Serena Olsaretti

Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people's lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being.

Egalitarian theories assume, without defending it, the view that the costs of children should be shared between non-parents and parents. This standard position is called into question by the Parental Provision view. Drawing on the familiar idea that people should be held responsible for the consequences of their choices, the Parental Provision view holds that under certain conditions egalitarian justice requires parents to pay for the full costs of their children, as it would be unfair for non-parents to bear the negative externalities of others’ choices to have children. This article examines closely the Parental Provision view and argues that various possible justifications for it are unsuccessful. In so doing, it brings to light respects in which the choice to have and rear children is special and may not be treated as being on a par with other choices for which we think people should be held responsible.

This paper examines Thomas Scanlon’s Value of Choice account of substantive responsibility, on which the fact that choice has value accounts both for why people should be provided with certain opportunities and for why it may be permissible, in those cases, to let people bear certain opportunity-accompanying burdens. Scanlon contrasts his view with the familiar one according to which it is permissible to require people to bear certain burdens if and only if they have actively chosen those burdens, because of the legitimating force of choice. The paper argues that Scanlon’s account, in its most distinctive version, is at best incomplete and can only justify claims about responsibility for a restricted class of burdens. It then goes on to suggest that, when Scanlon’s account is supplemented so as to be able to generate judgments of responsibility about a wider range of burdens, it is no longer clear that there is a difference between the Value of Choice account and a plausible version of the Forfeiture View.

In this paper we ask whether liberal egalitarians can endorse workfare policies that require that welfare recipients should work in return for their welfare benefits. In particular, we focus on the fairness-based case for workfare, which holds that people should be responsible for their own welfare since they would otherwise impose unfair costs on others. Two versions of the fairness-based case are considered: The first defends workfare on the grounds that it would form part of an unemployment insurance scheme that individuals would endorse under certain hypothetical conditions that are salient for the purposes of determining just public policy. The second appeals to the notion of reciprocity in order to justify the requirement that people work for their benefits. We cast doubt on both of these arguments for workfare. Neither argument shows that the unconditional provision of welfare benefits is unjust; hence, the fairness case for workfare is inconclusive.

Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people's lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being.

In a number of debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy and philosophy of economics, philosophers hold the conviction that preferences have normative significance. A central assumption that underlies this conviction is that a cogent account of preference-formation can be developed. This is particularly evident in debates about well-being. Those who defend subjective accounts of well-being, on which a person’s life goes better for her to the extent that her preferences are satisfied, often qualify that account so that it does not include malformed or adaptive preferences (that is, preferences formed in non-autonomous ways, or humble preferences tailored to stifling circumstances), the satisfaction of which does not seem to contribute to well-being. This assumes that there is a normative standard of preference-formation with which to identify those preference that are malformed or adaptive in the relevant sense. An account of preference-formation is also important for philosophers who uphold an objective theory of well-being, on which well-being consists of the pursuit of objectively valuable goals, but who also believe in the value of freedom and thus emphasise the importance of respecting individuals’ choices among various goals. For they, too, in extolling the importance of respect for choices, assume that these choices are not distorted by inauthentically formed preferences, and thus also need an account of preference-formation to help distinguish those cases in which we ought to respect people’s choices from those in which we do not. In the vast literature on preferences, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to the.

Contemporary egalitarian theories of justice constrain the demands of equality by responsibility, and do not view as unjust inequalities that are traceable to individuals' choices. This paper argues that, in order to make non-arbitrary determinate judgements of responsibility, any theory of justice needs a principle of stakes , that is, an account of what consequences choices should have. The paper also argues that the principles of stakes seemingly presupposed by egalitarians are implausible, and that adopting alternative principles of stakes amounts to fleshing out the demands of responsibility rather than imposing limits on them.

Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither argument is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics.

The compensatory desert argument is an argument that purports to justify inequalities in (some) incomes generated by a free labour market. It holds, first, that the principle of compensation is a principle of desert; second, that a distribution justified by a principle of desert is just; and third, that (some) rewards people reap on a free labour market are compensation for costs they incur. It concludes that therefore, a distribution of (some) rewards generated by a free labour market is just. In this chapter I criticise the first two premises of this argument. I argue that the principle of compensation is not a principle of desert (sections 3 and 4), and that a distribution of deserved compensatory payments may be unjust (sections 5 and 6). Before developing my critique of the compensatory desert argument, I start by illustrating further that argument in the version of it which has been defended by Julian Lamont (section 1), and to dispel two objections that have been moved against the view that compensation is a principle of desert.

One of the most distinctive features of Ronald Dworkin’s egalitarian theory is its commitment to holding individuals responsible for the costs to others of their ambitions. This commitment has received much criticism. Drawing on Dworkin’s latest statement of his position in Justice for Hedgehogs, we suggest that it seems to be in tension with another crucial element of Dworkin’s own theory, namely, its endorsement of the importance of people leading authentic lives – lives that reflect their own values. We examine this tension between responsibility and authenticity, and some strategies Dworkin does and could deploy to defuse it, which we think are unsuccessful. We then propose a solution for reconciling the demands of responsibility and authenticity, which is, so we claim, friendly to Dworkin’s fundamental commitments but which leads to a revisionist interpretation of the demands of equality of resources.