Sylvie Thoron (Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC)- Fac AEI)
Abstract. I will present some elements of a positive theory of distributive justice. The idea is to understand how people choose principles of justice when they have a personal stake in the situation. There is an experimental literature interested in this question which is based on protocols with a two-stage structure. The first stage is an earning stage preceding a distribution stage which takes the form of a dictator game. There are two competing ideas in this literature: in the first conception, people have fairness ideals, from which they can deviate for different reasons. The opposite conception is that people just choose principles with a self-serving bias. On top of that there is the idea that justice is context dependent. This literature is mainly interested in three principles of distributive justice: egalitarianism, libertarianism and accountability. I will discuss and criticize the way the earning stage frames the situation to render these principles applicable. Then, I will present some preliminary results on a series of experiments that are running in order to understand how people change their choice of principles in response to past experiences. We might expect no change in the choice of principles in the light of these experiences, and this would confirm strongly the idea that people have fairness ideals. Otherwise, we will have to understand how, and through which mechanism, people modify their choice. Resentment and empathy are two alternative mechanisms that can be considered.