Justice and Reciprocity

Justice and Reciprocity examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls’s conception of ＂justice as fairness.＂ Reciprocity was a central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn’t explicit about the different forms of reciprocity, nor the diverse roles reciprocity played in his theory.

The book’s main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is not simply a fact of human psychology or a duty, but a limiting condition on other duties. Second, such conditions are a natural consequence of thinking of equality as a relational value. However, third, we can identify limits on this conditionality, which explains how some duties of justice can be unconditional. The book explores the ramifications of this argument in a series of debates about distributive justice: productive incentives, duties to future generations, unconditional basic income, and global justice. In each domain, thinking about reciprocity as a limiting condition helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of justice as fairness, in some cases making the view more plausible, but in others underlining limits that will be unappealing to egalitarians of a more unilateral bent. Lister ultimately shows that reciprocity involves more than returning benefits, and that limiting justice with reciprocity conditions need not make justice implausibly undemanding. In this way, the book rehabilitates reciprocity for egalitarianism.

Andrew Lister, Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University

Andrew Lister earned his PhD in Political Science from UCLA. He taught previously at Concordia University, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal, and is currently Associate Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He has been an academic visitor at Balliol College and Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Social Justice, at the Université Catholique de Louvain’s Hoover Chair for Social and Economic Ethics, and at Nuffield College, Oxford. He works on public reason, democracy, and distributive justice.