Just deserts or deserved payoff? What does it mean to earn punishment or reward? How should the important goods in life be fairly divided? Moritz Heepe responds to these questions by developing a basically Aristotelian principle of justice that has been neglected in modern discourse, but is firmly rooted in the human sense of justice adequately described by moral psychology.

Moritz Heepe formulates a principle of justice and examines how aspects of the proportionality of well-being to moral desert combine with aspects of reciprocity. This places the principle partly in an Aristotelian tradition and very much at odds with the liberal mainstream of the contemporary philosophy of justice . The starting point is an informed survey of the empirical, especially psychological research of how common sense justice is conceived. Here, proportional reciprocity proves itself to be a central characteristic of our sense of justice. After a coherent reconstruction of its concept proportional reciprocity's various systematic properties and problems are discussed and, against a background of central positions in the history of ethics, also juxtaposed with the most important contemporary concepts of justice. The author finally derives concrete norms of action (heuristics) from the abstract-reciprocal basic principle and is thus able to present a highly innovative blueprint of philosophical justice.

Autorentext
Geboren 1965; Studium der Humanmedizin und Philosophie an der Freien Universität Berlin mit Promotion in beiden Fächern; Weiterbildung zum Facharzt für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Geriatrie, in Berlin und Teupitz; 2003-09 Chefarzt der Abteilung Gerontopsychiatrie in der LWL-Klinik Warstein-Lippstadt; seit 2009 Ärztlicher Direktor des St. Joseph Krankhauses Dessau; etliche Zeitschriftenpublikationen im Bereich Rechtsphilosophie und Ethik.