Justice, luck, and knowledge / S.L. Hurley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hurley, S. L. (Susan L.)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Responsibility.

Distributive justice.

Fortune--Moral and ethical aspects.

Fortune.

Physical Description:

viii, 341 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003.

Summary:

The recent past has seen striking advances in our understanding of both moral responsibility and distributive justice. S. L. Hurley's Justice, Luck, and Knowledge brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other.

Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility; on this view, the aim of egalitarianism is to respect differences between positions for which people are responsible while neutralizing differences that are a matter of luck. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice. Her book brings the new articulation of responsibility to bear in explaining these constraints. While responsibility might help specify what to distribute, it cannot tell us how to distribute; thus, Hurley argues, responsibility cannot tell us to distribute in an egalitarian pattern in particular. It can, however, play other important roles in a theory of justice, in relation to incentive-seeking behavior and well-being. Hurley's book proposes a bias-neutralizing approach to distributive justice that places responsibility in these less problematic roles.

Contents:

Introduction: Responsibility and Justice 1

I Responsibility

1 Philosophical Landscape: The New Articulation of Responsibility 15

2 Why Alternate Sequences Are Irrelevant to Responsibility 54

3 Why Responsibility Is Not Essentially Impossible 80

4 Responsibility, Luck, and the "Natural Lottery" 106

II Justice

5 Philosophical Landscape: The Luck-Neutralizing Approach to Distributive Justice 133

6 Why the Aim to Neutralize Luck Cannot Provide a Basis for Egalitarianism 146

7 Roemer on Responsibility and Equality 181

8 The Currency of Distributive Justice and Incentive Inequality 206

9 The Real Roles of Responsibility in Justice 232

10 From Ignorance to Maximin: A Bias-Neutralizing Alternative 256

Appendix Outline of the Arguments 283.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-329) and index.

ISBN:

0674010299

OCLC:

50912596