On the Difficulty of Being Fair: A Review of Grzegorz Lissowski's Principles of Distributive Justice

On the Difficulty of Being Fair: A Review of Grzegorz Lissowski's Principles of Distributive Justice Warszawa, Opladen, Berlin & Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers; Scholar Publishing House; 2013: 382 ISBN: 978-83-7383-603-7 ISBN: 978-3-8474-0092-9The question of justice is ever present in our lives. Lissowski quotes Chaim Perelman, who writes that 'Every revolution, every war, every overthrow has always been effected in the name of Justice.' Yet we don't need to go so far to find this great idea; we meet with it, or perhaps rather we stumble over it, nearly every day. From quarrels over whose turn it is to do the washing up through the division of bonuses among colleagues to debates on the subject of equal rights or the amount of aid to developing countries, the disputes involve the principles by which goods and burdens are distributed. The problem is therefore universal. Grzegorz Lissowski's book, entitled Principles of Distributive Justice deals with this ubiquitous and-to a certain degreeinsoluble issue. And like most scholarly works that make a significant contribution to science, it provides more questions than final answers. We do not find in it specific 'prescriptions for justice', but rather the many different ways in which justice can be considered.Principles of Distributive Justice, which was originally published in Polish in 2008, and then in 2013 in English, is the result of many years of work, research, and reflection on the problem of just distribution and this can be sensed in every page of the book. Grzegorz Lissowski, a professor at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw has been engaged on the subject of justice for over twenty years and during this period has published many articles on the topic, including in the prestigious American Political Science Review. The author's almost complete knowledge of the field is palpable in Principles. A 'compendium of knowledge' would probably be the best description of the book if it had to be described in three words. Such a description, however, would miss the nature of the book, which far exceeds the framework for those reliable and thorough works called compendiums.The author himself writes about his work (p. 22) that 'The aims of this book are modest' and that they are the 'presentation of selected principles of the distribution of goods and burdens and their most important properties.' If these two sentences were true, the word 'compendium' might indeed suffice. The author, no doubt in good faith, misses the truth here, though. In addition to an unusually solid description of the concept of justice, we find much more in the book. First, from the theoretical viewpoint, it has a very promising new typology of the principles for the just distribution of goods and burdens, organizing these principles according to the most basic intuitions concerning fairness. Furthermore, the introduction of this typology gives the author the pretext to present new evidence and assertions, which undoubtedly constitute value added for the theory of justice. A further aspect distinguishing Principles from an ordinary compendium is that it contains not only concepts that are known and widely discussed, but also turns its attention to propositions that have not been popularized yet.Lissowski's book, as was mentioned earlier, describes selected principles of the distribution of goods and burdens, and their properties. Its extent is limited by the fact that a description of all the principles of distribution and all their possible properties would undoubtedly occupy thousands of pages. Furthermore, the author restricts himself to the pure distribution problem, in which all the participants in the distribution have equal rights and claims. Such a selection of persons taking part in the distribution brings Principles close to the great theories of global distributive justice, as what is being considered here are persons with equal rights, and this makes it possible to advance conclusions of a universal nature. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.