John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Amartya Sen: the three names of fairness

Abstract

The reflections on fairness by John Rawls, Amartya Sen and even John Stuart Mill summarized in this article, show the serious shortcomings of the economy by assuming that all agents have a single rationality, and that the market automatically solves inequality rendering distributive justice unnecessary, as recently stated by Robert Nozick. The exclusion of ethics in current reflections of the economy has its origin in an incomplete and tendentious reading of authors such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill or Léon Walras, to whom the economy was a moral discourse and not a mere technique to achieve an efficient allocation of public goods, and, therefore, today it is urgent the work of linking again the economy with consensus-based ethics, in order to answer the demands of a distributive justice.