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A twofold challenge arises from the normative aim of environmental justice to the management of agricultural systems: (1) the improvement of food security and livelihood of the rural poor today; (2) the sustenance and enhancement of the long-term productivity and resilience of agricultural systems to future generations. The paper analyzes the success factors and barriers of the Philippine farmer network MASIPAG in simultaneously realizing both objectives - based philosophically on Rawls' 'A Theory of Justice' (1971), conceptually on specific determinants of the relationship between the objectives, and empirically on the results of a comprehensive evaluation of the MASIPAG network.

The increasing loss of ecosystem services severely affects life perspectives of today's poor and future persons. Thus, governing the use of ecosystem services in an intragenerational and intergenerational just way is an urgent issue. I develop a conception of ecological justice that establishes the specific link between justice and ecosystem services, and argue that specific demands on a conception of ecological justice follow from determining ecosystem services as objects of justice. Showing that Rawls' 'A Theory of Justice' (1971) can consistently meet the identified demands, I verify that it is an appropriate theory for deriving a conception of ecological justice.

We need to go beyond the accepted notions relating to the role of women in the economy and society, especially in terms of what is recognized in mainstream theory and policy as work done by women. Thus, the traditional gender roles, with the man as the breadwinner and the woman in the role of housekeeper, do not explain the contribution of women in general. We also need to go beyond standard models to interpret the intrahousehold gender inequities. We do not gain much insight from dwelling on the cooperative-conflict type of bargaining concepts either, which are offered in the literature to unfold the process of women's subordination within households. The issues relate to the intrahousehold power structure, which has an inbuilt bias against female members under patriarchy. In terms of a policy agenda, especially in the context of social and economic disparities that affect women in particular, we need to recognize not only the collective social norms but also the unequal power relations that influence the sexual division of labor, both within the family and in the workplace. A notion of gendered moral rationality, complemented by the Rawlsian concept of justice as fairness (implying compensation for the underprivileged), can be used to devise policy that addresses the status of women both in the workplace and at home. We need a concerted move toward sensitization of gender issues and scrutiny entailing a gender audit at every level of activity. This may work at least partially until society is ready to remodel itself by treating men and women equally.

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarily unequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem where subjects either know or do not know their endowments, we find impartial behavior to be a stable pattern. Subjects either compensate for initial inequalities fully or not at all in both conditions, and they do so more often when they do not know their endowment than when they know it. Moreover, the type and the size of the good to be distributed also affect the frequency of impartial behavior.

This paper analyses Rawls's celebrated difference principle, and its lexicographic extension, in societies with a finite and an infinite number of agents. A unified framework of analysis is set up, which allows one to characterise Rawlsian egalitarian principles by means of a weaker version of a new axiom - the Harm Principle - recently proposed by [12]. This is quite surprising, because the Harm principle is meant to capture a liberal requirement of noninterference and it incorporates no obvious egalitarian content. A set of new characterisations of the maximin and of its lexicographic refinement are derived, including in the intergenerational context with an infinite number of agents.

Drawing from the formal setting of the optimal tax theory (Mirrlees 1971), the paper identifies the level of Rawlsianism of some European social planners starting from the observation of real data and redistribution systems and uses it to build a metric that allows measuring the degree of (dis)similarity of the redistribution systems analyzed. It must be considered as a contribution to the comparative research on the structure and typology of the Welfare State. In particular we consider the optimal taxation model that combines both intensive and extensive margins of labor supply, as suggested by Saez (2002) in order to assess the degree of decommodification of seven European welfare systems. We recover the shape of the social welfare function implicit in tax-benefit systems by inverting the model on actual effective tax rates, as if existing systems were optimal according to some Mirrleesian social planner. Actual distributions of incomes before and after redistribution are obtained using a pan-European tax-benefit microsimulation model. Results are discussed in the light of standard classifications of welfare regimes in Europe. There appears to be a clear coincidence of high decommodification willingness and high Rawlsianism in the Scandinavian, socialdemocratically influenced welfare states (Denmark). There is an equally clear coincidence of low decommodification willingness and utilitarianism in the Anglo-Saxon liberal model (UK) and in the Southern European welfare states (Italy and Spain). Finally, the Continental European countries (Finland, Germany and France) group closely together in the middle of the scale, as corporatist and etatist.

We implement the Rawlsian veil of ignorance in the laboratory. Our experimental design allows separating the effects of risk and social preferences behind the veil of ignorance. Subjects prefer more equal distributions behind than in front of the veil of ignorance, but only a minority acts according to maximin preferences. Men prefer more equal allocations mostly for insurance purposes, women also due to social preferences for equality. Our results contrast the Utilitarian's claim that behind the veil of ignorance maximin preferences necessarily imply infinite risk aversion. They are compatible with any degree of risk aversion as long as social preferences for equality are sufficiently strong.

Although the problem of trade and inequality is central to the resolution of the WTO Doha Round and to contemporary trade policy in general, it is currently undertheorized from a normative perspective. In this paper I develop a normative critique of WTO special and differential treatment law, as a case study of how normative political theory can be applied to international economic law. Using Rawls' theory of Justice as Fairness, I argue both that special and differential treatment can play an important role in justifying economic inequalities according to the difference principle, and that special and differential treatment as currently structures fails abysmally to do so. In doing so, I will also identify conceptual issues which need to be addressed in order to develop such a critique, and illustrate how I address such issues in my own work.

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the facilities’ cost is independent of location and access costs are linear with respect to the Euclidean distance. We show that an external intervention that covers 0.19% of the facility cost is sufficient to guarantee secession-proofness or no cross-subsidization, where no group of individuals is charged more than its stand alone cost incurred if it had acted on its own. Moreover, we demonstrate that in this case the Rawlsian access pricing is the only secession-proof allocation.

This paper discusses the concept of resourcism' as an alternative to the capability approach. It argues that the term economic resources covers too many different concepts for the term resourcism to be useful when analysing distributional justice. In particular, the resourcism of Dworkin is radically different from that of Rawls, because resources in Dworkin's usage are not the same as Rawls's income and wealth. The term economic goods is proposed as a more precise term than resources. Furthermore, it is argued that, since all theories of distributional justice concern the distribution of economic goods, they are all in some sense resourcist. The paper then discusses in the concept of resourcism defined by Thomas Pogge (2004), and concludes that his concept of resourcism is not logically consistent. Pogge also maintains that the just distribution of economic goods should take into account only standard human needs. The paper argues that taking natural human diversity into account is both possible and desirable as far as valuable human functionings are concerned, and that Pogge's criticism of the capability approach in this respect therefore is unfounded. Finally, it is argued that the relation between capabilities and access to economic goods merits investigation.

In the first section of the study, we analyze the cross-sectional relationship between poverty rates and the income level of the poor. Thereafter, we take a close look at changes in time: how poverty and 'richness' rates and changes in the income of the poor and the rich are related to each other. The second part of the paper illustrates how the economic tide has improved the lot of the middle-income earners, the worse-off and the best-off. Have the rich taken all the money and run? Is there anything left for the poor? The last section of the paper discusses the fairness of income distribution and presents some tasks for future research on the topics.

This paper presents a characterization of a welfare index for the evaluation of primary goods (to be understood as those goods that all agents should enjoy equally). The welfare associated with a given distribution of n primary goods among m agents is measured as the sum of n real-valued functions, one for each good, which are increasing in the aggregate consumption and decreasing in its dispersion (measured by Theil's first inequality index). welfare evaluation ; inequality ; primary goods

The article adapts the Rawlsian idea of decision-making behind the veil of ignorance in the realm of income transfer systems. As rational decision-makers we would plan a society where the incidence of poverty is low, differences in the level of living between life cycles are small, income differences between the rich and poor are modest, income mobility from poverty to non-poverty is high, and where the living standard of the poor is decent. The results show that income mobility is not greater in those countries which have wide income differences, nor is the situation of the poor any better in countries with huge income disparities than that of the poor in other countries. Cross-national comparisons indicate that high poverty rates are not associated with more rapid income mobility and higher standards for the poor.

The literature of welfare-maximising greenhouse gas emission reduction strategies pays remarkably little attention to equity. This paper introduces three ways to consider efficiency and equity simultaneously. The first method, inspired by Kant and Rawls, maximises net present welfare, without international co-operation, as if all regions share the fate of the region affected worst by climate change. Optimal emission abatement varies greatly depending on the spatial and temporal resolution, that is, the grid at which 'maximum impact' is defined. The second method is inspired by Varian's no-envy. Emissions are reduced so as to equalise total costs and benefits of climate change over the world and over time. Emission reductions are substantial. This method approximately preserves the inequities that would occur in a world without climate change. The third method uses non-linear aggregations of welfare (the utilitarian default is linear) in a co-operative setting. This method cannot distinguish between sources of inequity. The higher the aversion to inequity, the higher optimal greenhouse gas emission reduction.