Setting Wage-Levels According to the Ideal of Compensatory Justice: A Preliminary Exploration

Abstract

This thesis aims to determine whether or not the ideal of compensatory justice is an attractive way to set wage-levels. Along with most egalitarians, I think the typical labour market structure where employers set wages, is unjust due to such things as market failure and the influence of morally arbitrary factors. Compensatory justice is the idea that wages should act as compensation for labour burden. In other words, how burdensome a job is should correlate with how well paid the worker who performs it is. This thesis begins with an analysis of compensatory justice's relationship with egalitarianism in order to see what type of theorist is compatible with it. Subsequent chapters explore what moral notions are contained in the idea of compensating for labour burden: I claim that these are desert and equality of opportunity. The well known objection to redistributive taxation based on the right to own oneself is then addressed, given that it works against compensatory justice and would therefore significantly impact how attractive it is. I also examine labour burden and argue that it should be construed as relative disutility. I conclude that while some egalitarians are more suited to compensation for labour burden than others, compensatory justice is an attractive way to determine wages with only one main problem: the problem of expensive tastes.