MA Defence: Chris Nicolson, Philosophy

A Relational Egalitarian Account of Contributive Justice

Chris Nicolson

Supervisor: Pablo Gilabert

ABSTRACT: This paper advances a relational egalitarian account of contributive justice, arguing that individuals have a positive right to work certain kinds of jobs and a duty to contribute to others. I offer this account of contributive justice as either complementary to, or as a replacement for, existing liberal egalitarian accounts that focus on equalizing distributive shares of the benefits and burdens of working. The paper goes over some problems for these kinds of accounts before introducing a novel one, which takes for its starting point the claim that justice requires that individuals participating in a joint scheme of cooperation be able to relate to each other as equals.

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