Incentives and taxation in Rawls’s institutional theory of justice

Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay ()
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Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay: BETA - Bureau d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée - AgroParisTech - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) Mulhouse - Colmar - UL - Université de Lorraine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, Centre Walras-Pareto - UNIL - Université de Lausanne = University of Lausanne

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Abstract: John Rawls proposed a theory of justice for the basic structure of society. Surprisingly, his suggestions for tax institutions were not well articulated. Rawls's principles of justice do not prescribe a unique set of tax recommendations, but his remarks on tax matters reflect his vision of society as a cooperative venture in which everyone must work. This paper makes two contributions. First, it offers a chronological, systematic, and contextual analysis of what Rawls wrote on taxation. Rawls's comments on taxation reveal his lifelong concern for preserving market incentives and his rejection of ability-to-pay as a principle of taxation. Second, the paper argues that some of Rawls's tax proposals belong to nonideal theory because they depend on a conception of individuals in tension with the conception of moral persons developed in his theory.

Keywords: Incentives; Institutions; Ideal theory; John Rawls; Nonideal theory; Optimal tax theory; Richard A. Musgrave; Taxation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-26
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Published in Journal of Institutional Economics, 2026, 22, pp.e12. ⟨10.1017/S1744137426100472⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05681198

DOI: 10.1017/S1744137426100472

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