The resources that a society has to distribute are scarce - for example in the social or healthcare system. Which distribution is considered fair and why? Political scientist Markus Tepe and philosopher Mark Siebel are investigating this in a new DFG research group.
QUESTION: "Needs-based justice and distribution procedures" - that's the name of the research group to which you both belong. What is the scientific interest behind it?
SIEBEL: The aim is to develop a theory of justice. We look empirically at how individuals judge distributions to be fair, how they recognise certain needs or not. But the end result should be a normative theory that says how the limited resources in a society should and should not be distributed.
QUESTION: So it's also about instructions for action, for example for politics and society?
SIEBEL: Ultimately, yes. For me as a philosopher, this normative question is certainly the more exciting one - while social scientists are more likely to focus on the empirical foundation.
TEPE: Indeed. And this interdisciplinary approach to the concept of justice - especially needs-based justice - is what makes this research group so special.
On the other hand, it is methodologically innovative, as it investigates the whole issue in a laboratory experiment. This way of working with laboratory experiments is still relatively new for the social sciences.
SIEBEL: ... and for the philosophers involved, it's something completely new. We usually just sit at home in our armchairs and think about the world (both laugh). But empiricism is also important for philosophers. After all, it's no use formulating a highly abstract theory if nobody can follow it afterwards. For a theory that can have an impact, you have to look at how people think.
QUESTION: Your group is just starting out. Do you already have any assumptions about which factors influence whether we perceive distribution or redistribution as fair?
SIEBEL: We have two core hypotheses that we want to test: the transparency hypothesis and the expert hypothesis. The expert hypothesis forms the background for the two Oldenburg sub-projects. It states that distributions are more likely to be considered fair if there is expertise behind them - for example, if experts, rather than the individuals themselves, identify the needs. Other projects deal with the transparency hypothesis, which states that distributions based on transparent principles are more likely to be recognised.
TEPE: In the sub-project that I am helping to supervise, for example, we are looking at the question of how people decide in favour of a redistributive tax rate. To what extent do they redistribute and under what conditions is this socially accepted? The question also arises as to who is an expert in such a decision-making situation? Someone who has knowledge? Or someone who is considered a moral authority?
QUESTION: And what is your sub-project about, Mr Siebel?
SIEBEL: It's about how you can measure judgements of justice. You have a certain amount of a good and recipients who should receive some of it, but who have different needs. The question is then, on the one hand, how fair the allocations to individual people are and, on the other, how fair the overall distribution is. We also look at whether there is more of a consensus if the people making the judgement have a better basis of information.
TEPE: And how do the laboratory experiments work?
SIEBEL: In my sub-project, we tell little stories and then ask people to give their judgement. We deliberately avoid financial incentives because we don't want them to interfere with the pure judgements of fairness.
TEPE: In the experiments at the Institute of Social Sciences, on the other hand, we assume that setting financial incentives in an anonymised decision-making situation makes it possible to observe actual behaviour - in contrast to preferences expressed in surveys, for example, which could deviate due to social desirability.
QUESTION: Are the scenarios that you set up for your laboratory experiments specifically related to your research topic or are they highly abstracted? Do they have anything recognisably to do with distribution within society?
SIEBEL: Absolutely. One example would be the distribution of a limited quantity of lemons to cover given vitamin C requirements - and the question of which distribution of lemons is considered fair.
TEPE: On the contrary, we will deliberately avoid using terms such as "fair" so as not to make the whole thing more standardised. With us, a group of five people, for example, can initially earn an income with a certain activity - depending on how hard they work. The test subjects then decide on a redistributive tax rate. The amount of tax that ends up in the common pot after their vote is redistributed. We also want to analyse how the participants rate a certain basic income, for example.
QUESTION: How could a theory that you helped to develop change our welfare state and its redistribution mechanism in the future?
TEPE: A legitimate question - we don't want to be a self-referential community of laboratory researchers. It's about recognising need, about socio-political issues such as a minimum income. And we're not just looking at the normative question of how things should be, but also the empirical question of how people behave. The extent to which the experiments are transferable to society may need to be considered. But I would be very pleased if they succeed.
SIEBEL: And we look at how distribution procedures work: What level of information do the decision-makers and the people on whom decisions are made receive - and what procedures are socially accepted? Some things may not be able to be implemented across the board - for example, because it could take too long for everyone to have certain information - but other things very much can.