A Proposal to Unify Some Concepts in the Theory of Fairness
So far, the Theory of Distributive Justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of Justice. In our opinion, we live in a world in which different people hold conflicting ideas about justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions, by means of what we call ``aspiration functions'', and we present in this paper three different ways of aggregating such opposing opinions into a socially acceptable judgement. Furthermore, we show that many well-known concepts are special cases of our approach. We study, under a restriction on the form of the aspiration functions, the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a social choice correspondence to be generated from any of our concepts.