Luck Egalitarianism and Relational Egalitarianism: An Internal Tension in Cohen’s Theory of Justice
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Jiangjin Chen
Abstract
Relational Egalitarianism focuses on the construction of equal social relationships between persons. It strongly opposes luck egalitarianism, which understands equality as a distributive ideal. In Cohen’s theory of justice, luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism simultaneously exist, and Cohen provides arguments corresponding to each. In this paper, we explore the manifestation of tension between these two forms of egalitarianism in his theory. In addition, we also reconstruct some possible solutions provided by Cohen to soften this tension, including the three approaches of market mechanism, egalitarian ethos and value pluralism, and find them to be unsuccessful. This tension is a serious challenge that needs to be addressed in Cohen’s theory of justice.
© 2020 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- 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
Artikel in diesem Heft
- 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
