Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Desert and justifications of the market
- 2 Incentive payments and compensatory desert
- 3 Productive contributions and deserved market rewards
- 4 Liberty and entitlements in the libertarian justification of the free market
- 5 The moralised defence of the free market: a critique
- 6 The free market, force and choice: beyond libertarians and their critics
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Productive contributions and deserved market rewards
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Desert and justifications of the market
- 2 Incentive payments and compensatory desert
- 3 Productive contributions and deserved market rewards
- 4 Liberty and entitlements in the libertarian justification of the free market
- 5 The moralised defence of the free market: a critique
- 6 The free market, force and choice: beyond libertarians and their critics
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In this chapter I turn to consider an alternative, and more familiar, desert-based defence of the market, which I will refer to as the contribution argument. This argument views differences in free market incomes as deserved rewards for people's productive contribution. Like the compensatory desert argument, the contribution argument holds that the market is substantively just in as far as it respects people's deserts, basing this conclusion on the following three main premises. First, the principle of contribution is a plausible interpretation of desert; second, a distribution justified by the principle of contribution is just; and third, the rewards people reap on the free market adequately reflect the productive contribution they make. Since David Miller's is the most sophisticated version of the contribution argument, the analysis that follows mostly concentrates on his claims.
The main claims of my analysis are as follows. Whilst I do not rebut the first main claim of the contribution argument, namely, that the contribution principle qualifies as a principle of desert, I suggest that, on scrutiny, this appears less evident than is generally believed. There are also reasons, which I briefly survey here, to doubt the third main claim, which holds that the rewards people reap on the free market adequately reflect their productive contribution. But my main reservations about the contribution argument concern the second claim it makes.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Liberty, Desert and the MarketA Philosophical Study, pp. 62 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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