IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v104y2022i5p1110-1119.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Choice and Personal Responsibility: What Is a Morally Relevant Choice?

Author

Listed:
  • Alexander W. Cappelen
  • Sebastian Fest
  • Erik O. Sorensen
  • Bertil Tungodden

Abstract

The principle that people should be held personally responsible for the consequences of their choices is a fundamental moral ideal in Western societies. We report from a large-scale experimental study of how far-reaching this principle is for inequality acceptance. We show that third-party spectators violate minimal conditions for a morally relevant choice when making redistributive decisions for two workers. They accept more inequality when the workers have made nominal and forced choices than when brute luck is the source of inequality. We argue that our findings shed light on important current political debates about personal responsibility and redistributive policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexander W. Cappelen & Sebastian Fest & Erik O. Sorensen & Bertil Tungodden, 2022. "Choice and Personal Responsibility: What Is a Morally Relevant Choice?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 104(5), pages 1110-1119, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:104:y:2022:i:5:p:1110-1119
    DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01010
    Download Restriction: Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1162/rest_a_01010?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peter Andre, 2022. "Shallow Meritocracy," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2022_318v3, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    2. Andre, Peter, 2023. "Shallow meritocracy," SAFE Working Paper Series 405, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:104:y:2022:i:5:p:1110-1119. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.