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Cover -- Half Page -- Dedication -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1. The Many Faces of Responsibility -- 2. Thinking about Responsibility -- 3. Responsibility within Distributive Justice -- 4. Responsibility within Retributive Justice -- 5. Responsibility and Justice -- Notes -- References -- Index

Ideal for all students of political theory and philosophy, this text considers the role of responsibility in politics, morality, and the law.

Annotation

With an introduction to Scanlon's ideas on contractualism by the editor, this collection of essays offers a range of views on Scanlon's book What We Owe to Each Other and the field of contractualist ethics.

AbstractThis paper is concerned with how we ought to think about legitimate expectations in the non-ideal, 'real' world. In one (dominant) strand of contemporary theories of justice, justice requires not that each gets what she deserves, but that each gets that to which she is entitled in accordance with what Rawls calls 'the public rules that specify the scheme of cooperation'. However, that is true only if those public rules are part of a fully just scheme and it is plausibly the case that no such scheme obtains in the real world. Given that, and given the centrality of legitimate expectations to theories of justice, it is vital to think about the status of such expectations in non-ideal circumstances. Having explained the sense in which legitimate expectations have come to play a role often previously associated with desert, a brief argument in favour of an 'expectations' view of punishment is considered to show that the system to public rules that generates expectations must itself be (in some sense) just. This argument is illustrated by appeal to just punishment and the relevance of thinking about punishment and not merely distributive justice is defended. In the absence of justice, one possibility would be simply to declare that there are nolegitimateexpectations and so theories of justice provide no guidance as to who should get what in non-ideal conditions. However, this would be to render such theories more-or-less useless in practice. Through discussion of a series of vignettes, the paper offers an account of how we might think about the demands such expectations place on the systems that give rise to them even in cases where the system is unjust.

Albert Weale's Democratic Justice and the Social Contract is an important book. It offers an innovative and original (proceduralist) account of justice. In so doing, it places what Brian Barry called 'the empirical method' at the centre of normative political philosophy's attempts to generate determinate answers to moral questions. This article-written from the perspective of someone sympathetic to both the commitment to mutual advantage and the empirical method – focuses on the kind of argument it is that Weale is offering and in particular on the nature of his constructivist project. It argues that Weale's commitment to equality lies outside the constructivist project and that this undermines his aspiration to genuine constructivism. The article goes on to consider, on the basis of arguments found in Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, various ways in which Weale might have grounded his egalitarian commitments from within the constructivist project.