INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Income distribution is one of the most considered issues in judgments about overall distributive justice. These judgments often complain about income inequality and approve of its reduction. Moreover, a main tool for overall distributive justice, the income tax, is based on actual incomes and its progressivity is commonly justified as a means of reduction of inequalities in disposable incomes. This describes an ideal of equal disposable individual incomes (hence, household incomes are adjusted for family size). This ideal happens to discard a relevance of eudemonistic capacities; this is another manifestation of this general view about macrojustice (see Chapter 6).

This ideal also discards a relevance of differences in individuals' earnings for the distribution of disposable incomes. However, earnings depend on both labour and productivity. Then, these income egalitarians state that individuals' disposable incomes should not differ because of differences in productive capacities. But when it comes to the possible effects of labour, the view of most present-day income egalitarians is that someone who works more than someone else (longer, harder, at more painful or dirtier jobs, etc.) deserves a compensation for this extra work. This compensation is an extra income that compensates the painfulness of this extra labour (including foregone leisure). It a priori refers to a concept of indifference for an individual (but this is not the interindividual comparison of individual satisfactions or of their variations, which are found irrelevant for macrojustice).