Notes
A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), §44. Parenthetical references hereinafter are to pages of this book.
‘Justice as Fairness’,Philosophical Review LXVII (1958), 170.
Philosophy of Right, §§ 158–181.
John Kenneth Galbraith points out that by taking the household as the ‘individual’, economics has similarly ignored part of the economic role of women (and men) as individuals. Households are taken to have preferences rather than the individuals comprising them, so that the balancing of preferences and economic interchanges within this unit, including the cost and productivity of housework and child rearing, are not studied or counted by that science. ‘The Economics of the American Housewife’,Atlantic Monthly, August, 1973.
P. 83. To put it another way, the lexical difference principle tells us first to raise the position of the worst-off representative individual as far as possible. If, once this is done, several alternative arrangements remain, we are to choose the one that gives the highest level to the group that is the second worst-off. We maximize the minimum level in the sub-society obtained by ignoring the worst-off group, so to speak. If alternatives still remain, we raise the third worst-off group as far as possible, and so on through all levels of society.
Nicholas Rescher,Distributive Justice (Indianapolis, 1966). A drawback of these diagrams is that they do not reflect the number of persons in each class.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
English, J. Justice between generations. Philos Stud 31, 91–104 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01857179
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01857179