While recognising that the private domain of individual decision-making is driven by multifarious desires that ought to be respected, I argue in this chapter that public sectors are each driven by a limited number of collectively agreed-upon objectives, with these objectives – e.g. health, literacy – being in some sense primary (i.e. foundational, if people are to have a reasonable opportunity of fulfilling their private desires). Given that public sector objectives are collectively agreed upon a priori, respect for autonomy can be to some extent relaxed in this domain. With this, and given that the complexity of many public sector services lends scope for egoistically inclined suppliers to exploit market failures and the behavioural influences for their own interests, I contend that demand-led competitive markets in the public sector ought to be disallowed. Instead, I propose that providers and users be given direct incentives to reciprocate, by, for example, instituting reputational competition between service suppliers.

Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world in 1900. Its GDP per capita, according to the Maddison Project database, was $4,583. At the same time, Germany’s GDP per capita was $4,758, Sweden’s was $3,320, and Japan’s $2,123, the same as South Africa one year earlier, while Indonesia ($1,151) and India ($955) were comparatively poorer.1

More than a century later, in 2018, the situation was very different. While Argentina was four times as rich in 2018 as in 1900 ($18,556 vs. $4,583, adjusted for price increases), Germany was ten times richer in 2018 than in 1900 – a country, one must remember, that had suffered defeat in two world wars. Sweden was fourteen times richer. Indonesia was ten and India seven times richer.

This chapter gives an introduction to the debate between resourcists and capabilitarians on the best metric for interpersonal comparisons of ‘advantage’. It starts by identifying a number of factors that complicate the debate and should be kept in mind while reading this body of literature. The remainder of the chapter zooms in on the philosophical literature about justice, addressing two main topics. The first is the existence of immense human diversity, which resourcists like Rawls and Pogge insufficiently acknowledge and address according to capabilitarians. The second topic is neutrality towards the good life, a value which capabilitarians like Nussbaum fail to respect according to resourcists. In the course of the chapter, several theoretical distinctions are identified that underlie the debate: chance versus choice, natural versus social causes, ideal versus non-ideal theories of justice and distributive justice versus justice as recognition. The difference between resourcists and capabilitarians, so it is concluded, is as much a difference in how they frame the debate about justice as a difference in the evaluative space that they defend.

This essay seeks to get beyond the narrow debate between two candidate grounds for indexing advantage in accounts of justice: the Rawlsian primary goods of income and wealth and capability or capabilities. Rawls is more deeply committed to multidimensionality than this debate has tended to recognize. Commitment to multidimensionality is shallow if each of the multiple dimensions is seen as contributory to something sought only for its own sake that can be adequately represented along a single dimension, such as welfare or well-being as they are sometimes conceived. To avoid treating multidimensionality shallowly — whether within the domain of justice or outside it — defenders of appealing to capabilities would do well to follow Rawls in recognizing a division of moral labour among multiple principles, with the different principles serving different social values and addressing different sets of social institutions. This approach offers an attractive and flexible alternative to single-principle outcome-ranking approaches. Along the way, in reference to the older debates, it is shown that there is, for Rawls, no single currency of justice and that he has serious reasons, grounded in respect for the fact of pluralism, to avoid resting too much theoretical weight on the idea of well-being.