Professor Liam Murphy, Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University delivers the 2013 Annual Lecture in Law & Society.
In the wake of the House of Commons Debate on tax fairness and increasing public outrage at tax avoidance by Google and other multinationals, Professor Murphy assesses how misunderstandings of the ethical bases of the central legal institutions of a market economy badly distorts political debate on tax and other issues of social justice.
Professor Murphy argues that the law of the market encourages a kind of everyday libertarianism in social attitudes. This illusion leads us to believe, for example, that pre-tax income and wealth represent moral entitlements that should be used as a baseline in discussions of tax justice.
The common criteria of tax fairness — vertical and horizontal equity — demand that those with more pre-tax income pay proportionately more tax, and that those with the same pre-tax income pay the same. But justice is not a matter of applying some equitable-seeming functions to a morally arbitrary initial distribution.
