐classical logical treatment.

Franck’s Right to Democratic Governance and the Role of Democratic Sanctions

In 1992, Tomas Franck conceptualized the democratic entitlement theory — a new approach regarding the international validation of governance, which was previously based solely on the “doctrine of effective control.” This led to the emergence of a new international norm under which only democracy can validate a government’s legitimacy. Twenty years later, the theory proposed by Franck has gained more currency. International organizations and states began and continue to address the legitimacy of a government by imposing democratic sanctions. This article proposes to corroborate the Franck democratic entitlement theory by incorporating democratic sanctions, while also consolidating cases where sanctions were applied, inter alia, construing legal status of such measures.

Deep disagreement and hinge epistemology

This paper explores the application of hinge epistemology to deep disagreement. Hinge epistemology holds that there is a class of commitments—hinge commitments—which play a fundamental role in the structure of belief and rational evaluation: they are the most basic general ‘presuppositions’ of our world views which make it possible for us to evaluate certain beliefs or doubts as rational. Deep disagreements seem to crucially involve disagreements over such fundamental commitments. In this paper, I consider pessimism about deep disagreement, the thesis that such disagreements are rationally irresolvable, and ask whether the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement—according to which such disagreements are disagreements over hinge commitments—provides adequate support for pessimism. I argue that the answer to this question depends on what hinge commitments are and what our epistemic relation to them is supposed to be. I argue for two core claims. First, that non-epistemic theories of hinge commitments provide adequate support for pessimism. Nevertheless, such theories have highly implausible consequences in the context of deep disagreement. Secondly, at least one epistemic theory of hinge commitments, the entitlement theory, permits optimism about such disagreements. As such, while hinge epistemology is mainly pessimistic about deep disagreement, it doesn’t have to be.

Robert Nozick’s Entitlement Theory of Justice, Libertarian Rights and the Minimal State: A Critical Evaluation

Robert Nozick in his famous book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) responded to, in part, John Rawls’ distribution theory as articulated in the latter’s celebrated book A Theory of Justice (1971) with the former’s entitlement theory. Nozick calls Rawls’ distribution theory a patterned theory. To Nozick, no distribution is just and there should not be redistribution at all. Redistribution infringes individual’s rights which, according to Nozick, trumps all other considerations and subject matters. In Nozick’s view, individual rights are all that matters and that there is nothing such as a society or community or collective well-being. In line with this course arguments, Nozick falls just short of supporting anarchy but the all-encompassing individualism that he propagates only allows for the existence of the minimal state which he regards as the only legitimate form of state which does not violate individual’s rights. Nozick’s theories blatantly rejects the idea of any more extensive form of state such as those propagated by Rawls which calls for distributive justice i.e. through taxing individuals and redistributing them. This article will shed light particularly on entitlement theory of justice, libertarian rights, individualism and the minimal state and evaluate them from a critical perspective.

The Entitlement Theory of Justice in Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia

The Entitlement Theory of Justice in Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia

Menos informação é melhor do que mais: um puzzle sobre a teoria da titularidade de Nozick

Minha intenção neste artigo é mostrar uma tensão na teoria da titularidade nozickiana. A tensão é entre a aplicação do princípio de retificação em condições epistêmicas ideais e as duas primeiras cláusulas da teoria. Para tanto, mostro que a aplicação do princípio nas condições acima descritas acarreta um resultado teoricamente estranho: ele é mais bem aplicado sob relativa ignorância do que em condições ideais, o que provavelmente indica que a teoria de Nozick é exageradamente rígida. A sugestão de fundo é a de que Nozick ignora certos aspectos importantes a respeito do modo como encaramos os efeitos do tempo nas reivindicações de propriedade. Finalizo com a sugestão de que há dois modos de encarar o problema e que ambos implicam custos. O primeiro é manter a teoria tal como foi concebida e arcar com a objeção de que ela é, de certa maneira, implausível. Ou podemos alterar a teoria de modo a enfraquecer seu caráter puramente histórico. E não é claro como isso pode ser feito sem suscitar dificuldades..

ENTITLEMENT THEORY OF JUSTICE AND END-STATE FAIRNESS IN THE ALLOCATION OF GOODS

Abstract:Robert Nozick allegedly introduced his liberal theory of private ownership as an objection to theories of end-state justice. Nevertheless, we show that, in a stylized framework for the allocation of goods in joint ventures, both approaches can be seen as complementary. More precisely, in such a context, self-ownership (the basis for Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice) followed by voluntary transfer (Nozick’s principle of just transfer) can lead to end-state fairness (as well as Pareto efficiency). Furthermore, under a certain solidarity condition, the only way to achieve end-state fairness, following Nozick’s procedure, is to endorse an egalitarian rule for the initial assignment of rights.

TENSÕES INTERNAS NA TEORIA DOS DIREITOS DE NOZICK

Desde que Nozick publicou, em 1974, o clássico Anarquia, Estado e Utopia (doravante AEU), muita tinta tem sido gasta na tarefa de discutir o que ficou conhecido como Teoria da Titularidade. Em linhas gerais, essa teoria busca estabelecer as condições de apropriação inicial, transferência e retificação de propriedade. Os filósofos ficaram especialmente interessados nas implicações anti-redistributivistas da argumentação de Nozick. Menos atenção, contudo, é dada à estrutura prévia de direitos individuais que Nozick ofereceu na primeira parte do livro. Será que ela pode ser plausivelmente defendida? Neste artigo, defendo que ela sofre de tensões internas que a tornam uma base frágil para o projeto nozickiano.

Incommensurabilities of the SADC Land Issue and Nozick's Entitlement Theory

Racialised land ownership in former apartheid-governed states of the SADC remains the most divisive subject particularly between Western states and SADC states themselves. Western states have reacted to the SADC land reform programme (LRP) by imposing severe economic sanctions on target states while SADC states have, in the aftermath of the Campbell decision, suspended the very SADC Tribunal for handing down that decision, pending review of its jurisdiction. Further, SADC states have limited the jurisdiction of the Tribunal to inter-state matters only, shutting the door on individual petitions for any alleged human rights abuses. At the heart of this matter is the issue of contested title to lands that the SADC Tribunal had dealt with in the Campbell case. This article applies Nozick's entitlement theory to determine the question of entitlement as a means of illuminating the incommensurabilities around the SADC land issue. Formalist arguments that are premised on strict and purist positions on either side of these incommensurabilities are weighed under the light of entitlement theory. The article shows that because of its historically multi-layered dimensions, the SADC land issue appears ill-suited to legal formalist arguments that ignore both the historical context of colonialism and forcible expropriation of native titles without compensation.

Jealousy: a response to infidelity? On the nature and appropriateness conditions of jealousy

This paper critically assesses the widespread claim that jealousy is a response to infidelity. According to this claim, herewith called the entitlement theory (ET), jealousy is only an appropriate response to a relationship between a loved one and a rival if, by entertaining this relationship, the loved one does not treat the jealous person the way she is entitled to be treated. I reconstruct different versions of ET, each of them providing a different answer to the question why we should assume that jealousy is a response to infidelity. I show that even the most plausible versions enjoy less argumentative support than it seems at first sight. The positive aim of this paper is to present a more inclusive account of jealousy as an alternative to ET. According to this account, jealousy serves to disturb the rival relationship and to (re-)gain the attention and affection of the loved person. Jealousy so understood is not only an appropriate response to infidelity but has wider appropriateness conditions. However, it plays a role in the negotiation of norms concerning exclusivity in personal relationships. The inclusive account does justice to the continuity and commonalities between adult and infant protest against rival relationships.

The ugly side of customer management – Consumer reactions to firm-initiated contract terminations

Many firms apply “customer demarketing” strategies and dismiss unprofitable customers. However, empirical research on the consequences of dismissing customers is scarce. We address this research gap and develop and empirically analyze a theoretical framework of consumer reactions to customer demarketing based on the theory of dual entitlement. We conduct seven experiments in which we identify the main effect of observing customer demarketing and analyze several moderating and mediating factors. In addition, we use a field study to illustrate the consequences of experiencing a contract termination in a real-world setting, in which a firm terminated contracts for >10.000 customers. The results show that consumers disapprove of customer demarketing, regardless of whether they experience it themselves or only observe it, regardless of the responsibility for the cause of the contract termination, and regardless of the social proximity to the dismissed customers. The effect is, however, somewhat weaker if customer demarketing is perceived to be a common occurrence, if alternative offers are made, and if the financial cause is framed as a loss. Furthermore, firms can dampen the negative effect of customer demarketing by offering substantial monetary compensation to dismissed customers. We identify perceived fairness of the firm's behavior as the underlying process that causes the negative effects of customer demarketing, and this also holds when we control for potential alternative mediators (i.e., warmth and competence perceptions).

Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice: a critique

The burden of this paper is to critique Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice which was drafted as an argument against traditional distribution theories. Nozick’s theory of justice claims that whether a distribution is just or not depend entirely on how it came about. By contrast, justice according to equality, need, desert or Rawl’s Difference principle depends entirely on the “pattern” of distribution. He objected to these patterned distribution due to their deficiencies. To this he propounded the entitlement theory which is primarily concerned with respecting people’s rights, especially, their rights to property and their rights to self-ownership. Entitlement theory of justice involves three ideas; justice in acquisition, justice in transfer, and rectification of injustice. Most political philosophers rejected Nozick’s entitlement perspective, for its shaky foundation and lack of practical relevance. This paper therefore attempts to inquire into Nozick’s theory to highlight some of the percieved strenghts, defects, inconsistencies and hidden fallacies and to offer some remedial solutions where necessary. We then conclude that through affirmative action and his rectification criteria that his philosophy is still relevant in our contemporary world.

Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice: a critique

The burden of this paper is to critique Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice which was drafted as an argument against traditional distribution theories. Nozick’s theory of justice claims that whether a distribution is just or not depend entirely on how it came about. By contrast, justice according to equality, need, desert or Rawl’s Difference principle depends entirely on the “pattern” of distribution. He objected to these patterned distribution due to their deficiencies. To this he propounded the entitlement theory which is primarily concerned with respecting people’s rights, especially, their rights to property and their rights to self-ownership. Entitlement theory of justice involves three ideas; justice in acquisition, justice in transfer, and rectification of injustice. Most political philosophers rejected Nozick’s entitlement perspective, for its shaky foundation and lack of practical relevance. This paper therefore attempts to inquire into Nozick’s theory to highlight some of the percieved strenghts, defects, inconsistencies and hidden fallacies and to offer some remedial solutions where necessary. We then conclude that through affirmative action and his rectification criteria that his philosophy is still relevant in our contemporary world.

Indigenous peoples’ fisheries and food security: a case from northern Canada

Indigenous peoples in northern Canada (at least the off-reserve part of the population) experience food insecurity at a rate which is more than double that of all Canadian households. The Cree community of Norway House in northern Manitoba, which harvests and consumes a great deal of fish, may be an exception and may offer some lessons. The objective of the paper is to address food security through the lens of local fisheries, both commercial and subsistence, of a northern indigenous community, and to develop an integrated approach to analyze food security. The approach uses Sen’s entitlement theory and the concept of food sovereignty. This mixed-methods research study employed questionnaire surveys among on–reserve commercial and subsistence fishing households, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and follow-up interviews for verification. During commercial fishing seasons (spring/summer and fall), fishers and their helpers share their fish harvest extensively through their families and communal networks, reaching almost half of the total population of the community. Such extensive sharing and the continuing community-based fishery have contributed to Norway House having more than 90 % food secure households, comparable to the Canadian average. Norway House may provide an example for other northern indigenous communities regarding food insecurity through use of fish and other traditional foods. The proposed integrated approach may be useful for analyzing food security in general.

Gender and food security in Bangladesh: the impact of climate change

Food security remains a critical global issue, made more difficult because of the rising world population, climate challenges affecting food production and a focus on market-based solutions that undermine subsistence production in vulnerable rural areas. Particularly affected are countries across Asia where poverty, hunger and malnourishment affect a significant proportion of the population. Drawing on Sen’s entitlement theory, we argue that a shift in focus from national food production to intra-household food access enables a critical reflection on consumption smoothing strategies adopted at this level. In particular, we draw attention to the tendency for women and girls to eat less as an intra-household adaptation strategy. We present findings from our research in rural areas of Bangladesh and note that adaptation strategies adopted by households in response to food insecurity. We note that strategies designed to address food insecurity must include gender mainstreaming to ensure that women and girls are not taking a disproportionate responsibility for intra-household food security.

Perceived unfairness of prices resulting from yield management practices in hotels

This study analyzes the consumer perception of yield management (YM) with an example in the hotel sector. Hotels use these practices in order to increase their incomes. However, the dual entitlement theory suggests that customers perceive YM practices as unfair when they are not the result of cost increase or external factors. This study explores four YM practices that might be suitable in the hotel context through an empirical study of the behavior of 1010 customers. The study consists of non-parametric tests to analyze the perception of YM practices and Anova tests to identify relationships between the variables that may explain customer behavior. The results show that the manner of presenting the YM practices to consumers (positive or negative frame) has a considerable influence on their perception. Lastly, loyal customers perceive price changes the YM introduces as more unfavorable. From this point of view, firms can use several managerial levers in the communication of tariff practices and management of loyalty programs to avoid or reduce customers' perception of unfairness.