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This essay focuses on Cohen’s recent arguments for extending the scope of justice beyond Rawls’s formulation. It argues for the merits of Rawls’s argument that the primary subject of justice should be restricted to social institutions. It contends that whether or not one agrees with Rawls’s view of what should count as the subject of justice, Cohen is wrong to understand the upshot of this to be either a paltry measure of redistribution or the accommodation of the untrammelled pursuit of selfish interests.

Continues the analysis of focus group responses discussed in Ch. 9. It is argued that the way different people respond to examples of the kind commonly employed in contemporary moral and political argument provides some test of the examples' persuasiveness. The subject of investigation in this chapter is responses to a series of vignettes concerning connections between different forms of cooperative activity and the generation of obligations. In particular, is a strong sense of cooperation necessary to generate obligations? Subjects were given vignettes that concerned cooperative schemes that provide excludable benefits, essential public goods, and trivial public goods, respectively. Their responses indicate strong connections between the generation of obligations and the nature of specific benefits provided, especially their weight or importance. Receipt of important benefits was viewed as generating obligations, even without a strong sense of cooperation. Receipt of benefits from activity characterized by a strong sense of cooperation was viewed as not establishing obligations, if benefits produced were not of significant importance.

This chapter incorporates arguments and observations from earlier chapters into a case for a version of the equal shares approach of equal per capita national emissions allowances, contrasting this approach with the equal burdens model in which costs of mitigation and adaptation are equally assigned. A case is made against several versions of the equal burdens approach (including the Kyoto Protocol and the Bush administration's emissions intensity proposal) as being unjust, and a modified equal shares approach is defended against several anticipated objections. The case is made for instantiating the equal basic access to the earth's atmospheric services as a moral and legal environmental right, drawing upon Shue's distinction between basic and non-basic rights, and comparing this right with the claimed right to develop. Finally, it makes the case for procedural fairness in global climate policy development, urging recognition of this democratic norm for both principled and practical reasons.

Reviews the basic features of a theory of political obligation on the basis of the principle of fairness, discusses the criteria a successful theory of obligation should satisfy, and explores the claim that most people believe that they have political obligations.

The most powerful objection to political obligations based on the principle of fairness concerns alternative supply of necessary public goods. According to this line of argument, if the subject prefers not to receive particular benefits from the state, then he need not incur obligations through their provision. However, as the discussion in Ch. 2 shows, for certain essential public goods, there is no alternative to state provision. Moreover, the fact that a subject prefers that goods be provided in a different form or by a mechanism other than the state is not ordinarily sufficient to dissolve obligations that they would otherwise incur.

Scholars who doubt the existence of general political obligations typically criticize and reject theories of obligation on the basis of individual moral principles, for example, consent, fairness, or a natural duty of justice. A stronger position can result from combining different principles in a single theory. This chapter develops a multi-principle theory of political obligation, on the basis of the principle of fairness, a natural duty of justice, and what I call the ‘common good’ principle. The three principles interact in three main ways: ‘cumulation’, combining the separate state services that different principles cover; ‘mutual support’, combining the force of different principles in regard to the same state services; and simple overlap. The result is a theory that can satisfy the main criteria of a theory of political obligation.

This and the following chapters explore the ‘self-image of the state’ in regard to political obligations through analysis of judicial decisions. Examining the reasons that states themselves provide to justify political obligations provides an empirical test of normative theories. Although judicial decisions have no claim to moral truth, the fact that justices regularly argue from certain principles rather than others adds to the plausibility of a theory based on the former and increases the burden of justification for proponents of other principles. Supreme Court justices usually defend their opinions on the basis of statutory or constitutional interpretation and seldom appeal directly to moral principles. However, on occasion they do invoke moral principles to support their opinions, especially in difficult cases. Justices of the US Supreme Court consistently ground obligations on protection that individuals receive from society. The most likely basis of these ‘reciprocal obligations’ is a principle of fairness, as expressed most notably in Arver v. U.S., the most important of the 'Selective Draft Law Cases'.

Examines judicial decisions in Germany and Israel in order to provide a comparative test of the analysis of US Supreme Court decisions in Ch. 7. Although questions of political obligation have been much discussed by scholars, little attention has been paid to moral reasons advanced by actual states to justify the compliance of their subjects. Because in US cases, justices appeal to moral reasons most explicitly in difficult cases that concern imposing military service on conscientious objectors, the analysis focuses on this area. In spite of their important constitutional and judicial differences, Germany and Israel support military obligations along similar lines. German decisions emphasize norms of equality or fairness. Israeli Justices have generally appealed to the importance of each individual's contribution to national defence. However, in a recent decision, norms of fairness are invoked.

Examines opinions of ordinary people in regard to political obligations through small focus groups. Under certain circumstances, the views of ordinary people can lend support to the particular theories to which they subscribe and increase burdens of justification for proponents of alternative theories. Responses of participants in ten focus groups indicate strong consensus on basic points. Participants strongly believe they have political obligations, although they make exceptions for particular laws, which seem to them to serve no real social purpose. They ground their obligations on benefits provided by the state, and strongly connect up their own requirements to obey the law with requirements that all other people behave similarly. The moral principle that appears to coincide most closely with their views is a variant of the principle of fairness.

This chapter begins by bringing together the findings of the previous six chapters to outline the complete conception of legitimacy—the Moderate Instrumentalist Approach. It goes on to use this approach to consider to answer two central questions: (a) ‘Who has the right to intervene?’ and (b) ‘Who has the duty to intervene?’ It first suggests that any agent that has an adequate degree of legitimacy has the right to intervene. Second, it argues that the duty to intervene should fall on the most legitimate intervener. Assigning the duty to intervene raises additional issues, such as that of fairness. The chapter therefore defends the view that the most legitimate agent has the duty to intervene against three leading alternatives and the claims that this is unfair. The third section considers who, out of current agents (the NATO, the states, the UN, the regional organizations, and the private military companies), (a) has an adequate degree of legitimacy, and therefore the right to intervene, and (b) is the most legitimate agent, and therefore has the duty to intervene. It concludes that, although some agents of intervention possess an adequate degree of legitimacy, no current agent is fully legitimate.

Strict employment protection rules are typically motivated by concern for fairness rather than equality, but they may nevertheless help to reduce inequality in earnings among the employed. The concern is that they may also reduce hiring, thereby inhibiting employment growth. What does the experience of affluent countries in recent decades suggest? This chapter examines this issue.

This chapter argues that democracy is grounded in the principle of public equality defended in the first two chapters. Thinking of the grounds of democracy in this way helps us understand the sense in which democracy is intrinsically just, while preserving the idea that democracy serves important purposes that are independent of it and it helps us understand the reasons for equality of citizenship. It also sets the stage for the later chapters on the authority of democracy and its limits. This chapter explores the implications of this grounding of democracy in equality for representative democracy and political equality across age groups and shows how the fairness of democratic procedures is distinct from fair lotteries. It responds to two major objections to democracy: the objection that power ought to be apportioned to knowledge and the objection that power ought to be decentralized rather than democratized.

This chapter presents an overview of the book. It argues that the metaphysical approach to ethics is a failure and that the time has come to take a scientific view of morality. A social contract is taken to be the set of common understandings that allow the citizens of a society to coordinate. Such social contracts are seen as the product of biological and cultural evolution. To survive, a social contract must therefore be an equilibrium in the repeated game of life played by a society. Since the folk theorem of repeated game theory says that there are large numbers of such equilibria, fairness norms then become explicable as an equilibrium selection device that selects one of the many efficient equilibria of a society's game of life. It is suggested that the deep structure of such fairness norms is captured by John Rawls' notion of the original position, and is therefore universal in the human species. On the other hand, the standard of interpersonal comparison needed as an input to the original position is culturally determined.

The choice of tax base–income, consumption, wealth–is an instrumental one: it depends upon the efficiency and justice of the outcomes different tax bases promote. Traditional fairness-based arguments for the consumption base–for example, that it is fairer to savers, or appropriately taxes according to what is taken out rather than put into the “common pool”–all suffer from the everyday libertarian mistake of treating the pretax distribution as morally significant. But there are important philosophical questions to be asked about the value of wealth and the legitimacy of taxing endowment (potential rather than actual income).

Considerations of fairness have no direct bearing on the issue of progressivity in tax rates; there is no genuine issue of vertical equity. Whether a proportional, progressive, or a regressive tax rate scheme is to be preferred on ethical grounds depends upon the justice of the outcomes the different schemes tend to promote. It is clear that this instrumental question requires a good deal of empirical information for its answer. While it is often claimed that high marginal tax rates greatly deter work (which is bad according to most theories of justice), this is not the consensus among economists.