Distributive Justice and Access to Advantage

Distributive Justice and Access to Advantage is the most recent anthology devoted to the work of the great and, sadly, late political philosopher G.A. Cohen. Whereas other anthologies published since his passing have been comprised of Cohen's own work, this anthology, edited by Alexander Kaufman, presents us with a series of essays about Cohen's work. The volume's impressive roster of contributors will raise readers’ hopes, and I don't think those expectations are likely to be dashed: the chapters in Distributive Justice achieve a high level of sophistication, and most of them have not been previously published. Though I didn't know Cohen personally, I'm sure he would have been happy with the careful attention Distributive Justice's authors devote to understanding his views, as well as with their insightful commentary. Distributive Justice is broken up into three sections, each of which is devoted to a different theme in Cohen's work. The first mostly concerns methodological views that Cohen defended in the later part of his career: namely (a) that fundamental normative principles are ‘fact-insensitive’ or justified independently of factual reasons, and (b) that the concept of justice is located at the level of fact-insensitive principles, rather than at the level of derivative, action-guiding principles (Cohen calls the latter ‘rules of regulation’). The second section is primarily concerned with Cohen's luck egalitarian conception of fairness, i.e., his view that distributive fairness obtains if and only if there are no involuntary inequalities. The third is about matters of political practice. Issues addressed in this last section include the extent to which a number of the values Cohen champions (particularly fairness, freedom, community, and efficiency) can feasibly be implemented in unison, as well as which institutional arrangements (socialist or capitalist?) would best serve to implement them.

Distributive justice · Distributive property · Economic Justice · Economics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Luck · Normative · Obligation · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Social science · Sociology · Sophistication · Theme (computing) · Computer Science · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics

• Social equality, social freedom and democracy

  Open Access•Kenneth Baynes•Constellations•2019

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