Abstract
In a recent article, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinctive egalitarian critique of the types of incentive inequalities that are permitted by John Rawls's difference principle. She argues that citizens of a well-ordered society, who publicly accept Rawls's two principles of justice and their justifications, may not demand incentives to employ their talents in productive ways since such demands are inconsistent with a major justification for the difference principle: the moral arbitrariness of talent. I argue that there is no such inconsistency. Citizens can publicly accept the claim that talent is morally arbitrary and accept incentives to employ their talents productively without inconsistency. In the standard case that Rawls envisions, citizens who do so take their preferences to be a reason for a higher salary, not their talents.
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Notes
By a relation of community, Cohen means a relation in which citizens can justify policies to each other, and justify the behaviors that these policies presuppose (Cohen 2008, pp. 32, 41–44).
All incomes are post-tax.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point of clarification.
References
Cohen, G. A. (2008). Rescuing justice and equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice rev ed.. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (2001). In E. Kelly (Ed.), Justice as fairness: a restatement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scheffler, S. (2003). What is egalitarianism? Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31(1), 5–39.
Shiffrin, S. V. (2010). Incentives, motives, and talents. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 38(2), 111–142.
Acknowledgments
I thank Jonathan Peterson, Arthur Ripstein, Alan Wertheimer, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.
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MacKay, D. Incentive Inequalities and Talents: A Reply to Shiffrin. Philosophia 41, 521–526 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9393-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9393-2