Treating individuals equitably is often more appropriate than treating them equally. Fairness is a key concern for individuals and policymakers, but practically absent from the analysis of second-best policies. We enrich the welfare-analysis toolbox by accommodating fairness concerns in Paretian social welfare functions, while including standard welfare criteria as special cases. To illustrate our axiomatic characterization, we investigate various fairness views in the context of labor-income taxation. Utilitarianism implicitly assumes individuals do not deserve their income opportunities; in contrast, our criteria allow any degree of deservingness. Our simulation analysis shows the US tax system is rationalized by a large degree of deservingness and little concern for progressivity.

The paper reviews the implications of evolutionary Kantian morality for a classical problem in the economic theory of voting: the costly participation problem.

People care about each other. They care about their families and friends, and also about strangers. In this paper, we ask whether these feelings have any normative content. We show that, for sufficiently large populations, people's aversion to income inequality among strangers places tight bounds on the plausible amount of inequality aversion in a Paretian social welfare function. In contrast, people's degree of egoism and their altruistic feelings towards their families do not. Our results also suggest a new rationale for paternalism: when people are paternalistic with respect to the choices of others, the social welfare function must be as well.

Society relies on researchers, journalists, witnesses, and other investigators to learn the facts it needs for policymaking, law enforcement, and other decisions. To what extent does this learning process depend on the goodwill and ethical concerns of these information intermediaries? I study this question in a sequential model and show that the answer depends on the supply of information available regarding the question of interest. When this supply is “large” is a statistical sense, material incentives can be designed to elicit the truth from information intermediaries. When the supply of evidence is limited, however, societal learning is impossible unless information intermediaries are intrinsically motivated by the truth.