Overview
Congratulations! You have been chosen to be a delegate at the first ever Distributive Justice Council. The policies the Council adopts here will determine the new world wide system of distribution. You have been assigned a random portion of the population on whose behalf you will advocate. It is possible that you, yourself, are a part of this population, but you may have
been assigned to a different delegate instead. As these things are anonymous, we unfortunately have no way of knowing.
You are bargaining on behalf of your clients in an Original Position. You have to come up with a principle of distributive justice which your clients will which your clients will be able to live under satisfactorily. You know nothing of your client’s talents, abilities, gender, religious views, sexual orientation etc.
Fortunately, the other delegates are in exactly the same situation. You will have to think about how you will justify your choice to your clients when you find out who they are. Note: a prior OP (Original Position) has already agreed that basic liberties — freedom of conscience, religion, expression, association, and the rights to participate in public and political life, as well as the liberties associated with the psychological and physical integrity of the person — must be guaranteed to all, so you need not worry about violations of people’s basic liberty-rights.
You have six principles from which to choose. Remember that these principles will govern your client’s entire life, and he/she will not be able to escape.
- Laissez Faire: Markets will operate without government intervention, except to protect private
property (including intellectual property through patenting and copyrighting legislation) and to
place modest limits on the emergence of oligopolistic and monopolistic markets. - Equality of Resources: People will have roughly equal resources available to them over their
full lives. - Sufficiency: Everyone will have a `basic needs’ safety net guaranteed. Above that level,
markets will determine rewards, except as the democratically elected legislature chooses to
constrain them. (If you select this principle, be prepared to explain what count as basic needs and
why). - Maximin: Inequalities of resources will be arranged so that the least advantaged will better off
than they would be under any other arrangement. - Equality of Welfare: Resources will be distributed so that everyone is more or less equally
happy. - You may, if you choose, formulate a compromise between these principles, or formulate an
entirely different principle. If so, it must be precise and you must be prepared to defend it.
Once you choose your principal, you will need to sketch out a rough notion of how the principal will work in practice. For example: If you choose #5, how will you evaluate whether the distribution has made everyone more or less equally happy? What will you do if this is not the case?