Abstract

PETRONI, Lucas. John Rawls and the Social Maximum. Diacrítica [online]. 2015, vol.29, n.2, pp.65-86. ISSN 0807-8967.

The debate about predistribution is a highly pressing one. Based on the most important normative argument for predistribution - John Rawls' defense of property-owning democracies - political egalitarians are committed to the dispersion of wealth or productive assets as a necessary condition for any just society based on the private ownership of the means of production. Despite the soundness of the Rawlsian argument, in this paper I intend to show that, first, the argument is misleading regarding the egalitarian potential of welfare institutions and, second, that there are no conceptual obstacles within contractualist moral theories to make conventional welfare institutions as egalitarian as those of property-owning democracy. Two things must be ensured though: (1) a right-based theory of welfare institutions and (2) the idea of a social maximum - that is a bundle of institutions for checking unreasonable exclusion from capital control. In the last section of this paper some reasons for a reasonable notion of a social maximum for democratic societies are addressed.

Keywords : Predistribution; John Rawls; Egalitarianism; Social Maximum.

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