Monetary incentives, economic inequality, and economic justice

Abstract

After distinguishing between incentive providing bonus schemes and bonus schemes of two other kinds - schemes designed to recognize excellent performance and schemes that aim to provide compensation for the performance of unusually demanding tasks - I ask whether, and if so in what way, monetary incentive schemes can be justi fied from the standpoint of justice. Along the way I reject both (1) the idea that monetary incentive schemes necessarily generate (or exacerbate) economic inequality (understood as inequality of income or wealth) and (2) the idea that incentive-generated economic inequalities are bound to be unjust. Although economic equality is not itself an ideal of justice, I argue for a broadly egalitarian approach to questions of economic justice. Economic justice obtains when the distribution of income and wealth in society contributes to - or at any rate is consistent with - the realization of a number of equality ideals for which a justice rationale can be provided: equality of economic opportunity, social equality, equality under the law, political equality, and equality in educational and occupational opportunity.