The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi’s model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting interpersonal comparability of welfare. We show that the...

The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of ‘income equality’. We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resource allocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise...

The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of 'income equality'. We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resource-allocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a...

The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of 'income equality.' We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resource allocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a...

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi's model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting interpersonal comparability of welfare. We show that the...

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool of recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi's model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting objective comparisons among persons. We show that the veil-of-ignorance...

Utilitarians, egalitarians, prioritarians, and sufficientarians each provide examples of situations demonstrating, often compellingly, that a sensible ethical observer must adopt their view and reject the others. We argue, to the contrary, that an attractive ethic is eclectic, in the sense of...

We model an intergenerational society, with a representative agent at each date, who must deplete a renewable resource, from which he derives utility, to produce consumption goods. We adopt the intergenerational lexicographic minimum as the social welfare function. Initially, technological...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an...