Equality and Merit. Through Experiments to Normative Justice
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Anton Leist
Abstract
When we want to justify claims against one another, we discover that conceptual thought alone is not sufficient to legitimize property and income in the relative and proper proportions among members of a productive group. Instead, the basis for justification should also be seen in motivational states, validated less by rational thought than by an effective behaviour. To circumnavigate otherwise dangerously utopian claims to justice, the social sciences, and especially behavioural economics, are the most reliable basis for normative distributive justice. This article builds on recent findings of experiments, first of all in order to give proof of the extent to which a general behavioural tendency towards equality is widespread among people, and second of all in order to highlight ‘desert’ and ‘need’ as the crucial criteria of just distribution, which will then sum up to justified inequality in the economic sphere.
© 2020 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- 10.1515/auk-2020-toc
- Editorial
- Focus: Experiments on Social Norms
- Social Norms in Experimental Economics: Towards a Unified Theory of Normative Decision Making
- Economic and Sociological Accounts of Social Norms
- Incentivized Measurement of Social Norms Using Coordination Games
- Distributive Justice in the Lab: Testing the Binding Role of Agreement
- Equality and Merit. Through Experiments to Normative Justice
- General Part
- Moral Progress: Improvement of Moral Concepts, Refinements of Moral Motivation
- Habermas’s Politics of Rational Freedom: Navigating the History of Philosophy between Faith and Knowledge
- Luck Egalitarianism and Relational Egalitarianism: An Internal Tension in Cohen’s Theory of Justice
- Discussion
- Diversity and Decency
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- 10.1515/auk-2020-toc
- Editorial
- Focus: Experiments on Social Norms
- Social Norms in Experimental Economics: Towards a Unified Theory of Normative Decision Making
- Economic and Sociological Accounts of Social Norms
- Incentivized Measurement of Social Norms Using Coordination Games
- Distributive Justice in the Lab: Testing the Binding Role of Agreement
- Equality and Merit. Through Experiments to Normative Justice
- General Part
- Moral Progress: Improvement of Moral Concepts, Refinements of Moral Motivation
- Habermas’s Politics of Rational Freedom: Navigating the History of Philosophy between Faith and Knowledge
- Luck Egalitarianism and Relational Egalitarianism: An Internal Tension in Cohen’s Theory of Justice
- Discussion
- Diversity and Decency
