Richard Arneson: Should we reward the deserving? Some puzzles

Do plausible fundamental principles of justice incorporate the idea of rewarding the deserving? Utilitarianism is famously indifferent between a world in which saints fare badly and scoundrels fare we

Richard Arneson is a political philosopher with a special interest in theories of social justice.  AbstractDo plausible fundamental principles of justice incorporate the idea of rewarding the deserving?

Campbell, T. Axiological Retributivism and the Desert Neutrality Paradox. Philosophies 2022, 7, 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7040080 Abstract: According to axiological retributivism, people canan outcome in which someone gets what she deserves, even if it is bad for her, can thereby haveintrinsic positive value. A question seldom asked is how axiological retributivism should deal withcomparisons of outcomes that differ with respect to the number and identities of deserving agents.Attempting to answer this question exposes a problem for axiological retributivism that parallels awell-known problem in population axiology introduced by John Broome. The problem for axiologicalretributivism is that it supports the existence of a range of negative wellbeing levels such that if adeserving person comes into existence at any of these levels, the resulting outcome is neither betternor worse with respect to desert. However, the existence of such a range is inconsistent with a setof very plausible axiological claims. I call this the desert neutrality paradox. After introducing theparadox, I consider several possible responses to it. I suggest that one reasonable response, thoughperhaps not the only one, is to reject axiological retributivism.

Noûs 2021 Abstract Distributive theories evaluate distributions of goods based on candidate recipients’ characteristics, e.g. how well off candidates are, how deserving they are, and whether they fare b

White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford ABSTRACTMany people believe that collectives of certain kinds, such as corporations and states, are entities ca

Emil Andersson

I defended my dissertation, Reinterpreting Liberal Legitimacy, in June 2019 at Uppsala University. The thesis deals with the topic of political legitimacy from a Rawlsian contractualist perspective. In

Lukas H. Meyer, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria, and Speaker of the Field of Excellence Climate Change Graz, the Doctoral Programme Climate Change, and the Working Unit MoraIn my talk I argue that fairness concerns are decisive for eventual cumulative emission allocations shown in terms of quantified national shares.I will show that major fairness concerns are quantitatively critical for the allocation of the global carbon budget across countries. The budget is limited by the aim of staying well below 2°C. Minimal fairness requirements include securing basic needs, attributing historical responsibility for past emissions, accounting for benefits from past emissions, and not exceeding countries’ societally feasible emission reduction rate. The argument in favor of taking into account these fairness concerns reflects a critique of both simple equality and staged approaches, the former demanding the equal-per-capita distribution from now on, the latter preserving the inequality of the status-quo levels of emissions for the transformation period. I argue that the overall most plausible approach is a four-fold qualified version of the equal-per-capita view that incorporates the legitimate reasons for grandfathering.