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Fairness and the Strengths of Agents’ Claims

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2016

NATHANIEL SHARADIN
NATHANIEL SHARADIN*
Affiliation:
Syracuse Universitynpsharad@syr.edu
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Abstract

John Broome has proposed a theory of fairness according to which fairness requires that agents’ claims to goods be satisfied in proportion to the relative strength of those claims. In the case of competing claims for a single indivisible good, Broome argues that what fairness requires is the use of a weighted lottery as a surrogate to satisfying the competing claims: the relative chance of each claimant's winning the lottery should be set to the relative strength of each claimant's claim. In this journal, James Kirkpatrick and Nick Eastwood have objected that the use of weighted lotteries in the case of indivisible goods is unacceptable. In this article, I explain why Kirkpatrick and Eastwood's objection misses its mark.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 347 - 360
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Broome, John, ‘Fairness’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990), pp. 87–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Kirkpatrick, James and Eastwood, Nick, ‘Broome's Theory of Fairness and the Problem of Quantifying the Strengths of Claims’, Utilitas 27.1 (2015), pp. 82–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 There are also cases of non-competing claims to (divisible and indivisible) goods, but these cases won't concern me here. They also aren't the target of Broome's account. See Broome, ‘Fairness’, pp. 94–5.

4 Broome, ‘Fairness’, p. 100.

5 This is not to say that, when S(A,G) = 1 no other agent is such that they have an equally good claim to G.

6 Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out the need to restrict the requirements to cases of a finite number of competing claims to (at most) finitely divisible goods.

7 Broome, ‘Fairness’, pp. 95–6.

8 Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, p. 86. Kirkpatrick and Eastwood borrow this example from Hooker, Brad, ‘Fairness’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005), pp. 329–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 349.

9 Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, pp. 87–8.

10 Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, p. 88.

11 Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, p. 88.

12 Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, p. 86.

13 See, for instance, Hooker, ‘Fairness’, p. 349.

14 The same is of course true in the case of a divisible good, i.e. a case governed by Requirement 1.

15 Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging clarity on this point.

16 Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, p. 88.

17 Thanks to two anonymous referees for suggesting this way of putting things.

18 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting the analogy with Bayesian requirements of rationality.

19 This is a rather simple version of (extremely) subjective Bayesianism. But I'm not interested in the plausibility of this account per se, only in displaying the analogy with the requirements of fairness.

20 It's not important here what form of conditionalization we think is more plausibly required by rationality, e.g. whether we think Jeffrey conditionalization is superior to simple conditionalization. For more on this issue, see Richard C. Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision (Chicago, 1983).

21 Pettit, Philip, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

22 See Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar and Pettit, Theory. The exact details of Pettit's account don't matter for present purposes.

23 See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (1971, Cambridge)Google Scholar, esp. §22.

24 I am not suggesting this is the case with respect to the requirements of fairness since, unlike Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, I am not as pessimistic about our ability to come up with a way to assign values to the strengths of agents’ claims to goods. But pursuing such an account is beyond the scope of this article.

25 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this line of response.

26 It's possible that Kirkpatrick and Eastwood anticipate this line of thought, for they consider and reject two possible methods for assigning absolute values to the strength of agents’ claims: the use of authorities and the use of rules. See Kirkpatrick and Eastwood, ‘Quantifying’, pp. 89–90. The idea in each case would be that, in order to assign the absolute values we need in order to conform to Requirement 2 in cases like Medicine-1 and Medicine-2, we could appeal either to some authority whose job it was to assign such values, or we could follow a rule for assigning the relevant values. They argue quite correctly that neither method is acceptable by Broome's own lights. But the conclusion they draw from this is again incorrect: they conclude that, because Broome's account of the requirements of fairness stands in need of an account of how to evaluate the absolute strength of agents’ claims to goods, and because an appeal neither to authority nor to rules is acceptable by Broome's own lights, his account of the requirements of fairness is somehow unacceptable. But this is the wrong conclusion: what we should conclude is that, for any account of the requirements of fairness to be applicable by us to cases like Medicine-1 and Medicine-2, we shall also require an account of how to assign absolute values to the strength of agents’ claims.