On Fairness and Claims

Abstract

Perhaps the best-known theory of fairness is John Broome's: that fairness is the proportional satisfaction of claims. In this article, I question whether claims are the appropriate focus for a theory of fairness, at least as Broome understands them in his current theory. If fairness is the proportionate satisfaction of claims, I argue, then the following would be true: fairness could not help determine the correct distribution of claims; fairness could not be used to evaluate the distribution of claims; fairness could not guide us in distributing claims (or unowed goods); we could not have a claim to be treated fairly; and we would not be wronged when treated unfairly. These entailments mean that it is questionable that fairness is concerned with claims in the way Broome suggests. At the very least, the relationship between fairness and claims appears to be more complex than the picture painted by Broome.

How to be fairer

“…All this does help Curtis only to some extent: even when adopting a Broomean definition of a claim, we would still need an explicit argument for why P would follow from FC as the only fair division rule. Broome's (1990) account of fairness has been criticized on various grounds that are connected to his notion of a claim being overly idealized and restrictive (Hooker 2005;Tomlin 2012;Kirkpatrick and Eastwood 2015). For instance, Hooker (2005) argues that, pace Broome, fairness is not insensitive to side-constraints.…”

“…Thus, Hooker challenges Broome's view that fairness is only concerned with claims, whereas Tomlin challenges Broome's view that claims are logically prior to fairness. The restrictions inherent in Broome's notion of claims and the criticisms voiced by Hooker (2005) and Tomlin (2012) suggest that a theory of fairness, in order to be applicable to a broader set of important cases, should not be bound to a specific idea of claims as what is owed to the agent.…”

“…Let us again reflect more generally about the preceding explorations. We have considered the challenge, issued by Hooker (2005) and Tomlin (2012), against the highly restrictive notion of Broomean claims, which have been employed in Curtis' (2014) theory of fairness. In Sect.…”

“…We also find that several of the 'Broomean' assumptions that Curtis makes, which have so far been the focal point of the recent philosophical literature on fairness, are equally implausible. In particular, Broome's restricted notion of what a 'claim' in a fair division problem is, already criticized by Hooker (2005), Tomlin (2012), and Kirkpatrick and Eastwood (2015), renders his theory of fairness inapplicable in many important contexts. The economic literature, by contrast, offers a range of tools in which such assumptions can be dropped, and thus offers a fruitful environment for the study of fairness.…”

Theories of Fairness and Aggregation

“…We introduce the claims approach and the games approach to fair division and explain that both approaches can be used to model fair division problems such as Problem I and II. Ever since Broome's seminal paper on fairness (Broome 1990), fair division problems are modelled as claims problems in the philosophical literature (see Hooker 2005;Saunders 2010;Tomlin 2012;Curtis 2014or Piller 2017 for an overview). However, by drawing on O'Neill (1982), we observe that the very same fair division problems can also be modelled as cooperative games.…”