Marc Fleurbaey

This article defends the principle of giving a fresh start to individuals who come to consider that they have mismanaged their share of resources at an earlier stage of their life. The first part challenges the ethical intuition that it would be unfair to tax the steadfast frugal in order to help the regretful spendthrift and argues that the possibility of changing one’s mind is an important freedom. The second part examines the disincentives induced by fresh-start policies. It shows that even when individuals can strategically misrepresent their preferences, there remains a significant difference between unforgiving and forgiving policies. It shows that the optimal policy does not only redistribute funds, but also puts protective constraints on early individual decisions (for example, compulsory saving through social security taxes). Key Words: fairness • freedom • fresh start • incentives • preference changes • regret.

Happiness studies have rekindled interest in the measurement of subjective well-being, and often claim to track faithfully ‘what people care about’ in their lives. It is argued in this article that seeking to respect individuals’ preferences in the context of making intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons for social evaluation has important and somewhat surprising implications, which shed light, in particular, on subjective measures and their objective alternatives, such as Sen’s capability approach. Four points are made. First, raw subjective well-being scores are problematic because they involve different calibration norms for different individuals or for the same individuals at different times. Money-metric and similar measures appear more attractive in this perspective. Second, if individuals genuinely care about their relative positions, incorporating such relative aspects in the evaluation of individual situations does not necessarily lead to rewarding the selfish and malevolent. Third, in the context of risk, relying on ex ante preferences may clash with a concern for ex post preferences, which are better informed. Fourth, focusing on opportunities or capabilities may fail to respect preferences

L’analyse empirique des inégalités porte en général sur les ressources, tandis que les théories philosophiques de la justice se divisent entre celles qui se concentrent sur les ressources et les opportunités, d’un côté, et celles qui se focalisent sur les relations sociales, de l’autre. Cet article propose une représentation de la société qui intègre à la fois les ressources et les relations sociales au sein d’un réseau d’interactions sociales qui déterminent dans quelle mesure les individus s’épanouissent ou non au cours de leur vie. Cette représentation invite à repenser l’analyse des inégalités et de la justice sociale, et suggère qu’il est possible d’identifier des tensions et des synergies entre les différentes composantes du réseau social.

What is a fair distribution of resources and other goods when individuals are partly responsible for their achievements? This book develops a theory of fairness incorporating a concern for personal responsibility, opportunities and freedom. With a critical perspective, it makes accessible the recent developments in economics and philosophy that define social justice in terms of equal opportunities. It also proposes new perspectives and original ideas. The book separates mathematical sections from the rest of the text, so that the main concepts and ideas are easily accessible to non-technical readers. It is often thought that responsibility is a complex notion, but this monograph proposes a simple analytical framework that makes it possible to disentangle the different concepts of fairness that deal with neutralizing inequalities for which the individuals are not held responsible, rewarding their effort, respecting their choices, or staying neutral with respect to their responsibility sphere. It dwells on paradoxes and impossibilities only as a way to highlight important ethical options and always proposes solutions and reasonable compromises among the conflicting values surrounding equality and responsibility. The theory is able to incorporate disincentive problems and is illustrated in the examination of applied policy issues such as: income redistribution when individuals may be held responsible for their choices of labor supply or education; social and private insurance when individuals may be held responsible for their risky lifestyle; second chance policies; the measurement of inequality of opportunities and social mobility.

This rejoinder to Roemer examines Roemer's amendment to his EOp criterion, explains the similarities and differences between Roemer's approach to equality of opportunity and the economic literature inspired by the fair allocation theory, and proposes some clarifications on the compensation principle and the role of the reward principle in the definition of a responsibility-sensitive social criterion. It highlights the power of the ideal of respect for individual preferences with respect to the reward issue and the concern for potential harshness of the social criterion toward the individuals who fail to make good use of their opportunities. It discusses Roemer's objection against holding individuals responsible for their preferences.

:This paper questions the distinction between egalitarianism and prioritarianism, arguing that it is important to separate the reasons for particular social preferences from the contents of these preferences, that it is possible to like equality and separability simultaneously, and that some egalitarians and prioritarians may therefore share the same social preferences. The case of risky prospects, for which Broome has proposed an interesting example meant to show that egalitarians and prioritarians cannot share the same preferences, is scrutinized. The levelling down objection is also examined.

John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for selection and how this selection ought to be carried out.

The difference between the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons requires that there be a shift in the moral weight that we accord to changes in utility when we move from making intrapersonal tradeoffs to making interpersonal tradeoffs. We examine which forms of egalitarianism can, and which cannot, account for this shift. We argue that a form of egalitarianism which is concerned only with the extent of outcome inequality cannot account for this shift. We also argue that a view which is concerned with both outcome inequality and with the unfairness of inequality in individuals‘ expected utilities can account for this shift. Finally, we limn an alternative view, on..

This paper re-examines the welfare economics of risk. It singles out a class of criteria, the “expected equally-distributed equivalent”, as the unique class which avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches. Such criteria behave like ex-post criteria when the final statistical distribution of wellbeing is known ex ante, and like ex-ante criteria when risk generates no inequality. The paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequality aversion and respect of individual ex ante preferences, in the vein of Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem.

The definition and measurement of social welfare have been a vexed issue for the past century. This book makes a constructive, easily applicable proposal and suggests how to evaluate the economic situation of a society in a way that gives priority to the worse-off and that respects each individual's preferences over his or her own consumption, work, leisure and so on. This approach resonates with the current concern to go 'beyond the GDP' in the measurement of social progress. Compared to technical studies in welfare economics, this book emphasizes constructive results rather than paradoxes and impossibilities, and shows how one can start from basic principles of efficiency and fairness and end up with concrete evaluations of policies. Compared to more philosophical treatments of social justice, this book is more precise about the definition of social welfare and reaches conclusions about concrete policies and institutions only after a rigorous derivation from clearly stated principles.

This paper examines the exercise of individual or group rights within the game form approach. It focuses in particular on what it means for a strategy or action to be feasible and admissible. Admissibility is best discussed in relation to two basic distinctions among rights, passive and active rights on the one hand and negative and positive rights on the other. It is argued that while there are quite a few cases in which the outcomes of mutual rights exercising are to the fore, there are many situations where the uninhibited exercise of individual or group rights and not particular outcomes are what society is primarily interested in.

The health co-benefits of CO2 mitigation can provide a strong incentive for climate policy through reductions in air pollutant emissions that occur when targeting shared sources. However, reducing air pollutant emissions may also have an important co-harm, as the aerosols they form produce net cooling overall. Nevertheless, aerosol impacts have not been fully incorporated into cost-benefit modeling that estimates how much the world should optimally mitigate. Here we find that when both co-benefits and co-harms are taken fully into account, optimal climate policy results in immediate net benefits globally, overturning previous findings from cost-benefit models that omit these effects. The global health benefits from climate policy could reach trillions of dollars annually, but will importantly depend on the air quality policies that nations adopt independently of climate change. Depending on how society values better health, economically optimal levels of mitigation may be consistent with a target of 2 °C or lower.