One objection to the principle of public reason is that since there is room for reasonable disagreement about distributive justice as well as about human flourishing, the requirement of reasonable acceptability rules out redistribution as well as perfectionism. In response, some justificatory liberals have invoked the argument from higher-order unanimity, or nested inclusiveness. If it is not reasonable to reject having some system of property rights, and if redistribution is just the enforcement of a different set of property rights, redistribution is legitimate if chosen democratically. This article explores two problems with this response. First, there are different ways to describe the set of possible policies, and so different ways to specify the noncoercive default that obtains in the absence of conclusive justification. Second, if the coercive exercise of political power must be conclusively justified, policies that are more coercive ought to require conclusive justification as against policies that are less coercive. These problems about the baseline with respect to which we require public justification raise the question of how we measure coercion, and whether or in what sense there is a presumption against coercion. The article distinguishes and argues against three such presumptions.

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This article reconsiders the reciprocity objection to unconditional basic income based on the idea that reciprocity is not only a duty but a limiting condition on other duties. If the objection were that unconditionality invites people to neglect contributory obligations arising from a duty of reciprocity, people could ask to opt out of eligibility for the benefit so as to avoid liability to contribution. While market failure provides a reason for mandatory participation in social insurance, it will not justify the generous (if conditional) income support egalitarians favour. To sustain the objection, we need to think of reciprocity a limit on duties of assistance and fair-sharing. In this form, the objection resists the inherited assets response, which holds that we can’t have a duty reciprocate benefits we receive from nature or from previous generations.

Theories of public reason face a dilemma. If their standard of reasonableness is low, the view will be unacceptably anarchic and self-refuting, while if it is high, the exclusion of unreasonable views will manifest unequal treatment. This paper shows how to avoid this dilemma by distinguishing two models of public reason. The coercion model is vulnerable to the worry about anarchy but not self-defeat, while the reasons model is vulnerable to self-defeat but not anarchy. The coercion model can avoid anarchy without idealizing heavily via aggregation of individual policies into packages. The reasons model can avoid self-refutation by making acceptance of public reason one of the conditions for counting as fully reasonable, which is a natural constraint if the justification of the principle is relational.

This article traces John Rawls’s debt to Frank Knight’s critique of the ‘just deserts’ rationale for laissez-faire in order to defend justice as fairness against some prominent contemporary criticisms, but also to argue that desert can find a place within a Rawlsian theory of justice when desert is grounded in reciprocity. The first lesson Rawls took from Knight was that inheritance of talent and wealth are on a moral par. Knight highlighted the inconsistency of objecting to the inheritance of wealth while taking for granted the legitimacy of unequal reward based on differential productive capacity. Rawls agreed that there was an inconsistency, but claimed that it should be resolved by rejecting both kinds of inequality, except to the extent they benefitted the worst off. The second lesson Rawls learned from Knight was that the size of one’s marginal product depends on supply and demand, which depend on institutional decisions that cannot themselves be made on the basis of the principle of rewarding marginal productivity. The article claims that this argument about background justice overstates its conclusion, because the dependence of contribution on institutional setup is not total. Proposals for an unconditional basic income may therefore have a strike against them, as far as a reciprocity-based conception of desert is concerned. If we follow Knight’s analysis of the competitive system, however, so too does the alternative of leaving determination of income up to the market.