This chapter recasts the police power to pursue order maintenance as the brokerage and enforcement of the fair terms of social cooperation in a community’s public spaces. The nature of dense, urban living, and various conceptions of the good in a pluralist state unavoidably come together to make legitimate, competing uses of public space incompatible, and in some cases facially uncooperative. The state’s duty to promote fair use in ways that protect and facilitate pluralist interests is accorded to the police, who should privilege brokerage over enforcement whenever possible. Nongovernmental (e.g., informal) adjudication of competing uses carries the risk of illiberal outcomes driven by populism, majoritarian preference, or the occupation and use of space by force, intimidation, or other arbitrary means. That said, the formal policing of social cooperation is also subject to these risks, so while laws that are either underdetermined or inherently designed to promote cooperation through discretionary enforcement underwrite the second power of the police (e.g., disorderly conduct, or quality of life statutes), as a matter of justice the decisions police make based on them will require reasons and justifications that honor democratic pluralism.

This chapter focuses on the currently popular idea that the distribution of scarce goods such as income and social benefits should reflect differences in “deservingness” and track “responsible behavior.” In philosophy, this idea lies at the heart of what is sometimes referred to as “luck egalitarianism,” while in politics the idea translates into an ever-increasing emphasis on “personal responsibility.” I argue that the psychological findings on self-control raise serious problems for this approach to distributive justice. In fact, the problems are so intractable that they leave us little choice but to entirely abandon this approach in favor of an alternative – a combination of sufficientarianism and relational equality – that better fits the psychological findings previously discussed. Put differently, these findings more or less force us to revise our views on “who should get what.” Especially for the United Kingdom and the United States, this would imply a significant change in both ideology and practical policies.