Marc Fleurbaey

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 trade-offs to making interpersonal trade-offs. 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 which such inequalities are not intrinsically bad, but nonetheless determine the strength of individuals’ competing claims. We argue that this ‘Competing Claims View’ can also account for the shift.

If a potential person would have a good life if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? In this paper, we argue that both questions should be answered affirmatively. We also explain where prominent arguments to differing conclusions go wrong. Finally, we explore the relevance of our answers to issues in population ethics.

We consider a special set of risky prospects in which the outcomes are either life or death (or, more generally, binary utilities). There are various alternatives to the utilitarian objective of minimizing the expected loss of lives in such prospects. We start off with the two-person case with independent risks and construct taxonomies of ex ante and ex post evaluations for such prospects. We examine the relationship between the ex ante and the ex post in this restrictive framework: There are more possibilities to respect ex ante and ex post objectives simultaneously than in the general framework, i.e. without the restriction to binary utilities (cf. Harsanyi's aggregation theorem). We extend our results to n persons and to dependent risks. We study optimal strategies for allocating risk reductions given different objectives. We place our results against the backdrop of various pro-poorly off (or prioritarian) value functions (Diamond 1967; Rabinowicz 2002; Fleurbaey 2010) for the evaluation of risky prospects.

The COVID-19 crisis and the policy responses to it have impacted many different areas of common concern including public health and the economy. This raises difficult questions about how to balance these concerns in making policy decisions. In this chapter, we review a number of tools that welfare economics offers for conceptualizing and studying such trade-offs. We argue that social welfare analysis is the most useful method for doing so. We show how concerns for the distributive and other effects of a policy on individual wellbeing can be evaluated using a Social Welfare Function (SWF) and survey some of the main features of such functions. As an illustration, we then use this approach to model and evaluate the implications for social welfare of the adoption of pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour. Our model reveals how such evaluations not only are determined by empirical facts but may also depend on key judgments about the relative importance of the different determinants of individual wellbeing (health, income, longevity, and so on) and about the extent to which special concern should be given to the worse-off. In doing so, it illustrates how critical transparent modelling of these concerns is in developing responses to pandemics of this kind.

The economic theory of income taxation has recently been eager to apply philosophically prominent approaches to the selection of the optimal tax on earnings. This chapter presents and compares the consequentialist–utilitarian approach to taxation developed by Mirrlees and defended by Murphy and Nagel, to the fair allocation approach, as adapted to taxation problems by Fleurbaey and Maniquet. The fairness approach does retain an element of libertarianism and gives some value to market earnings. The two approaches have different recommendations for taxation, especially regarding low incomes, which are given absolute priority under the fairness approach, and may be submitted to lower tax rates out of respect for the diversity of preferences among the least skilled workers.

This chapter draws attention to two distinctions which have been highlighted by the economics literature on fair opportunities and may have some philosophical relevance. They may even enhance our understanding of the multifaceted notion of responsibility itself. The first distinction is about two possible interpretations of the distributive implications of personal responsibility: either the absence of redistribution or the absence of inequality aversion. The second distinction is between the compensation principle and the reward principle. For each of these two topics, there is an ethical choice to be made between two options. These two choices being quite independent, makes four possible combinations of choices, justifying the title of this chapter. For each of these four possible approaches there is a well-defined criterion or set of criteria which embodies it and makes it possible, in application to policy issues, to select specific redistributive policies.

The utilitarian economist and Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi and the liberal egalitarian philosopher John Rawls were two of the most eminent scholars writing on problems of social justice in the last century. This volume pays tribute to Harsanyi and Rawls by investigating themes that figure prominently in their work. In some cases, the contributors explore issues considered by Harsanyi and Rawls in more depth and from novel perspectives. In others, the contributors use the work of Harsanyi and Rawls as points of departure for pursuing the construction of theories for the evaluation of social justice. The introductory essay by the editors provides background information on the relevant economics, game theory, philosophy, and social choice theory, as well as readers' guides to the individual contributions, to make this volume widely accessible to scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Control measures, such as “lockdowns”, have been widely used to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. Under some conditions, they prevent illness and save lives. But they also exact an economic toll. How should we balance the impact of such policies on individual lives and livelihoods (and other dimensions of concern) to determine which is best? A widely used method of policy evaluation, benefit–cost analysis (BCA), answers these questions by converting all the effects of a policy into monetary equivalents and then summing them up. A different method, social welfare analysis, proceeds by determining the effects of a policy on individual wellbeing and then applying an aggregation formula to them to evaluate the overall effects of a policy. In this chapter, we survey these methods and argue that social welfare analysis has important advantages. One crucial advantage is that it enables ethical considerations relating to the impact of policies on individual wellbeing and its distribution to be incorporated into policy assessments in a transparent way. We illustrate this with a simple numerical model for evaluating pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour, showing how the evaluation depends on the ethical significance accorded to their impact on the wellbeing of different age and income groups.

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.

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.