Economic Egalitarianism and Fair Wages. A Critique to Libertarian Justice

Abstract

One difficulty that egalitarianism faces at evaluating a fair wage regime is to avoid preference utilitarianism used by economics to model free markets. What is philosophically problematic then is that a political theory identifies personal preference modelled by markets with the value that a democratic society should attribute to economic freedom. In this article, I critically discuss this identification and argue for an egalitarian criterion of economic opportunity, inspired by J. Rawls’s democratic egalitarianism and by R. Sugden’s impersonal money-metric of opportunities. To do so, I discuss the libertarian thesis of the just wage defended by Felipe Schwember and I show how his position cannot avoid preference utilitarianism and, therefore, that the libertarian thesis’s justification of economic freedom implies a conception of the social good incompatible with the value of democratic society’s equal freedom

Keywords

• salario justo, igualitarismo, justicia social, libertad económica, libertarianismo