February 2001.
The main social rule of allocation is according to action (free choice, labor or effort), following principles of natural right (aim-freedom), desert, merit, responsibility, deservingness, and equality of opportunity. These different concepts are defined, formalized, compared, associated with resourcist and consequential justices (possibly egalitarian and/or welfarist), evaluated, compared with other rules and historical theories, and applied. This provides answers to the questions raised by John Roemer’s innovative proposal for responsibility and equality of opportunity. This presentation includes the corresponding social ethical evaluation functions, the decomposition of inequality according to effort and circumstances, the types of relative merits and equal opportunities, and the application to global income redistribution.