Abstract
As a principle of justice, Citizenship designates the universal rights and obligations that are required to protect liberty. While all liberals assert the importance of individual sovereignty, there has been substantial disagreement around the legitimate scope and substance of citizenship. Classical liberals maintain that liberty is optimised only where governmental action is directed towards the possibility of coercive intrusion by other people. While accepting the requirement for an appropriate regime of negative rights, egalitarian liberals insist that liberty requires access to external resources, such as those made possible by redistributive income transfers. Considered only in terms of citizenship, a just retirement system must address the reality of financial insecurity, as well as the possibility of coercion.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The liberties specified under principle 1 have implications for distributive justice independently of principle 2. The worth of political liberties can be augmented by imposing a minimum set of conditions including universal education and health care, and a role for the state as employer of last resort (Armstrong 2006).
- 2.
At this point, we should highlight a fundamental distinction regarding the means by which property rights are given legitimacy. For libertarians, property rights should be regarded as “pre-institutional”, in that their legitimacy is generated independently of the legal and institutional arrangements created to protect them—reflecting, for example, “facts” of human nature (Nozick 1974; Machan 2006). As libertarians, they start by taking property rights as given. Rawlsian critics of the market reject this proposition, arguing that property rights should be regarded as “institutional”—their legitimacy is an artefact of the public discourses, laws and institutional arrangements that shape justice as fairness. A distribution of property is just only because the state says that it is.
- 3.
At the very least, we might object that the “agreement” that is generated by aggregating people’s political preferences does not, in itself, carry any moral significance. While people are best placed—intellectually and emotionally—to determine their own conception of “the good”, they might struggle to articulate a coherent account of justice.
- 4.
Conspicuously absent from Rawls list are important economic liberties—for example, “freedom of contract to buy and sell, to employ and be employed, or to accumulate and invest” (Lomasky 2005, p. 180). Why should such liberties be regarded as less important than the opportunity to participate in collective decision making, as realised by Western liberal democracies?
- 5.
The NRA is the statutory retirement age that is characteristically applied to the population as a whole, triggering eligibility for social security benefits (Hyde et al. 2006).
- 6.
The CRA is the retirement age that applies in second pillar retirement schemes, and is subject to contractual agreement between workers and their employers, not concerns around citizenship.
- 7.
An exception to this general principle concerns employees in hazardous occupations. Their higher prevalence of ill-health and diminished longevity could mean that preferential treatment with regard to the NRA is a necessary corollary of their basic liberties.
References
Anderson, E.S. (1999) “What is the point of equality?”, Ethics, 109, pp. 295.
Armstrong, C. (2006) Rethinking Equality, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bentham, J. (1781) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books.
Blackburn, R. (2002) Banking on Death or Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions, London: Verso.
Bode, I. (2007) “From citizen’s wage to self-made pensions? The changing culture of old age provision in Canada and Germany”, Current Sociology, 55, 5, pp. 696–717.
Bode, I. (2008) The Culture of Welfare Markets: The International Recasting of Pension and Care Systems, London: Routledge.
Carter, I. (1999) A Measure of Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Conway, D. (1995) Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal, New York: St Martins’ Press.
Doyal, L. and Gough, I. (1991) A Theory of Human Need, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Duhamel, O. and Mény, Y. (1992) Dictionnaire Constitutionnel, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Dworkin, R. (2000) Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Etzioni, A. and Brodbeck, L. (2010) “The intergenerational covenant: Rights and responsibilities”, in Hyde, M. and Dixon, J. (eds), Comparing How Various Nations Administer Retirement Income: Essays on Social Security, Privatisation, and Inter-Generational Covenants, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Fitzpatrick, T. (1999) Freedom and Security: An Introduction to the Basic Income Debate, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Freeden, M. (1991) Rights, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Friedman, M. (1962) Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Friedman, D. (1989) The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing.
Garcia-Inda, E. (2008) On the Concept and Models of Citizenship, Granada, Spain: Universidad de Granada.
Gillion, C., Turner, J., Bailey, C. and Latulippe, D. (2000) Social Security Pensions: Development and Reform, Geneva: International Labour Office.
Hayek, F.A. (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, London: Routledge.
Hyde, M.B. (2014) Classical Liberalism and Conservatism: How is Chile’s “private” Pension System Best Conceptualised?, New York: Centre for a Stateless Society.
Hyde, M. and Borzutzky, S. (2016) Rent-Seeking in Private Pensions: Concentration, Pricing and Performance, London: Palgrave.
Hyde, M., and Dixon. J. (2009) “A just retirement pension system: Beyond neoliberalism”, Poverty & Public Policy, 1, pp. 1–25.
Hyde, M., Dixon, J. and Joyner, M. (1999) “Arbeit, Sicherheit und Bereitstellung von Chancen: Zur Reform der sozialen Sicherheit im Vereinigten Königreich”, International Revue Für Soziale Sicherheit, 4, 99, pp. 55–80.
Hyde, M., Dixon, J. and Drover, G. (2006) The Privatisation of Mandatory Retirement Income Protection: International Perspectives, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Impávido, G., Lasagabaster, E. and García-Huitron, M. (2010) New Policies for Mandatory Defined Contribution Pensions: Industrial Organisation Models and Investment Products, Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Kangas, O. (2000) “Distributive justice and social policy: Some reflections on Rawls and income distribution”, Social Policy and Administration, 34, 5, pp. 510–528.
Kant, I. (1965) Critique of Pure Reason, New York: St. Martins’ Press.
Kelly, D. (1998) A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, Washington, DC: The Cato Institute.
Korpi, W. and Palme, J. (1998) “The paradox of redistribution and strategies of equality: Welfare State institutions, inequality, and poverty in the western countries”, American Sociological Review, 63, 5, pp. 661–687.
Kymlicka, W. (2002) Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Layard, R. (2005) Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, London: Allen Lane.
Littlewood, M. (1998) How to Create a Competitive Market in Pensions, London: Institute of Economic Affairs.
Lomasky, L.E. (2005) “Libertarianism at twin Harvard”, in Frankel Paul, E., Miller, F.D. and Paul, J. (eds), Natural Rights Liberalism from Locke to Nozick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Long, R.T. and Machan, T.R. (2008) Anarchism/minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Machan, T.R. (2006) Libertarianism Defended, New York: Ashgate.
Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, D. (1999) Principles of Social Justice, Cambridge, MT: Stanford University Press.
Novak, T. (1988) Poverty and the State, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford: Blackwell.
Olsaretti, S. (2004) Liberty, Desert and the Market: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olsaretti, S. (ed) (2007) Desert and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pennington, M. (2010) Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Phillipson, C. (1982) Capitalism and the Construction of Old Age, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Rand, A. (ed) (1967) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, New York: Signet.
Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (2003) Justice As fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rothstein, B. and Uslaner, E.M. (2005) “All for all equality, corruption, and social trust”, World Politics, 58, 1, pp. 41–72.
Sergeant, M. (2004) “Mandatory retirement age and age discrimination”, Employee Relations, 26, 2, pp. 151–166.
Schmidtz, D. (2005) Elements of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schokkaert, E. and Van Parijs, P. (2003) “Social justice and the reform of Europe’s pension systems”, Journal of European Social Policy, 13, 3, pp. 245–279.
Shapiro, D. (2007) Is the Welfare State Justified?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shapiro, D. (2010) “The moral case for social security privatisation in the United States”, in Hyde, M. and Dixon, J. (eds), The “Social” in Social Security: Market, State and Associations in Retirement Provision, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Skoble, A.J. (2005) “Life, liberty and retirement pensions”, The Freeman, pp. 55–57.
Smith, T. (2006) Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, G.H. (2012) Jeremy Bentham’s attach on natural rights, Libertarianism.Org, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/jeremy-benthams-attack-natural-rights.
Tanner, D. (ed) (2004) Social Security and Its Discontents, Washington, DC: The Cato Institute.
Thompson, L. (1998) Older & Wiser: The Economics of Public Pensions, Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.
Titmuss, R.M. (1974) Social Policy, London: George, Allen and Unwin.
Vallentyne, P. (2007) “Brute luck equality and desert”, in Olsaretti, S. (ed), Desert and Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Parijs, P. (1995) Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) Can Justify Capitalism?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walker, A. (1981) “Towards a political economy of old age”, Ageing & Society, 1, 1, pp. 73–94.
Wilding, P. (1982) Professional Power and Social Welfare, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
World Bank. (1994) Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth, Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hyde, M., Shand, R. (2017). Citizenship and Just Pension Design. In: Retirement, Pensions and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60066-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60066-0_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60065-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-60066-0
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)