A Proposal to Unify Some Concepts in the Theory of Fairness

So far, the theory of distributive justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of justice. However, different people hold conflicting ideas about justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions by means of ``aspiration functions.'' We present three different ways of aggregating such opposing opinions into a socially acceptable judgement. Furthermore, we show that many well-known concepts are special cases of our approach. We study, under a restriction on the form of the aspiration functions, the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a social choice correspondence to be generated from any of our concepts. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D63, D71.