Economic Theories of Justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 665-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Fleurbaey
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Welfare Function ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Large Range ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Welfare Economics ◽  
Individual Utility ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theories Of Justice

Social justice considerations are incorporated into welfare economics via properties of the social welfare function and measures of individual utility. The ethical issues underlying various approaches are illustrated through intriguing paradoxes that have emerged in the literature. Such puzzles point to the tensions among certain important values (such as respecting preferences, giving priority to the worse off, personal responsibility, and informational simplicity) and suggest the relevant ways in which reasonable compromise can be sought. Welfare economics is now able to accommodate a large range of conceptions of justice, including utilitarianism and various forms of egalitarianism and libertarianism.

scholarly journals Retrospectives: James Buchanan: Clubs and Alternative Welfare Economics

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Alain Marciano
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Economics ◽  
Social Welfare Function ◽  
Welfare Economics ◽  
Individual Utility ◽  
James Buchanan ◽  
The Public ◽  
Goods And Services

James Buchanan wrote “An Economic Theory of Clubs” and invented clubs to support a form of welfare economics in which there is no social welfare function (SWF) and individual utility functions cannot be “read” by external observers. Clubs were a means to allow the implementation of individualized prices for public goods and services and to allow each individual to pay exactly the amount he wants to pay. He developed this project to answer and counter Paul Samuelson's analysis of public goods, in which social welfare functions play a crucial role. Buchanan and Samuelson disagreed over the allocation of the costs of the public good to each individual. To Buchanan, it was by relying on individual's preferences. To Samuelson, by using a SWF. Buchanan's clubs are thus foreign and incompatible with the traditional Samuelson-style public economics in which they are used.

scholarly journals THE SOCIAL JUSTICE IMPLICATIONS OF THE US DRUG WAR

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1178-1191
Author(s):  
Matthew Robinson ◽  
Maggie Jones ◽  
Maggie Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Drug War ◽  
National Drug ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
National Drug Control Policy ◽  
Goals And Objectives

In this paper, the authors outline key facts pertaining to the US drug war, including its stated goals and objectives, and then offer an assessment of the empirical evidence related to its (in)effectiveness in achieving these goals. Data illustrate that drug use is not down, that availability of drugs is not down, that the price of drugs is not down, that access to drug treatment has not increased, and that deaths and illnesses associated with drugs use are not down. The authors also identify major costs associated with national drug control policy and weigh these against its benefits. This analysis permits a conclusion with regard to whether the drug war is a good or bad policy. Finally, the authors utilize major theories of justice to identify whether the drug war is consistent with social justice. The analysis shows that the drug war does not commonly accepted definitions of social justice.

scholarly journals The Death of Welfare Economics

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 827-865 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herrade Igersheim
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Social Welfare Function ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Welfare Economics ◽  
Impossibility Result ◽  
Impossibility Theorem ◽  
Individual Values ◽  
The Social

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, as set out in his pathbreaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function—one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis—does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Berg-son-Samuelson social welfare function, though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow’s attacks. The aim of this article is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and involved a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and, behind them, two distinct communities—welfare economics, which was on the wane, against the emerging social choice theory—representing two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and two different conceptions of social welfare.

Bologna, My Love: Il Cinema Ritrovato

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
Carla Marcantonio
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Francis Ford Coppola ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ongoing Project

FQ books editor Carla Marcantonio guides readers through the 33rd edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival held each year in Bologna at the end of June. Highlights of this year's festival included a restoration of one of Vittorio De Sica's hard-to-find and hence lesser-known films, the social justice fairy tale, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951). The film was presented by De Sica's daughter, Emi De Sica, and was an example of the ongoing project to restore De Sica's archive, which was given to the Cineteca de Bologna in 2016. Marcantonio also notes her unexpected responses to certain reviewings; Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019), presented by Francis Ford Coppola on the large-scale screen of Piazza Maggiore and accompanied by remastered Dolby Atmos sound, struck her as a tour-de-force while a restoration of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) had lost some of its strange allure.

Social Justice and Dietetic Education: Are We Preparing Practitioners to Lead?

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-126
Author(s):  
Jennifer Brady
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Determinants Of Health ◽  
Structural Determinants ◽  
Social Justice Advocacy ◽  
Dietetic Education ◽  
Qualitative Survey ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
And Training

Purpose: To explore dietetic practitioners’ perceptions of their education and training in the knowledge, skills, and confidence to understand social justice issues and to engage in socially just dietetic practice and social justice advocacy. Methods: An online semi-qualitative survey sent to Canadian dietitians. Results: Most respondents (n = 264; 81.5%) felt that knowledge- and skill-based learning about social justice and social justice advocacy should be a part of dietetic education and training. Reasons given by respondents for the importance of social justice learning include: client-centred care and reflexive practice, effecting change to the social and structural determinants of health, preventing dietitian burnout, and relevance of the profession. Yet, over half of respondents either strongly disagreed or disagreed that they were adequately prepared with the knowledge (n = 186; 57.4%), skills (n = 195; 60.2%), or confidence (n = 196; 60.5%) to engage in advocacy related to social justice concerns. Some questioned the practicality of adding social justice learning via additional courses to already full programs, while others proposed infusing a social justice lens across dietetic education and practice areas. Conclusions: Dietetic education and training must do more to prepare dietitians to answer calls for dietitians to engage in social justice issues through practice and advocacy.

‘Everything Belongs to God’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Rech
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Private Ownership ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wealth Redistribution ◽  
Social Teachings

This chapter examines and contextualizes Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine of property and social justice, which he articulated at a time of deep social conflicts in Egypt. The chapter describes how Qutb, along with other writers concerned with economic inequality in the 1920s–40s such as Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) and Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri (1895–1971), conceptualised private ownership as a form of power that must be limited by religious obligations and subordinated to the public good. The chapter further shows that Qutb made this notion of restrained property central to a broader theory of social justice and wealth redistribution by combining the social teachings of the Qur’an with the modern ideal of the centralized interventionist state. Arguably this endeavour to revitalise the Quranic roots of Islamic charity and simultaneously appropriate the discourse of modern statehood made Qutb’s position oscillate between legalism and anti-legalism.

scholarly journals Ethical Issues in Consent for the Reuse of Data in Health Data Platforms

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex McKeown ◽  
Miranda Mourby ◽  
Paul Harrison ◽  
Sophie Walker ◽  
Mark Sheehan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Personalised Medicine ◽  
Data Reuse ◽  
Remote Access ◽  
Risk Indicators ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractData platforms represent a new paradigm for carrying out health research. In the platform model, datasets are pooled for remote access and analysis, so novel insights for developing better stratified and/or personalised medicine approaches can be derived from their integration. If the integration of diverse datasets enables development of more accurate risk indicators, prognostic factors, or better treatments and interventions, this obviates the need for the sharing and reuse of data; and a platform-based approach is an appropriate model for facilitating this. Platform-based approaches thus require new thinking about consent. Here we defend an approach to meeting this challenge within the data platform model, grounded in: the notion of ‘reasonable expectations’ for the reuse of data; Waldron’s account of ‘integrity’ as a heuristic for managing disagreement about the ethical permissibility of the approach; and the element of the social contract that emphasises the importance of public engagement in embedding new norms of research consistent with changing technological realities. While a social contract approach may sound appealing, however, it is incoherent in the context at hand. We defend a way forward guided by that part of the social contract which requires public approval for the proposal and argue that we have moral reasons to endorse a wider presumption of data reuse. However, we show that the relationship in question is not recognisably contractual and that the social contract approach is therefore misleading in this context. We conclude stating four requirements on which the legitimacy of our proposal rests.

scholarly journals COVID-19 and the calls of humanistic social work: Exploring the developmental-clinical social work concerns of the pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 002087282110079
Author(s):  
Robert K Chigangaidze
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Clinical Social Work ◽  
Health Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face

Any health outbreak is beyond the biomedical approach. The COVID-19 pandemic exposes a calamitous need to address social inequalities prevalent in the global health community. Au fait with this, the impetus of this article is to explore the calls of humanistic social work in the face of the pandemic. It calls for the pursuit of social justice during the pandemic and after. It also calls for a holistic service provision, technological innovation and stewardship. Wrapping up, it challenges the global community to rethink their priorities – egotism or altruism. It emphasizes the ultimate way forward of addressing the social inequalities.

scholarly journals Big Data: Some Ethical Concerns for the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Michael Weinhardt
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Online Behavior ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
State Actors

While big data (BD) has been around for a while now, the social sciences have been comparatively cautious in its adoption for research purposes. This article briefly discusses the scope and variety of BD, and its research potential and ethical implications for the social sciences and sociology, which derive from these characteristics. For example, BD allows for the analysis of actual (online) behavior and the analysis of networks on a grand scale. The sheer volume and variety of data allow for the detection of rare patterns and behaviors that would otherwise go unnoticed. However, there are also a range of ethical issues of BD that need consideration. These entail, amongst others, the imperative for documentation and dissemination of methods, data, and results, the problems of anonymization and re-identification, and the questions surrounding the ability of stakeholders in big data research and institutionalized bodies to handle ethical issues. There are also grave risks involved in the (mis)use of BD, as it holds great value for companies, criminals, and state actors alike. The article concludes that BD holds great potential for the social sciences, but that there are still a range of practical and ethical issues that need addressing.

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