Mardi intime: Instrumentalism in fiscal policy

Bruno Verbeek (Leiden, Hoover Fellow)
When reading contemporary theories of distributive justice one easily gets the impression that institutional design is merely instrumentally relevant for the implementation of the favored conception of justice. This is especially the case when thinking about the tax regime. For example, Liam Murphy and Tom Nagel in their The Myth of Ownership argue that the moral evaluation of a tax regime boils down to assessing whether it is effective and efficient in realizing the preferred overall pattern of distribution. Such instrumentalism forms a clear break with an earlier tradition that insisted on principles of fiscal justice that evaluated fiscal policy ‘in splendid isolation’.

In this talk I will argue that Murphy and Nagel’s argument for instrumentalism fails. I will sketch the outlines of an argument that shows that there are procedural and substantive moral constraints of fiscal justice that are non-instrumental.