Can the need for incentives justify inequality? Starting from this question, Frank Vandenbroucke examines a conception of justice in which both equality and responsibility are involved. In the first part of the inquiry, which explores the implementation of that conception of justice, the justification of incentives assumes that agents make personal choices based only upon their own interests. The second part of the book challenges the idea that a normative conception of distributive justice can be based on that traditional assumption, i.e. that personal choices are not the subject matter of justice. Thus, Vandenbroucke questions the Rawlsian idea that the primary subject of a theory of justice is the basic structure of society, and not the individual conduct of its citizens. For a society to be really just, the ethos of individual conduct has to serve justice. Non-mathematical readers can skip the formal model proposed in Chapter 3 and understand the rest of the book.

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One Just Incentive Policies.- I. Responsibility-Sensitive Egalitarian Justice and the Labour Market.- 1. Responsibility: Control Versus Delegation.- 2. Equal Access to Advantage and Equalizing Wage Differences.- 3. Collective Choice.- a) Equality Versus Priority.- b) Conclusion.- 4. Does Responsibility-Sensitive Egalitarian Justice Entail a Principle of Natural Reward?.- a) Principles of Reward and Metrics of Advantage Determine Each Other.- b) Conclusion.- 5. Responsible Dimensions of Behaviour.- a) Responsible Dimensions of Behaviour: A Simple Example in a World of Dominated Diversity.- b) Responsible Dimensions of Behaviour in a More Complex World: Consumer Satisfaction Versus Producer Satisfaction.- 6) Conclusion.- Postscript to Chapter I.- II. Information, Efficiency, and Morality.- 1. Information and the "Trade-off" Between Equality and Efficiency.- a) Regime T.- b) Regime S.- c) Self-selection and Incentive Compatibility Constraints.- d) Regime F.- e) The "Trade-off" Between Equality and Efficiency.- f) Pareto-Efficient Transfer Structures.- g) Conclusion: Efficiency Imposes Mixed Schemes of Reward.- 2. Information and Morality.- a) Shameful Revelation.- b) Lump Sum Transfers and the Limits on First-Best Justice.- 3. Conclusion.- III. Responsibility, Well-being, Information, and the Design of Just Policies.- 1. Assumptions Concerning the Economic Environment.- 2. Assumptions Concerning the Government's Policy Stance.- 3. Axiomatic Approach: Two Principles for the Egalitarian Government.- 4. The Government's Second-Best Instruments.- 5. Constraints on Instruments.- a) The Balanced Budget Constraint.- b) The Labour Supply Constraints.- 6. Defining Individual Advantage.- 7. Defining Policy Objectives.- a) RAWLS.- b) RESPO.- c) Integrating RAWLS and RESPO in One Formula.- 8. Second-Best Approach: General Solution.- 9. Tracing the Optimal Policy Scenarios for ? Increasing to 1.- a) Optimal Policy Track in Regime S.- b) Optimal Policy Track with Additional Constraint on the Wage Subsidy, and Regime T.- c) The Impact of Policy and Pre-Tax Inequality on the Optimal Tax Rate in Regime T.- 10. Principles of Compensation: Conditions for Equality.- 11. Principles of Reward: Conditions for Neutrality.- 12. Conditions for Convergence Between RAWLS and RESPO.- 13. Basic Income?.- 14 State Neutrality and Basic Income.- a) Cases Whereby Equality Obtains.- b) Cases Whereby t < 1.- 15. "Reciprocity" Versus Basic Income.- 16. First-Best Approach: Lump Sum Taxation.- a) "Earnings Potential" Lump Sum Transfer Scheme.- b) Lump Sum Transfer Scheme for RESPO (LSTS RESPO).- c) Lump Sum Transfer Scheme for RAWLS (LSTS RAWLS).- 17. Comparison of Efficiency.- 18. Conclusions.- 19. Appendix:.- Graphical Analysis of the Second-Best Approach with Two Instruments.- Two Justice and Incentives.- IV. Do Incentives Justify Inequality?.- 1. The Necessity of Incentives.- 2. Comprehensive Justification.- 3. The Lax Difference Principle Lacks Solidarity.- a) Changing Fortunes in a Skill-Driven World.- b) Consequences of an Increase in the Dependency Ratio.- 4. Pareto-Arguments for Inequality?.- a) Barry's Justification of Economic Incentives.- b) Cohen Against the Pareto-Argument.- c) Generalizing Cohen's Argument.- d) Lump Sum Taxation and/or Total Commitment Admit "Redistributability".- e) Total Commitment and the Priority View Yield Equality.- 5. Conclusion.- V. Van Parijs's "Safeguard": One-Nation Pareto-ism.- 1. Pareto Against Equality: Van Parijs's Four Moves.- a) First Move: The Omniscient Social Planner.- b) Second Move: Objective Standards of Labour Burden Call for a "Safeguard".- c) Third Move: From a Safeguard to Incentives.- d) Fourth Move: From Incentives to a Fully-Fledged Labour Market.- 2. Moral Restraint in the Market.- 3. Assessment: An Incomplete Defence.- 4. Patriotism Against Pareto: Consequences of Factor Mobility.- VI. The Moral Division of Labour, Social Structure, and Rules.- 1. "The Coming of Age of Liberal Philosophy".- 2. The Moral Division of Labour and Second-Order Impartiality.- a) Nagel's Reconciliation of the Two Standpoints.- b) Are Egalitarian Principles, Comprehensive Justification and a Moral Division of Labour Compatible?.- c) Second-Order Impartiality.- 3. Structure and Rules.- a) Explaining the Social Structure: The Crawford-Ostrom Grammar.- b) The Existence of Rules.- c) Legality and Formality.- d) Publicity.- 4. Social Virtues.- VII. Rawls's Basic Structure Argument: A Critical Appraisal.- 1. Rawls's Definition of the Basic Structure.- 2. The Argument for the Primacy of the Basic Structure.- 3. Cohen's Criticism.- a) Cohen's First Move: Enlarging the Concept of Rules.- b) Cohen's Second Move: "Less Separability".- c) The "Profundity-of-Effect" Criterion Revisited.- 4. Conclusion.- VIII. Publicity, Stability, and the Tasks of Political Philosophy.- 1. Rawlsian Arguments for Publicity.- 2. The Intrinsic Value of Stability.- 3. Do Stability and Publicity Require Formal Rules?.- a) Public Accessibility of Information, and Exposure of Actions.- b) Informal Rules Can Be Stable and Public.- 4. Stability as a Pragmatic Desideratum.- a) Homo Reciprocans: Normative or Empirical Assumption?.- b) Pragmatic Stability.- 5. Conclusion.- Synopsis and Conclusion.- Index of Names.