Incentives and taxation in Rawls’s institutional theory of justice

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.