Can we make impartial decisions anymore? Could we ever? It seems that wherever we turn, we are told that impartiality just isn’t possible. We are told that things are much more complicated than they once seemed, that the idea that we could ever be impartial was a mischievous intellectual error and that impartial judgments were and are just a front, a façade, for the harsh reality of some imposi...

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi’s model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting interpersonal comparability of welfare. We show that the veil-of-ignorance conception of John Harsanyi, so completed, and Ronald Dworkin’s, when modeled formally, recommend...

Both evolutionary and developmental research indicate that humans are adapted to respecting property rights, independently (and possibly orthogonally) of considerations of fairness. We offer evidence from psychological experiments suggesting that enforcing one’s rights and respecting others’ possessions are basic cognitive mechanisms automatically activated and grounded in humans’ sensory-motor...