No abstract

In his famous book on a theory of justice, John Rawls argues that under some special conditions, referred to as an “original position,” people would unanimously choose as a principle of distributive justice, the principle of maximizing the welfare of the worst-off individual in the society. An experiment was conducted under conditions approximating Rawls's “veil of ignorance.” It was a replication of Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Eavy's experiment, using Polish instead of American students. In accordance with Rawls's prediction, most of experimental groups in both samples reached the consensus. However, the chosen principle was not the Rawlsian principle of maximizing the floor income, but the principle of maximizing the average income with the floor constraint. Moreover, in individual rankings and choices, the principle of maximizing the average income with a floor constraint received the highest ranks, while the Rawlsian principle received the lowest ranks. Our interpretation of these results is that the notion of distributive justice should not be reduced to considering only the welfare of the poorest.

There are many standard rules of aggregating individual preferences; majority rule is but one example. These rules determine what we typically consider to be a fair or a just solution to the problem of social choice. Yet we know very little, either about how these solutions relate to what a person, not a rule, would choose as a fair outcome or about what ethical or political beliefs would guide people in their choices. An empirical study was conducted to address these problems. As standard normative solutions fail to explain choices obtained in the study, we propose a new set of solutions, which generalize two classical principles of justice: Rawlsian and conservative. These generalized solutions fit the data remarkably well. More important, they uncover two normative dimensions within which choices turn out to be very consistent. These dimensions, we conjecture, indicate subjects' underlying attitudes. We use this theory to compare ethical-political attitudes in samples from Poland, Japan, and the United States.

No abstract

Who gets what and why to, najkrócej mówiąc, książka o rynkach. Pojęcie rynku jest w niej bardzo szerokie i obejmuje o wiele więcej niż rynki pietruszki, ropy naftowej czy papierów wartościowych. Autor rozumie przez nie każdy układ, w którym uczestnicy oferują pewne dobra czy usługi, na skorzystanie z tych ofert są chętni, transakcje dokonują się w sposób sformalizowany i -co bardzo istotne -pomiędzy uczestnikami niekoniecznie musi dochodzić do jakichkolwiek płatności. Możemy więc mówić na przykład o rynku przyjęć do szkół średnich w mieście, na którym szkoły oferują kształcenie nastolatków przez cztery lata, a potencjalni uczniowie szkołom -materiał ludzki pozwalający im kontynuować działalność. Rozważany jest nawet, i to jako jeden z ważniejszych przykładów w tej książce, rynek dawców i biorców nerek do przeszczepu, na którym wszelkie płatności są zakazane z mocy prawa. RECENZJA