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" "Not egoists but strangers, sometimes benevolent, make for citizens of the deontological republic; justice finds its occasion because we cannot know each other, or our ends, well enough to govern by the common good alone. This condition is not likely to fade altogether, and so long as it does not, justice will be necessary. But neither is it guaranteed always to predominate, and in so far as it does not, community will be possible, and an unsettling presence for justice.
Michael Joseph Sandel (born 5 March 1953) is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course "Justice", and for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).
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Luck egalitarianism defends inequalities that arise from effort and choice. This highlights a point of convergence with free-market liberalism. Both emphasize personal responsibility and make the community’s obligation to help the needy conditional on showing that their neediness is no fault of their own.
Despite their differences, both Hayek and Rawls reject the idea that economic rewards should reflect what people deserve. In doing so, they acknowledge that they are challenging conventional wisdom. The notion that justice means giving people what they deserve seems deeply embedded in untutored common opinion. Rawls notes the “tendency for common sense to suppose” that income and wealth should be distributed according to moral desert, and Hayek admits that his renunciation of merit “may appear at first so strange and even shocking” that he must “ask the reader to suspend judgment” until he can explain.
But even as free-market liberalism and welfare state liberalism set the terms of public discourse over the past half century, they did not dislodge the widely held conviction that what people earn should reflect what they deserve. To the contrary, during those decades, meritocratic attitudes toward success tightened their hold, even as mobility stalled and inequality deepened.
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Where the self is conceived as prior to its ends, independent of the roles it may occupy at any given time, reputation cannot be a matter of honor in the traditional sense. For the unencumbered self, not honor but dignity is the basis of respect―the dignity that consists in the capacity of persons as autonomous agents to choose their ends for themselves. Unlike honor, which ties respect for persons to the roles they inhabit, dignity resides in a self antecedent to social institutions, and so is invulnerable to injury by insult alone. For selves such as these, reputation matters, not intrinsically, as a matter of honor, but only instrumentally, as a business asset for example.