Equal Justice

A provocative, well-argued, elegantly written book that will root out any complacency that a reader might have had about these eternal issues on starting it.

• Introduction; Part I. Equality of Fortune: The presumption in favor of equal shares; Voluntary choices and emergent inequalities; Ineluctable risks: illness and injury; Occupational preferences, effort, and desert; Unequal endowments; Gifts, bequests, and intergenerational obligations; Justice and the transfer of body parts; Part II. Corrective Justice: The problem of liability rules: the failings of wealth maximization as a normative ideal; Outline of a theory of corrective justice; Illustrations; Part III. Saving and Taking Life: Do numbers count when saving lives?; The relevance of personal characteristics to choices between lives; Killing people or animals to benefit others; Envoi; Bibliography; Index