It is often thought that compulsory retirement funding gains support from paternalistic considerations. This paper examines this claim. I argue that compulsory retirement funding is more coherent when understood as an attempt at temporal smoothing than counterfactual insurance. An implication is that any paternalistic case for retirement funding faces problems that are more severe than they would be if compulsory retirement funding were insurance. I label these the problems of ‘inverted bias’ and of the ‘arbitrariness of income from labour’. The paper then makes some suggestions about how these points about paternalism bear on the problem of justice in retirement funding.

In Julia Maskivker’s recent “Justice and Contribution,” she argues that, under normal circumstances, the failure to guarantee that life-sustaining workers are above the non-struggle point is not merely disrespectful and a failure of beneficence, but a violation of the norms of fair play and, as such, a “low blow.” In this article, I offer a critical reply to Maskivker. I begin by explaining her reasoning. Then I turn to critique, focusing on two key weaknesses and, in so doing, drawing out two larger lessons.

Chung (2023) purports to derive conditions under which a Utilitarian society, which maximizes total welfare, Pareto dominates a Rawlsian society, which maximizes the income of the least advantaged members of society. We show that Chung’s analysis is doubly flawed. First, his analysis assumes that a Rawlsian government chooses an inefficient tax rate when it could do otherwise. Second, his analysis violates his assumption that citizens must choose a non-negative amount of labour. We show that Chung’s headline result does not hold once we enforce this assumption.

This comment focuses on two intersections between private right and public right: (1) permissions to use another’s property in circumstances of necessity, and (2) distributive justice. My overall claim is that the boundaries Weinrib deftly articulates between private right and public right should not be drawn exactly as Reciprocal Freedom maintains.

Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right is an account of how the law can coherently concretize ‘the juridical’, understood as the internal morality specific to legal relationships. The book elucidates the relationship between private law and the state, presenting the Kantian notion of reciprocal freedom as the normative idea implicit in a legal order in which private law occupies a distinctive place. Emphasizing that the juridical—as the morality specific to legal relationships—does not involve an appeal to morality at large, this article responds to critical comments about the correlative structure of corrective justice, the Kantian conception of ownership, and the book’s treatment of distributive justice and of the rule of law. It also outlines the jurisprudentially fundamental difference between the scope of a right and the operation of a right, which lies at the heart of Kant’s distinction between the state of nature and the civil condition.

In Reciprocal Freedom, Weinrib offers a neat and powerful explanation of the relationship between private law, corrective justice, public law, and distributive justice. In the Kantian view, private law and corrective justice are conceptually prior to public law and distributive justice. The primary function of public law is to publicly determine and enforce private rights. Institutions of distributive justice are required to legitimize a system of private rights that creates the possibility of subordination. In this comment, I argue that Reciprocal Freedom is a justification for what I will call ‘orthodox private law’ that, because it neglects the place of distributive justice within private law, fails to secure genuine independence for all persons.

This study examines the interplay between psychological contract fulfillment, distributive justice, and leader–member exchange (LMX) in shaping affective organizational commitment among university academics. Drawing on social exchange theory, and using simple random sampling, we propose a moderated mediation model to explore how these variables interact. To test the hypotheses, we used the linear moderated mediation test, applying PROCESS for SPSS. Specifically, on a sample of 465 academics, the study tests the hypothesis that distributive justice mediates the relationship between psychological contract fulfillment and affective commitment, with LMX acting as a moderator. Findings reveal that distributive justice is not always necessary for fostering affective commitment when psychological contracts are fulfilled, unless the quality of LMX is low. In low-quality leader–member relationships, perceptions of distributive justice become crucial when it comes to translating contract fulfillment into affective commitment. These results highlight the importance of relational dynamics in academic settings, especially when resources are limited. The study concludes with a discussion of its theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations and avenues for future research.

This article presents a critique of Sergei Sazonov’s entrepreneurial theory of ownership. The article first reconstructs Sazonov’s response to the private duty imposition objection. It then demonstrates that Sazonov’s theory cannot overcome this objection because it is based on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘use’. The entrepreneurial theory of ownership understands ‘use’ in a rather narrow and contradictory sense, which differs from the meaning in which this concept appears in objections to theories of original appropriation.

Drawing on the two-factor model of organizational justice and social exchange theory, this study investigates the mediating roles of procedural and distributive justice in the relationship between work locus of control (WLOC) and leader–member exchange (LMX). Using data collected from two cultural contexts – the United States and South Korea – this research further examines whether culture moderates the indirect relationship between WLOC and LMX through perceived justice. The findings indicate that subordinates with an internal WLOC tend to report higher-quality LMX relationships, and that both procedural and distributive justice partially mediate this relationship. Moderated mediation analyses reveal that the indirect effects of WLOC on LMX via justice perceptions are significantly stronger in the U.S. sample than in the Korean sample. These results contribute to the literature by identifying perceived justice as a key psychological mechanism linking individual traits to relational outcomes at work, and by highlighting how cultural values shape this process.

Modern market economies use competitions to distribute a range of social goods. Some theorists maintain that such competitions ought not to generate winner-takes-all outcomes. But the arguments that have been given against competitions with winner-takes-all outcomes fail to find fault with winner-takes-all outcomes per se (or so I argue). Is there, then, anything wrong with winner-takes-all outcomes? I argue that there is: winner-takes-all outcomes are wrong, in at least most distributive competitions, because they do not give people what they deserve.

The article examines the relationship between perceived distributive justice and trust in the welfare system within complex and self-contradictory policy setting. Based on thirty-three in-depth interviews with social assistance users in Poland and Czechia, we find that policy assemblages in those countries are experienced as confusing ‘institutional enigmas’. We identify four patterns linking perceptions of welfare system’s distributive justice and trust in this context: perceived rationality of the system combined with trust; perceived lack of system’s empathy combined with distrust; concerns about ‘undeserving claimants’ overusing the system linked to distrust in welfare system; and unexpected (non)receiving of benefits causing surprise and shaping (dis)trust. We argue that in contradictory institutional embedding, achieving users’ trust is challenging due to complex distributive justice principles they adhere to and numerous instances of those principles being violated. Trust can still be fostered when users are well informed or experience receiving meaningful support.

Two important tasks for theorists of justice are to determine the bounds of justice, which explain why some claims are matters of justice and others are not, and to determine the demands of justice, which settle conflicts that fall within those bounds. In this paper, we clarify the distinction between bounds and demands, revealing two striking things. First, while thresholds have typically been understood to be demands of justice, their use as such is confusing and arguably implausible. Second, thresholds appear to be better understood as demarcating the bounds of justice, if a suitable explanation for their use can be found. We explore three explanations for why thresholds can demarcate bounds and assess the prospects for seeing thresholds in this new and different role. These are satiability of the value of goods, satiability of justice, and conceptual engineering.