This study examines whether and how board gender diversity can affect corporate wage inequity by drawing on diversity theory and gender socialization and ethicality theories. Building on an exogenous relaxation of China’s one-child policy (OCP) in 2013, which led to a substantial decline in the female labor force participation rate. Our empirical analysis suggests that board gender diversity is negatively associated with corporate wage inequity. This result is robust to various endogeneity and sensitivity analyses. We find that the (...) OCP relaxation only increases average executive pay; it does not affect employee pay. One potential mechanism driving our results is that the decline in board gender diversity caused by the OCP relaxation reduces supervision, restriction, and fairness within the firm, which increases executives’ pursuit of personal interests and ultimately leads to the rise of wage inequity. Our findings are particularly significant for firms in capital-intensive industries, firms with a low level of employee bargaining power, and large firms. (shrink)

Given the substantial contribution of livestock agriculture to global greenhouse gas emissions, significant changes in that sector will likely occur as part of a comprehensive climate mitigation and adaptation plan. One option for reducing the sector’s climate footprint is the development and introduction of new forms of plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives that accurately replicate the sensory and nutritional qualities of meat. Since the current global trend is toward increased meat consumption, these products are designed to appeal primarily to meat-eaters (...) with the intention of enticing them to reduce or eliminate their consumption of animal meat. While this technology promises the undeniable benefits of reducing GHG and animal suffering, I argue that its widespread adoption could exacerbate global inequity, particularly between affluent and poor individuals and nations. To make my case, I identify four potential sources of inequity: the creation of luxury foods, an expansion of food deserts, increased economic disparity between the Global North and South, and the awarding of patents on the technology to multinational corporations. In light of economic pressures and dietary trends, it is likely these new meat alternatives will be introduced into the global market. As such, I do not argue against their development, but conclude by outlining some policies aimed at mitigating their negative social impacts and promoting food equity. (shrink)

The grounds for global solidarity have been theorized and conceptualized in recent years, and many have argued that we need a global concept of solidarity. But the question remains: what can motivate efforts of the international community and nation-states? Our focus is the grounding of solidarity with respect to global inequities in health. We explore what considerations could motivate acts of global solidarity in the specific context of health migration, and sketch briefly what form this kind of solidarity could take. (...) First, we argue that the only plausible conceptualization of persons highlights their interdependence. We draw upon a conception of persons as ‘ecological subjects’ and from there illustrate what such a conception implies with the example of nurses migrating from low and middle-income countries to more affluent ones. Next, we address potential critics who might counter any such understanding of current international politics with a reference to real-politik and the insights of realist international political theory. We argue that national governments – while not always or even often motivated by moral reasons alone – may nevertheless be motivated to acts of global solidarity by prudential arguments. Solidarity then need not be, as many argue, a function of charitable inclination, or emergent from an acknowledgment of injustice suffered, but may in fact serve national and transnational interests. We conclude on a positive note: global solidarity may be conceptualized to helpfully address global health inequity, to the extent that personal and transnational interdependence are enough to motivate national governments into action. (shrink)

The concept of equity is clearly important in Thomas Hobbes's philosophy. In his writings he repeatedly employs it in significant load bearing ways, particularly in the areas of civil law and governance. Equity is, however, not directly addressed in a sustained way in his core works and—perhaps even more frustratingly—it is often applied in ways which ask more questions about the concept than they answer. This presents an impediment to accurately understanding what equity really means to Hobbes. His late Dialogue (...) Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1681) seems to offer a solution to this challenge. This work contains extensive discussion on equity, including on the application of equity in relationship to absolute rule. However, equity in the Dialogue is not always the same as what we see in Hobbes's core works. The question is, did Hobbes change his mind on equity? This article argues no. Hobbes did not change his mind on equity; rather, within the Dialogue he is engaging with a common understanding of the term as it existed in English law. Consequently, Hobbes's discussions here should not inform us about how equity fits into his philosophy. (shrink)

Bioethics is reexamining how to implement diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice concerns into scholarship. However, bioethicists should question the categories used to define diversity. The act of categorization is value laden, and classification systems confer power and benefits and generate harms. For example, what conditions count as disabilities? We should consider the equity implications of offering only “male” and “female” options for self‐identification in health records. However, we should also interrogate all ideas about categorization, including how categories are formed, why (...) they are formed, and who decides. Bioethicists cannot comprehend fully what equity and justice mean for underrepresented, underserved, or marginalized people until there is an understanding of how the boundaries of marginalization are created. (shrink)

The nursing profession has a long history of advocating for social justice and health equity, and both values profoundly infuse nursing ethics, theory, and education. Homecare nursing occurs between the patient's daily life at home and the public health care system. Therefore, homecare nurses ideally possess insight into the living conditions and social determinants of health that their patients experience. This interpretive phenomenological study explores the strategies employed by homecare nurses to fight health inequity and advance social justice. Data (...) were collected through participant observations, situational interviews, and small group interviews with 12 homecare nurses from two municipalities. Three analytical approaches were used: paradigm cases, exemplars, and thematic analysis. The data identified two primary strategies homecare nurses use to circumvent, solve, and mitigate the negative consequences of social determinants of health on patients' care and treatment: “Negotiating practice” and “Aligning practice.” “Negotiating practice” ensures that care and treatment are delivered in a way acceptable to all involved. “Aligning practice” ensures cohesion, progression in the treatment and care trajectory, and support for patients and relatives in navigating the system. Both strategies are part of nurses' largely hidden work, reflecting the nursing profession's position as nested between the individual patient and the system. (shrink)

Scholarship on gender and policing has frequently applied gendered organizational theory to understand how this type of organization and the men who run it produce gendered difference and inequity at the workplace. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research on lower ranked policewomen in Pakistan and contend that to fully fathom women’s marginalization at work, an analysis must not limit itself to the organization or the men who create the inequity but must also focus on women’s workplace (...) behavior. My research sheds light on women’s anxieties about working with a large number of men and about people questioning their morality and character because they do so. I also demonstrate how their subsequent coping strategies can impede their professional development and reproduce their marginalization at their workplace. This woman-centric approach, which examines how policewomen navigate gendered landscapes in different patriarchal social spaces, therefore shows that workplace inequity is the collective result of the interplay between different actors and social structures, and leads to a more complex understanding of this phenomenon. (shrink)

Consideration of social cognition—how an individual’s decision-making is influenced by her/his social environment—is key to understanding the behaviour of socially living nonhuman primates. In this chapter we discuss primate social cognition by focusing on primates’ behavioural responses to the presence and actions of others, how they adjust their behaviour to maximize their own gains, and possibly also the rewards received by a partner. Individuals can observe and replicate the actions of others, or the outcomes of their actions, to accelerate behavioural (...) acquisition of techniques to obtain rewards. Beyond passively observing others, primates can also work with group mates to obtain rewards more easily or to get rewards that would otherwise be unattainable by a single individual. Although not universally seen among primates, one individual may also help another to acquire resources. Prosocial and collaborative interactions may result in an imbalance of benefits received, and certain primate species respond negatively when receiving less than a social partner, a response which may protect individuals against cheating. Such behaviours demonstrate how the interplay between an individual’s desires and those of others can modify behavioural outcomes and the importance of considering cognition from a social perspective in order to understand the decision-making of individuals. However, there is variation both within and between species in their sensitivity to the actions of others and their responses to them. Thus, a comparative framework is needed when studying what is meant by ‘primate social cognition’. (shrink)

Recently, there has been an upsurge of attention focused on bias and its impact on specialized artificial intelligence applications. Allegations of racism and sexism have permeated the conversation as stories surface about search engines delivering job postings for well-paying technical jobs to men and not women, or providing arrest mugshots when keywords such as “black teenagers” are entered. Learning algorithms are evolving; they are often created from parsing through large datasets of online information while having truth labels bestowed on them (...) by crowd-sourced masses. These specialized AI algorithms have been liberated from the minds of researchers and startups, and released onto the public. Yet intelligent though they may be, these algorithms maintain some of the same biases that permeate society. They find patterns within datasets that reflect implicit biases and, in so doing, emphasize and reinforce these biases as global truth. This paper describes specific examples of how bias has infused itself into current AI and robotic systems, and how it may affect the future design of such systems. More specifically, we draw attention to how bias may affect the functioning of a robot peacekeeper, a self-driving car, and a medical robot. We conclude with an overview of measures that could be taken to mitigate or halt bias from permeating robotic technology. (shrink)

Supervised injectable opioid assisted treament prescribes injectable opioids to individuals for whom other forms of addiction treatment have been ineffective. In this article, we examine arguments that opioid-dependent people should be assumed incompetent to voluntarily consent to clinical research on siOAT unless proven otherwise. We agree that concerns about competence and voluntary consent deserve careful attention in this context. But we oppose framing the issue solely as a matter of the competence of opioid-dependent people and emphasize that it should be (...) considered in the context of inequities in access to siOAT as a medical treatment. Consequently, we suggest that bioethics literature on nonexploitation, which focuses on clinical research in low-income countries, is helpful due to locating ethical issues within systemic social conditions. Finally, we consider the implications of our argument for the ethics of clinical research on siOAT. (shrink)

Although the possibility that a firm’s stakeholders may take damaging measures against it in response to its activities has been an underlying assumption of stakeholder theory from inception, the conditions that predispose stakeholders to act against firms remain largely unexplored in the literature. Based on work in equity theory, expectancy theory, and resource dependence theory, we present and test hypotheses concerning stakeholders’ propensities to impose sanctions upon—or to support—firms. Using a vignette-based experiment, we found strong confirmation of the criticality of (...) fairness in the firm–stakeholder relationship: stakeholder equity perceptions were unequivocally associated with the proclivity to sanction the firm, or to engage in prosocial behaviours of benefit to it. Stakeholder expectancy perceptions and resource dependence were related to only certain forms of stakeholder action, indicating that researchers should take care to differentiate between types of stakeholder response when investigating questions surrounding stakeholder mobilization. Our results also suggest specific avenues for stakeholder dialogue that could help firms mitigate the likelihood of stakeholders taking damaging action against them. (shrink)

Advances in molecular technologies have the potential to help remedy health inequities through earlier detection and prevention; if, however, their delivery and uptake are not more carefully considered, there is a very real risk that existing inequities in access and use will be further exacerbated. We argue this risk relates to the way that information and knowledge about the technology is both acquired and shared, or not, between health practitioners and their patients.A healthcare system can be viewed as a complex (...) social network comprising individuals with different worldviews, hierarchies, professional cultures and subcultures and personal beliefs, both for those giving and receiving care. When healthcare practitioners are not perceived as knowledge equals, they would experience informational prejudices, and the result is that knowledge dissemination across and between them would be impeded. The uptake and delivery of a new technology may be inequitable as a result. Patients would also experience informational prejudice when they are viewed as not being able to understand the information that is presented to them, and information may be withheld.Informational prejudices driven by social relations and structures have thus far been underexplored in considering equitable implementation and uptake of new molecular technologies. Every healthcare interaction represents an opportunity for experiencing informational prejudice, and with it the risk of being inappropriately informed for undertaking such screening or testing. Making knowledge acquisition and information dissemination, and experiences of informational prejudice, explicit through sociologically framed investigations would extend our understandings of equity, and offer ways to affect network relationships and structures that support equity in delivery and uptake. (shrink)

In this paper, we critique the emergent international normative framework of growth – the knowledge economy. We point out that the standardized character of knowledge economy's flagship – intellectual property rights (IPRs) – has an adverse impact on women in emerging economies, such as India. Conversely, this impact on women, a significant consumer segment, has a feedback effect in terms of market growth. Conceptually, we analyze the consequences of knowledge economy and standardized IPR through a feminist lens. We extend the (...) analyses by pointing to various contradictions surrounding growth norms; for example, there are inherent contradictions between established "formal" legalistic interpretation ofIPR, "soft law" norms of corporate social responsibility, a fluid situation of moral claims of human rights, and different institutional capabilities at the international and domestic level. Consequently, we are able to demonstrate how standard IPR laws fail to deliver equity for all. We argue our case through exploring the growth aspects of the agricultural sector in India and the adverse impact of standard biopatenting on women farmers' rights (as producers and consumers) and preservation of environment. We suggest that desired gendered equity is better achieved when there is a constellation of actors – private–sector business, the state, and civil-society leaders – working together to ensure a balanced development through tailoring of IPR to local needs. (shrink)

The reversal of Roe v. Wade raises the prospect that other due process guarantees upon which individuals have organised their lives, including the constitutional rights to same-sex intimacy and marriage, will be overturned. These potential upheavals in the hard-won legal infrastructure of basic social status call for a careful look at reliance arguments for sustaining constitutional precedent. When does reliance on a judicial decision provide reason for a court to sustain a precedent in the face of substantial doubts or convictions (...) that the original decision was importantly mistaken?Our commitments to democratic law pose distinctive challenges for reliance arguments in the public law domain that do not burden reliance arguments in the private law domain. A persuasive reliance argument in the public law context must offer a merits-independent rationale identifying limited circumstances in which reliance would justify honouring a prior (mistaken) decision and honouring it prospectively, into the future. I detail the challenges and offer a democratic account to identify when overturning a mistaken decision would impose an unfair and inequitable hardship. On this account, abortion, contraception, and same-sex intimacy rights warrant continued affirmation given reliance behaviours, but not other rights, including rights to gun ownership and freedom of contract. (shrink)

Humans expect resources to be distributed fairly. They also show biases to construe all acts as intentional. This study investigates whether every unequal distribution is initially assumed to be intentional unfairness. Study 1 presents a control group of adults with a movie showing one individual accidentally receiving less reward than expected for a task. The experimental group was shown the same scenario, except that the individual was now in the presence of an additional person who received the full reward. Despite (...) the similarity of the scenarios, as predicted, participants in the control condition responded as if the disappointing reward was accidental, while those in the experimental condition responded as if the act was intentional: Their tendency to avoid the “perpetrator” did not differ from that of participants in another control condition who saw an intentionally unfair reward distribution. In Study 2, 7- and 8-year-old children’s results replicated those of adults. Implications for social and moral cognition are discussed. (shrink)

Pesticides remain an integral part of development efforts to renew economic growth in Central America and lift the region out of a severe economic crisis. This paper analyzes the implications of the continued reliance on pesticides for heightening economic and ecological problems in the agrarian sector.Relying on a case study of export melon production in Choluteca, Honduras, the author argues that current development strategies, which rely heavily on pesticides, are generating ecological disruption that creates conditions biased against small producers. Lack (...) of knowledge of the hazards inherent in the technology and the resulting emergence of pesticide resistant pests, crop losses, environmental contamination, and public health problems, pose serious obstacles to the survival of small-scale producers. Meanwhile transnational and other flexible, large scale operations often adapt to such conditions, and on occasion may even turn such problems to their benefit. The author concludes that economic growth may only be sustainable when questions of social equity and ecological viability are brought to the forefront of U.S. development strategies. (shrink)

When writing about Buddhism, much attention is paid to Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: Life is suffering; Suffering is caused by craving and attachment; Suffering can be overcome by achieving non-attachment; the means to achieving non-attachment is to follow the Eight-Fold Path. Herein, the focus is on the Fourth Noble Truth, the following of Buddha’s Eight-Fold Path, which is the means to achieve the penultimate goal of Buddhism, non-attachment. Non-attachment is primarily aimed at developing non-attachment to personal cravings, to egoistic desires. (...) The purpose of the non-attachment is to free the self to experience the feeling of compassion for all sentient beings and to take action on that universal compassion to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. In contemporary parlance, the phrase, all sentient beings can be taken to stand for our global environment, its inhabitants and future generations. Non-attachment thus is not equivalent to detachment.Hidden in the practice of the Eight-Fold Path is the key to Buddhist economics, the Eighth path, the path of Right livelihood. In order to fully implement compassion, the economic path must be rightly chosen. One cannot achieve the goal of universal compassion, that is, the relief of suffering throughout the world, without the proper economic path, designated by the term, Right livelihood. Right livelihood will be the subject of this chapter’s inquiry. In Mahayana Buddhism, one cannot achieve spiritual enlightenment until everyone in the world achieves spiritual enlightenment. When one takes Right livelihood into account, herein also referred to as Buddhist economics, one cannot achieve Right livelihood until everyone in the world achieves Right livelihood and the effects of Right livelihood, the elimination of suffering are universally distributed. The concept of Right livelihood is to be understood as the practice of economic activity that is directed to the elimination of suffering in its most urgent cases, that is, in the most indigent people and places in the world. (shrink)

In this book Larry Temkin examines the concepts of equality and inequality, and addresses one particular question in depth: how can we judge between different sorts of inequality? When is one inequality worse than another? Temkin shows that there are many different factors underlying and influencing our egalitarian judgments and that the notion of inequality is surprisingly complex. He looks at inequality as applied to individuals and to groups, and at the standard measures of inequality employed by economists and others, (...) and considers whether inequality matters more in a poor society than a rich one. The arguments of non-egalitarians are also examined. Temkin's book presents a new way of thinking about equality and inequality which challenges the assumptions of philosophers, welfare economists, and others concerned with these notions on a practical as well as a theoretical level. (shrink)

Temkin presents a new way of thinking about equality and inequality that challenges the assumptions of philosophers, welfare economists, and others, and has significant implications on both a practical and theoretical level.

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to (...) rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to... (shrink)

Inequity in Education represents the latest scholarship investigating issues of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and national identity formation that influenced education in America throughout its history. This exciting collection of cutting-edge essays and primary source documents represents a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives that will appeal to both social and cultural historians as well as those who teach education courses, including introductory surveys and foundations courses.

Integrated assessment models of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. We create a variant of the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE)—a regionally disaggregated version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE)—in which we introduce a more fine-grained representation of economic inequalities within the model’s regions. This allows us to model the common observation that climate change impacts are not evenly distributed within regions (...) and that poorer people are more vulnerable than the rest of the population. Our results suggest that this is important to the social cost of carbon—as significant, potentially, for the optimal carbon price as the debate between Stern and Nordhaus on discounting. (shrink)

There are substantial inequalities associated with antibiotics and the determinants of their effectiveness, including the risk of exposure to antibiotic‐resistant microbes, access to relevant treatment advice, diagnostic facilities, risk of life‐threatening infectious disease, and access to antibiotics. Current arrangements (social, political, economic) allow inequalities in the distribution of antibiotic benefits and burdens. This article focuses on the justification of relevant inequalities from a contractualist perspective.

Economic inequality has become a focus of prime interest for economic analysts and policy makers. This book provides an integrated approach to the topics of inequality and personal income distribution. It covers the practical and theoretical bases for inequality analysis, applications to real world problems and the foundations of theoretical approaches to income distribution. It also analyses models of the distribution of labour earnings and of income from wealth. The long-run development of income - and wealth - distribution over many (...) generations is also examined. Special attention is given to an assessment of the merits and weaknesses of standard economic models, to illustrating the implications of distributional mechanisms using real data and illustrative examples, and to providing graphical interpretation of formal arguments. Examples are drawn from US, UK and international sources. (shrink)

Income inequality is emerging as the socioeconomic topic of our era. Yet there is no clear conclusion as to how income inequality affects the most comprehensive human outcome measure, subjective well-being. This study provides an explanation for the relationship between income inequality and SWB, by delving into its mechanisms, including egalitarian preferences, perceived fairness, social comparison concerns, as well as perceived social mobility. In a rigorous analysis using a large cross-country dataset, and accounting for the nested structure of the data, (...) as well as controlling for a variety of individual and country characteristics, we find that SWB is higher where income inequality is higher. Importantly, we also find support for this relationship being moderated by perceptions of poverty being caused by unfairness, an individual’s relative socioeconomic standing, as well as beliefs about hard work leading to success. Our study highlights the dire need for further scholarly attention to income inequality and its complex effects on SWB. (shrink)

Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects. Such instrumental arguments, however, often concern only the static effects of inequality and neglect its intertemporal conse- quences. In this article, we address this striking gap and investigate income inequality’s intertemporal consequences, including its potential effects on humanity’s (very) long-term future. Following recent arguments around future generations (...) and so-called longtermism, those effects might arguably matter more than inequality’s short-term con- sequences. We assess whether we have instrumental reason to reduce economic inequality based on its intertemporal effects in the short, medium, and the very long term. We find a good short and medium-term instrumental case for lower economic inequality. We then argue, somewhat speculatively, that we have instrumental reasons for inequality reduction from a longtermist perspective too, primarily because greater inequality could increase existential risk. We thus have instrumental reasons to reduce inequality, regardless of which time-horizon we take. We then argue that from most consequentialist perspectives, this pro tanto reason also gives us all-things-considered reason. And even across most non-consequentialist views in philosophy, this argument gives us either an all-things-considered or at least weighty pro tanto reason against inequality. (shrink)

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century. Yet the relationship between inequality and the process of economic development is far from being well understood. These Raffaele Mattioli Lectures have brought together two of the world's leading economists, Professors Philippe Aghion and Jeffrey Williamson, to question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience. Professor (...) Aghion assesses the affects of inequality on growth, and asks whether inequality matters: if so why is excessive inequality bad for growth, and is it possible to reconcile aggregate findings with macroeconomic theories of incentives? In the second part Jeffrey Williamson discusses the Kuznets hypothesis, and focuses on the causes of the rise of wage and income inequality in developed economies. (shrink)

This work explores what utopian writers have said about economic inequality. It is not an economic study but an exploration in social philosophy in its utopian expressions. Its transdisciplinary focus is utopian social theory as expressed in literary utopias. While our current age struggles with the prospect of a handful of people owning half the world’s wealth, it may be useful to reflect on the nature of this problem (if it is a problem) in its broadest contours including utopian precedents (...) warning us of its coming and directing us to possible solutions. As utopian writers envision a future where the extremes of both poverty and wealth have been tamed or at least tempered, it is instructive to explore the instruments they employ; by what measures have they defeated poverty or diminished the threats boundless fortunes pose, thereby revitalizing society? (shrink)

Antisocial punishment—punishment of pro-social cooperators—has shown to be detrimental for the efficiency of informal punishment mechanisms in public goods games. The motives behind antisocial punishment acts are not yet well understood. This article shows that inequality aversion predicts antisocial punishment in public goods games with punishment. The model by Fehr and Schmidt (Q J Econ 114(3): 817–868, 1999) allows to derive conditions under which antisocial punishment occurs. With data from three studies on public goods games with punishment I evaluate the (...) predictions. A majority of the observed antisocial punishment acts are not compatible with inequality aversion. These results suggest that the desire to equalize payoffs is not a major determinant of antisocial punishment. (shrink)

Widespread recognition that economic inequality has been growing for forty years in most of the developed world, and in fact has tended to grow across most of the history of modern economies, shows that the period 1945-1973, when inequality of wealth and income shrank, was a marked anomaly in historical experience. At the time, however, the anomalous period of equality seemed to vindicate a long history of optimism about economic life:that growth would overcome meaningful scarcity and usher in an egalitarian (...) and humanistic period that could almost qualify as post-economic. This has not been the experience of the last four decades. In this intellectual history of the anomalous period, we trace the main lines of that optimism and its undoing. (shrink)

For transition economies, income inequality is positively correlated with the share of output produced in the informal economy. Increases in income inequality also tend to be correlated with increases in the share of output produced in the unofficial economy. These hypotheses are supported significantly by empirical data for sixteen transition economies between 1987 to 1989 and 1993 to 1994. Various causal mechanisms may operate in both directions, an increasingly large informal economy causing more inequality due to falling tax revenues and (...) weakened social safety nets, and increasing inequality causing more informal activity as social solidarity and trust decline. (shrink)

_Examining inequality through the lenses of moral traditions_ Rising inequality has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years from scholars and politicians, but the moral dimensions of inequality tend to be ignored. Is inequality morally acceptable? Is it morally permissible to allow practices and systems that contribute to inequality? Is there an ethical obligation to try to alleviate inequality, and if so, who is obligated to take that action? This book addresses these and similar questions not through a (...) single lens of morality but through a comparative study of ethical traditions, both secular and religious, Western and non-Western. The moral and political traditions considered are: liberalism, Marxism, natural law, feminism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Confucianism. The types of inequality examined include property, natural resources, products, wealth, income, jobs, and taxation. The editors open the book with an introduction providing information on contemporary dimensions of the problem of economic inequality, and the book concludes with a summary of the perspectives represented. _Economic Inequality and Morality_ is unusual in that it addresses similarities and differences on the questions of inequality within and across moral traditions. Authors of the individual studies answer a common set of topic-related questions, giving the reader a broad perspective on how a broad range of traditions view and respond to inequality. (shrink)

In a recent article, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinctive egalitarian critique of the types of incentive inequalities that are permitted by John Rawls's difference principle. She argues that citizens of a well-ordered society, who publicly accept Rawls's two principles of justice and their justifications, may not demand incentives to employ their talents in productive ways since such demands are inconsistent with a major justification for the difference principle: the moral arbitrariness of talent. I argue that there is no such (...) inconsistency. Citizens can publicly accept the claim that talent is morally arbitrary and accept incentives to employ their talents productively without inconsistency. In the standard case that Rawls envisions, citizens who do so take their preferences to be a reason for a higher salary, not their talents. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the links between inequality in academic performance and juvenile conviction rates for violent crime, stealing from another person, burglary in a dwelling and racially motivated offences. We use area-based aggregate data to model this relationship. Our results show that, above and beyond impacts of absolute access to resources, young people who grow up in school cohorts marked by higher levels of disparity in educational achievement may be more prone to commit violent crime and racially motivated offences (...) than those with less disparity. This association is however not found for property-related offences. Our results further show that higher between-schools inequality and higher within-school inequality are both associated with higher conviction rates for violent crime and racially motivated offences. (shrink)

It is argued that the difficulty of using the positive and normative measures of inequality described in the previous chapter arises from the fact that they are ‘complete’ measures. Each of these measures may give absurd results, because they aim to give a complete‐ordering representation to a concept that is essentially one of partial ranking. Hence, a weakening of the inequality measures to a mixture of partly descriptive and partly normative considerations is proposed. A number of reasons for taking inequality (...) rankings as quasi‐orderings rather than complete orderings are suggested. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the merit, feasibility, and possible scope of equality-biased academic research agendas in Latin America. First, it discusses the merits of university research agendas as tools in the fight against inequality. Second, it analyzes the feasibility of defining such research agendas in Latin American public universities, taking into account their long tradition of institutionalized social commitment. Third, it comments on two Uruguayan examples of research programs that may make contributions to the reduction of (...) inequality. Finally, it assesses the possible impact of such programs in the light of inadequacies in Latin American national systems of innovation. (shrink)

Modest difference in individual decisional skills may warrant substantial inequality in power. This claim has been illustrated in Ben Yashar and Nitzan (Economics Letters 174:93–95, 2019), applying the symmetric uncertain dichotomous choice setting and focusing on the skill-dependent (s-d) power of the decision-makers under the optimal decision rule. The same claim is valid when one focuses on the relationship between skill heterogeneity and the distribution of the second type of power, viz., the group members' marginal contribution (mc). This has been (...) shown in Ben Yashar et al. (Journal of Theoretical Politics 33(2):225–235, 2021), where mc has been formally related to s-d power. A preliminary study of the relationship between inequality of the distributions of the two measures has also been presented. The current paper considerably expands this investigation by applying simulations and sheds light on the reason for the increased inequality of the two types of power. Since reward (in terms of status, payment or both) depends on s-d power and mc, inequality of the distribution of rewards depends on the inequality of the two types of power. Comparison of the two types of power inequality is therefore interesting if one wishes to shed light on the role of the two types of power on reward inequality. In particular, the results of the comparison may clarify the effectiveness of the incentives to invest in skills, dependent on the prevailing norms and the institutional characteristics that determine the relationship between rewards and the two types of power. For this reason, the current study focuses on the comparison between inequality of s-d power and marginal contributions showing that, in small (large) groups, on average, the latter is more (less) unequal than the former and both are more unequal than the optimal weights of the decision-makers and much more unequal than their skills. The robustness of these findings is shown by applying alternative symmetric probability distribution functions. Another novel task undertaken in the current study is the sensitivity analysis of inequality of the power measures with respect to changes in the size of the group and the skills of the group members. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which income inequality and income mobility—both considered indicators of economic inequality and conditions of formal regulatory institutions —facilitate or constrain the emergence of social entrepreneurship. Using 77,983 individual-level responses obtained from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey of 26 countries, and supplementing with country-level data obtained from the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, our results from multilevel analyses demonstrate that country-level income inequality increases the likelihood of individual-level engagement in social entrepreneurship, while (...) income mobility decreases this likelihood. Further, income mobility negatively moderates the influence of income inequality on social entrepreneurship, such that the condition of low income mobility and high income inequality is a stronger predictor of social entrepreneurship. We discuss implications and limitations of our study, and we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

The inequality as a social problem was in focus of attention of social philosophers since the early years of modern history when a person has ceased to perceive the social hierarchy as pre-established one and has understood the opportunity of its re-determination. Investigators studied in detail different aspects of the problem but their discussions were centered on the question about foundation of inequality. I argue that if we allow the possibility of change of the social positions as the main characteristic (...) of contemporary society the primary attention should be directed on what criteria this or that society is ranged of its members and how is it possible for a person or a group/community to change its own position. The object of my paper is to drown the possible strategies of work on inequality and to explore of what might be used to overcome of inequality. I consider it is possible to distinguish three groups of strategies in use to work through a problem of inequality: (1) The strategies of overcoming of inequality; (2) The strategies of maintenance of inequality; (3) The strategies of justification of inequality. These strategies are examined about how they could be applied and what outcomes of them would be followed with. Special attention is given to the ideas formulatedby P. Bourdien, F. Fukuyama, F. Parkin of those ways thanks to which equality/inequality are balanced. In conclusion I raise the question of the overcoming of inequality in light of the stable development of human society. (shrink)