Recently many philosophers and social choice theorists have questioned traditional welfare egalitarianism by introducing a notion of responsibility. They propose to distinguish between two sets of individual characteristics: those for which individuals are to be kept responsible and those for which they can be compensated. This approach raises the related questions of where to draw the line between these two sets of characteristics and how to operationalise the notion of "responsibility-sensitive fair compensation". The answers to these questions may depend on the cultural context. We present some empirical results from questionnaire studies in Belgium, Burkina Faso and Indonesia. The notion of control seems to play an important role in determining the variables for which individuals are to be held responsible. The strong notion of "full compensation" is clearly rejected in favour of more conservative distribution rules. Moreover, a large fraction of the respondents take the non-liberal position that the talented should be punished if they do not use their talents in a productive way. We find some intercultural differences. Belgian students are more in favour of redistribution. Indonesian students are the most conservative. While the Pareto principle is decisively rejected in Burkina Faso and Belgium, it is accepted by a majority of the Indonesian sample. Keywords: D63JEL classification: distributive justice; fair compensation ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe authors thank André Watteyne and Miryam Wijaya for their help in administering the questionnaire study in Burkina Faso and Indonesia and Bart Capéau for his comments on a first version of the questionnaire. Useful comments and suggestions were also made by Marc Fleurbaey. ________________________________________________________________ © by Erik Schokkaert and Kurt Devooght. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.

This paper deals with the question of how to incorporate modern responsibility-catering egalitarianism into economic theory on the measurement of income inequality. I present a particular axiomatic expression of the main aspects of such egalitarianism. Then, to measure offensive inequality separately I construct a norm or reference income distribution based upon the axiomatic model to replace the perfectly equal income distribution that is used as norm by all common inequality measures. I defend the use of a particular measure of distributional change to determine the degree of offensive inequality, and apply the method to Belgian income data. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2007.

This paper examines how people assess inequality of an income distribution and how inequality could be measured. We start from philosophical analysis of L. Temkin who distinguishes nine plausible aspects of inequality. His approach is based on the concept of 'complaints' or distances between incomes. We examine the Temkin approach by means of the questionnaire-experimental method pioneered by Amiel and Cowell. We want to find out whether the aspects of equality have any plausibility for student-respondents and if so, whether there are any aspects which are more appealing than others. Both the numerical and verbal responses show that a considerable majority of the respondents might be influenced by the intuitions included in the combination of the Weighted Additive Principle and the Average view of complaints. The questionnaire results also shed some light towards the Sequence and provide support for the poll result of the Temkin reports. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

As lifestyle diseases put a heavy burden on health care expenditures, voices are raised and win in sound to hold people responsible for their unhealthy lifestyle. Most of the arguments in favour of responsibility are backward-looking. In this paper, we describe the distributional consequences of these backward-looking measures and show that they are very harsh on those who regret a past unhealthy lifestyle. We demonstrate that it is possible to take policy measures which respect individual responsibility but which are at the same time able to grant fresh starts to individuals who regret their past unhealthy lifestyle (which is an application of Fleurbaey ( 2005)). This "forgiving" policy is confronted with a moral hazard problem, however. In general the regulator does not observe whether individuals really regret their past choices or if they just pretend to have changed preferences in order to enjoy the compensatory measures for regretful people. In this paper, we argue that the health setting offers interesting opportunities to move beyond this moral hazard problem and offer a solution through the use of redistributive instruments that are conditional on lifestyle changes.