ABSTRACT
Schokkaert and Devooght’s paper complements some of these theoretical studies by examining empirical aspects of this issue. In particular, the primary purpose of the paper is to investigate whether the respondents of a questionnaire study share the view that certain properties of redistribution mechanisms that have been introduced in the literature are desirable. As is usually the case in studies of that nature, the subjects are selected in a way that is supposed to guarantee that they have not been exposed to scholarly debates on the issue in question before-the intention is to get the responses of representatives of the general non-expert public. This methodology has been used in other areas as well. For example, there are studies that examine the acceptance of distributional principles in the absence of responsibility considerations in the theory of income inequality measurement (see Schokkaert and Devooght’s paper for references). The experimental study carried out by Schokkaert and Devooght is well-documented, and the authors explain their methodology very well in the paper. Therefore, rather than going into details concerning this particular study, I will focus my
comments on a discussion of what can be learned from such empirical studies in normative economics and ethics in general, and how they fit into the research programme under consideration.
