In a contribution to this journal Amos Witzum has challenged a common interpretation of Adam Smith's theory of justice, according to which Smith ‘employed a concept of justice – in the tradition of natural laws theories – whereby rights are related to guarding what is one's own rather than to what is one's due’ (Witzum, 1997, p. 242). Witzum claims that not only does Smith's conception of justice include one's due, and hence, distributional considerations, but the right to one's own ‘stems from the right to what is one's due’ (p. 244). Furthermore, he asserts that ‘as all members of society own their natural faculties, which presumably were given to them to enable them to survive, the fruits of their labour up to subsistence level belong to them by virtue of their ownership of their own faculties’ (p. 259). This leads him to the conclusion that property acquisition gives rise to a duty, on the part of property holders, to ‘distribute subsistence’ and that when wages fall below the subsistence level, the rights of workers have been violated ‘in exactly the same sense that taking an acquired asset away from its owner constitutes a violation of justice’ (p. 244).

This paper develops a normative evaluation of the minimum wage in the light of recent evidence and theory about its effects. It argues that the minimum wage should be evaluated using a consequentialist criterion that gives priority to the jobs and incomes of the worst off. This criterion would be accepted by many different types of consequentialism, especially given the two major views about what the minimum wage does. One is that the minimum wage harms the jobs and incomes of the worst off and the other is that it does neither much harm nor much good. The paper then argues at length that there are no important considerations besides jobs and incomes relevant to the assessment of the minimum wage. It criticizes exploitation arguments for the minimum wage. It is not clear that the minimum wage would reduce exploitation and the paper doubts that, if it did, it would do so in a morally significant way. The paper then criticizes freedom arguments against the minimum wage by rejecting appeals to self-ownership and freedom of contract and by arguing that no freedom of significance is lost by the minimum wage that is not already taken account of in the main consequentialist criterion. The conclusion is that, at worst, the minimum wage is a mistake and, at best, something to be half-hearted about.

The prisoner 's dilemma game (henceforth, PD) has acquired large literatures in several disciplines. It is surprising, therefore, that a good definition of the game is hard to find. Typically an author relates a story about captured criminals or military rivals, provides a particular payoff matrix and asserts that the PD is characterized, or illustrated, by that matrix. In the few cases in which characterizing conditions are given, the conditions, and the motivations for them, do not always agree with each other or with the paradigm examples elsewhere. In this paper we describe several varieties of PD's. In particular, we suggest there are two distinctions among PD's with philosophical significance, the pure/impure and the utilitarian/nonutilitarian distinctions. In the first section, we explain and characterize the two distinctions. In the second, we discuss an issue of moral philosophy that illustrates the significance of the former.

We consider a case where consumers are faced with a choice between sweatshop-produced clothing and identical clothing produced in high-income countries. We argue that it is morally better for consumers to purchase clothing produced in sweatshops and then to compensate sweatshop workers for the difference between their actual wage and a fair wage than it is for them either to purchase the sweatshop clothing without this compensatory transfer or to purchase clothing produced in high-income countries.

It is common to posit a clear opposition between the values served by property systems and the value of the environment. To give the environment its due, this view holds, the role of private property needs to be limited. Support for this has been said to be found in Locke’s famous ‘enough and as good’ proviso. This article shows that this opposition is mistaken, and corrects the implied reading of Locke’s proviso. In reality, there is no opposition between property and the environment. This is shown using Locke’s theory of appropriation, as well as the real-life case of instream water appropriation.

The concept of patience describes a person's ability to make prolonged efforts towards future goals, and his or her ability to consider long-term future consequences. Clearly, patience is a capacity that comes by degrees. On the following pages, a person will be said to be patient to the extent that his actions are motivated by future consequences. Hence, a person is not patient if he has the ability to see long-term consequences, while being unable to take these consequences into consideration when he decides how to act.

What should maximin egalitarians think about seniority privileges? We contrast a good-specific and an all-things-considered perspective. As to the former, inertia and erasing effects of a seniority-based allocation of benefits from employment are identified, allowing us to spot the categories of workers and job-seekers made involuntarily worse off by such a practice. What matters however is to find out whether abolishing seniority privileges will bring about a society in which the all-things-considered worst off people are better off than in the seniority rule's presence. An assessment of the latter's cost-reduction potential is thus needed, enabling us to bridge a practice taking place within a firm with its impact on who the least well off members of society are likely to be. Three accounts of the profitability of seniority privileges are discussed: the “(firm specific) human capital”, the “deferred compensation” and the “knowledge transfer” ones. The respective relevance of “good-specific” and “all-things-considered” analysis is discussed. It turns out that under certain circumstances, a maximin egalitarian case for seniority privileges could be made.

Senior: Do you know that they are planning layoffs? Of course, it is only fair that they lay-off the newcomers first! After all, I have been loyal to the company for many years.

Junior: Did I choose to be a newcomer?

In this paper, we examine different forms of altruism. We commence by analysing the ‘behavioural’ definition and, after clarifying its conditions for altruism, we argue that it is not in ‘reflective equilibrium’ with everyday linguistic usage of the term. We therefore consider a ‘psychological’ definition, which we likewise refine, and argue that it better reflects ordinary language use. Both behavioural and psychological approaches define altruism descriptively and thus fail to capture an important aspect of altruism, namely its normative component. Altruism, we argue, is a ‘thick concept’, i.e. one which embodies both positive and normative components. We discuss and compare various formulations of this normative component.

Recently the demand for rectification of past injustices has become an increasingly important issue. Each of the last three decades has witnessed democratization processes in the Mediterranean basin, Latin America, in Central and Eastern Europe and in Africa where debates have arisen over rectification of past wrongs which naturally include the unjust expropriation of property. Most recently, moreover, the idea of land restitution to indigenous people, particularly in Australia, Canada and Zimbabwe, has become a prominent, if not always equanimous, part of those countries' domestic political agendas. The difficulties associated with satisfying such demands have been discussed with particular regard to the framing of new post-Communist constitutions in eastern and central Europe by, among others, Jon Elster and Claus Offe. Yet, not only in the field of public policy has the issue of rectification become important. Perhaps because of these developments, there has been a resurgence of interest in rectification in political philosophy as is shown by a forthcoming collection of essays on the subject edited by Elster.

How may we best understand the motivational structure that stands behind individuals' acts of voting? In “The Impartial Spectator Goes to Washington” we suggested that expressive concerns swamp narrowly consequential motivations, in contradistinction to normal market transactions in which the priority is reversed. A striking consequence of this fact is that individuals will be led to vote for outcomes that they would reject were they in a position to act decisively. In this regard we found the moral psychology Adam Smith develops in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) (and, to a lesser extent, in The Wealth of Nations) remarkably fecund in suggesting alternatives to what we call the standard theory of electoral behavior.

Instrumental rationality requires that an agent selects those actions that give her the best outcomes. This is the principle of consequentialism. It may be that it is not the only requirement of this form of rationality. Considerations other than the outcomes may enter the picture as well. However, the outcome(s) of an action always play a role in determining its rationality. Seen in this light consequentialism is a minimum requirement of instrumental rationality. Therefore, any theory that tries to spell out the implications of instrumental rationality, in particular expected utility theory, should subscribe to the principle of consequentialism. Or so it seems.

The past fifteen years or so have witnessed considerable progress in our understanding of how the human brain works. One of the objectives of the fast-growing field of neuroscience is to deepen our knowledge of how the brain perceives and interacts with the external world. Advances in this direction have been made possible by progress in brain imaging techniques and by clinical data obtained from patients with localized brain lesions. A relatively new field within neuroscience is neuroeconomics, which focuses on individual decision making and aims to systematically classify and map the brain activity that correlates with decision-making that pertains to economic choices. Neuroeconomic studies rely heavily on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures the haemodynamic response (that is, changes in the blood flow) related to neural activity in the brain.

Roughly, according to conditional egalitarianism, equality is non-instrumentally valuable, but only if it benefits at least one individual. Some political theorists have argued that conditional egalitarianism has the important virtue that it allows egalitarians to avoid the so-called ‘levelling down’ objection. However, in the present article I argue that conditional egalitarianism does not offer the egalitarian a plausible escape route from this objection. First, I explain the levelling down objection and suggest some particular concerns from which it derives its force. Then I provide a more precise definition of conditional egalitarianism. Finally, I give two arguments against this principle. According to the first, it violates the transitivity of the betterness relation (or more specifically, ‘betterness with respect to equality’). According to the second, there is no plausible explanation of why equality must benefit at least one individual in order to be non-instrumentally valuable.

Hausman and McPherson defend welfare economics by claiming that even if welfare does not consist in preference satisfaction, preferences still provide good, if fallible, evidence of welfare. I argue that this strategy does not yet fully solve the problems for welfare economics stemming from the preference satisfaction theory of welfare. More work is needed to show that our self-interested preferences are sufficiently reliable, or in some other sense our best, evidence of well-being. Thus, my aim is to identify the challenges that remain and clarify what additional work is needed before Hausman and McPherson's defence of welfare economics succeeds.

An article by Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden published in this journal argues that market relations contain elements of what they call ‘fraternity’. This Response demonstrates that my own views on interpersonal relations and markets – which originated in the feminist analysis of caring labour – are far closer to Bruni and Sugden's than they acknowledge in their article, and goes on to discuss additional important dimensions of sociality that they neglect.

Bayesian decision theory operates under the fiction that in any decision-making situation the agent is simply given the options from which he is to choose. It thereby sets aside some characteristics of the decision-making situation that are pre-analytically of vital concern to the verdict on the agent's eventual decision. In this paper it is shown that and how these characteristics can be accommodated within a still recognizably Bayesian account of rational agency.

Scott Arnold's recent paper, “Marx and Market Socialism,” advances a provocative thesis: market socialists are advocating an economic system that has a strong, internally generated tendency to revert to capitalism. They are, in short, “capitalist roaders” (Arnold, 1987).

How do economists persuade their readers that one policy is superior to another? A glance at the literature on welfare economics quickly provides the answer to this question: Economists enter policy debates armed with mathematical models, evaluating options on the basis of their consequences. Economists typically classify a policy change as a welfare (or “potential Pareto”) improvement with respect to the status quo if the gain realized by the winners exceeds the harm sustained by the losers. The best policy becomes the one that generates the highest net benefit.