Verdientes Wohlergehen

Moritz Heepe formulates a principle of justice and examines how aspects of the proportionality of well-being to moral desert combine with aspects of reciprocity. This places the principle partly in an Aristotelian tradition and very much at odds with the liberal mainstream of the contemporary philosophy of justice . The starting point is an informed survey of the empirical, especially psychological research of how common sense justice is conceived. Here, proportional reciprocity proves itself to be a central characteristic of our sense of justice. After a coherent reconstruction of its concept proportional reciprocity's various systematic properties and problems are discussed and, against a background of central positions in the history of ethics, also juxtaposed with the most important contemporary concepts of justice. The author finally derives concrete norms of action (heuristics) from the abstract-reciprocal basic principle and is thus able to present a highly innovative blueprint of philosophical justice.