Rewarding effort

According to liberal egalitarian ethics, individuals should be rewarded for factors under their control (the principle of responsibility), but not for factors outside their control (the principle of equalization). The paper analyses the effects of two requirements on how to reward effort within a liberal egalitarian framework: the requirement of equal reward and the requirement of solidarity. We show that it is impossible to establish a framework that satisfies the principle of equalization in all respects, and that a generalized version of the egalitarian equivalent mechanism is a very plausible liberal egalitarian approach. We should like to thank Aanund Hylland, Dirk Van de Gaer and two anonymous referees for extremely valuable comments.