Taxation and Distributive Justice

Distributive justice concerns the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Opposition to higher rates of taxation, or even existing levels of taxation, is often made on grounds that such taxes are unfair burdens. This fairness argument can be given a number of further, more-specific formulations. Libertarians, such as Robert Nozick, argue that taxation of income is unfair because it violates individual rights. They invoke an entitlement argument that presumes that the appropriate baseline of property rights is pretax income . Others take issue with specific policies that are supported by taxation, such as welfare provisions, and argue that welfare reform is necessary because tax burdens are only legitimate when they satisfy some form of reciprocity thesis . These arguments are critically assessed here in relation to three recent books – The Cost of Rights , The Myth of Ownership and The Civic Minimum – which explore different arguments often invoked in defence of tax cuts. Themes that raise important questions about taxation and justice are also examined – private property, welfare reform and inheritance. The real challenge facing justice theorists is to take scarcity seriously; thus, I emphasise the shortcomings of simply endorsing a 'cost-blind', rights-oriented conception of justice, which currently dominates debates in normative political theory.     

Review Article: International Distributive Justice

The literature on global justice contains a number of distinct approaches. This article identifies and reviews recent work in four commonly found in the literature. First there is an examination of the cosmopolitan contention that distributive principles apply globally. This is followed by three responses to the cosmopolitanism, – the nationalist emphasis on special duties to co-nationals, the society of states claim that principles of global distributive justice violate the independence of states and the realist claim that global justice is utopian and that states should advance national interest.     

Charles Taylor, Marx and Marxism

Charles Taylor's engagement with Marx and the Marxist tradition has been relatively neglected in the literature on his work. This is a strange omission, because he was not only a pivotal figure in the development of the New Left, but also wrote many pieces which critically engaged with the main principles of Marx and Marxism. This paper re-examines Taylor's engagement with Marxism and thereby exposes a neglected element in his political philosophy. The following themes emerge: the self; Taylor's conception of the affirmation of ordinary life; democracy; ecology; and religion. In one area at least, the affirmation of ordinary life, a crucial element of Marxism is retained and positively endorsed by Taylor. In relation to the other themes, while he raises important issues for Marxist theory, he is, at times, far too quick to dismiss Marx's arguments and also misses similarities between those arguments and his own work.     

Distributive Justice and the Politics of Difference

Abstract

This essay identifies a point of convergence between economically oriented, distributive approaches to social justice and culturally oriented, identitarian ones. The primary problem of difference politics, I claim, is insuring that disadvantaged groups have equal abilities to participate in the social processes that construct and value identities. I argue that this is best accomplished through a conception of equality promoting human agency in both the cultural and economic spheres.     

技术价值、历史遗产与分配正义

贫富差距的持续扩大容易引起严重的社会危机.但在如何看待我国贫富差距持续扩大这个问题上,理论界缺乏共识.只有突破传统价值理论的局限,从技术价值论出发,兼顾历史与现实两个维度来全面考察价值的创造问题,我们才能找到公平分配的合理模式,正确评价当前我国社会的分配问题.     

Political Coercion and the Scope of Distributive Justice

A prominent position in the global justice literature holds that claims of distributive justice are only 'activated' by the densely coercive institutional apparatus of states. I dispute this view in three ways. First, I argue that coercion is either justified by its results and rationale or it cannot be justified at all; as a result, coercive institutions do not demand an independent justification via distributive justice. Second, I contend that because the shape of coercive institutions is the result of political choices that have distributive implications, one cannot make normative judgements without asking why coercive institutions have the shape that they do. Third, even accepting (for the sake of argument) the claim that coercive institutions must be justified by a special focus on distributive justice among those subject to them, I argue that the resulting position does not justify restricting distributive justice to state borders. If (any of) these arguments are correct, it is a mistake to think that a concern with the coercive nature of political institutions legitimates restricting claims of distributive justice to compatriots.     

Taking alleged dictatorship more seriously: Rejoinder to Fried

Fried (in Public Choise, this issue, 2013) claims that Quesada (in Public Choise 130:395–400, 2007) is wrong in showing that the dictator in a dictatorial social welfare function does not necessarily enjoy absolute decision power. This reply revisits, and illustrates by means of an example, the framework where Quesada’s result is obtained. It is argued that Fried’s counterfactual analysis conducted to invalidate Quesada’s conclusion relies on untenable presumptions: (i) that the rules to identify the values of a social welfare function say something about how these values must have been obtained; and (ii) that counterfactual analysis can be conducted in an environment where causes and effects cannot be unequivocally established.     

Embodying the Deepest Contradiction: A Rejoinder to Alan Rudy

Andrew Ross: The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society . London: Verso. 1994.

Alexander Wilson: The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez . Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. 1992.

Simon Schama: Landscape and Memory . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1994.