Justice practice questions.

A court orders a trader who defrauded a buyer to hand back exactly what he took, without asking which of the two is the better citizen. In Aristotle's classification, the kind of justice the court is administering is

• distributive justice, because a share is being assigned to each party.
• distributive justice, because the court applies a proportion based on merit.
• universal justice, because the trader has broken the law of the city.
• corrective justice, because the court restores an arithmetical equality.

Answer: corrective justice, because the court restores an arithmetical equality.

Corrective justice looks only at the loss and the gain and restores the balance arithmetically, which is exactly why the parties' merit is irrelevant, whereas distributive justice assigns shares in proportion to a criterion of merit and is therefore geometrical. Universal justice is not a third kind of remedy but lawfulness as a whole virtue, so it describes the trader's conduct rather than classifying what the court administers.

Sen objects that two people holding identical bundles of Rawlsian primary goods may still be very unequally placed. Which feature of his capability approach does the objection introduce?

• People differ in how far they can convert resources into doings and beings.
• People differ in how much satisfaction they derive from the same resources.
• Resources should be shared so that the worst off receive the largest bundle.
• Justice is settled by the procedure that generated a distribution, not its shape.

Answer: People differ in how far they can convert resources into doings and beings.

The point concerns conversion rather than taste: someone with a disability may need far more income to achieve the same mobility, so an index of resources misreports how well her life is going. The satisfaction option restates welfarism, which Sen also rejects because preferences adapt to long-standing deprivation.

A government proposes to suspend a basic political freedom because doing so would measurably raise the incomes of the poorest citizens. Why does Rawls' theory rule the proposal out?

• Because redistributing income would violate the entitlements of those who hold it.
• Because income and wealth are not primary goods and so carry no weight at all.
• Because a basic liberty may be limited only for the sake of liberty itself.
• Because the parties in the original position know that they will end up poor.

Answer: Because a basic liberty may be limited only for the sake of liberty itself.

The first principle has lexical priority over the second, so economic gains cannot be traded against basic liberties however large those gains are. Income and wealth are primary goods as well, which is why this is a conflict between the two principles rather than a case in which one of them is silent.

Rawls argues that parties behind the veil of ignorance would choose principles that secure the position of the worst off, rather than principles maximising average welfare. Harsanyi objects that

• the parties would have no reason to care about justice at all in that situation
• parties ignorant of their identity should reason as if they had an equal chance of being anyone, and so maximise expected position
• the veil of ignorance is impossible to imagine and therefore cannot ground any conclusion
• the parties would be unable to agree on any principles whatever, since they know nothing about themselves, not even about how to begin choosing

Answer: parties ignorant of their identity should reason as if they had an equal chance of being anyone, and so maximise expected position

The dispute is about which decision rule is rational under that peculiar uncertainty: maximin protects against the worst outcome, expected-utility reasoning trades a risk of it against gains elsewhere. Rawls replies that the stakes are one's whole life prospects and that the parties cannot assign probabilities, so caution is rational.

Walzer argues that different social goods — medical care, offices, education, political power — have distinct meanings and should be distributed by criteria appropriate to each. On his account, injustice as domination occurs when

• a society tolerates any inequality at all in the distribution of a social good
• the criteria for distributing a good are decided democratically rather than by experts
• advantage in one sphere is converted into advantage in others, so money buys health, office and influence
• a good is distributed equally when the people concerned would have preferred a different arrangement among themselves

Answer: advantage in one sphere is converted into advantage in others, so money buys health, office and influence

The target is convertibility rather than inequality as such: on this view a society may tolerate unequal wealth while blocking its exchange for medical priority or political office. The standard objection is that the meanings of goods are contested within a society, so the criteria cannot simply be read off them.

A state forbids discrimination in hiring but leaves schooling to be bought privately. Judged by Rawls' principle of fair equality of opportunity, the arrangement

• fails, because those of equal talent and willingness do not have equal prospects
• succeeds, because posts are open to all applicants and none is excluded by law
• fails, because it does not equalise the incomes that people finally receive
• succeeds, provided the resulting inequalities also benefit the worst-off group

Answer: fails, because those of equal talent and willingness do not have equal prospects

Careers open to talents requires only that offices be legally open to all; fair equality of opportunity adds that social starting points must not decide who is in a position to compete. Neither principle requires equality of outcome, and the difference principle governs the separate question of how far inequalities may go.