The Elements of Justice

by David Schmidtz

• ISBN13: 9780521539364
• ISBN10: 0521539366
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due. However, what that means in practice depends on the context in which the question is raised. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity. Nonetheless, the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood rather than that of a building. A theory of justice offers individuals a map of that neighborhood, within which they can explore just what elements amount to justice.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
PART 1 WHAT IS JUSTICE?
1 The Neighborhood of Justice	3	(4)
2 The Basic Concept	7	(6)
3 A Variety of Contestants	13	(4)
4 Contextual Functionalism	17	(4)
5 What Is Theory?	21	(10)
PART 2 HOW TO DESERVE
6 Desert	31	(3)
7 What Did I Do to Deserve This?	34	(6)
8 Deserving a Chance	40	(10)
9 Deserving and Earning	50	(5)
10 Grounding Desert	55	(7)
11 Desert as Institutional Artifact	62	(4)
12 The Limits of Desert	66	(7)
PART 3 HOW TO RECIPROCATE
13 Reciprocity	73	(2)
14 What Is Reciprocity?	75	(7)
15 Varieties of Reciprocity	82	(8)
16 Debts to Society and Double Counting	90	(4)
17 The Limits of Reciprocity	94	(13)
PART 4 EQUAL RESPECT AND EQUAL SHARES
18 Equality	107	(2)
19 Does Equal Treatment Imply Equal Shares?	109	(5)
20 What Is Equality for?	114	(6)
21 Equal Pay for Equal Work	120	(6)
22 Equality and Opportunity	126	(14)
23 On the Utility of Equal Shares	140	(10)
24 The Limits of Equality	150	(11)
PART 5 MEDITATIONS ON NEED
25 Need	161	(2)
26 Hierarchies of Need	163	(3)
27 Need as a Distributive Principle	166	(4)
28 Beyond the Numbers	170	(7)
29 What Do We Need?	177	(6)
PART 6 THE RIGHT TO DISTRIBUTE
30 Intellectual Debts	183	(2)
31 Rawls	185	(13)
32 Nozick	198	(10)
33 Rectification	208	(8)
34 Two Kinds of Arbitrary	216	(4)
35 Procedural versus Distributive Justice	220	(9)
References	229	(8)
Index	237