Disability compensation and responsibility

Abstract

It is a central political goal to secure disabled individuals the same opportunities as others to pursue their conception of a good life. This goal reflects an ambition to combine an egalitarian and a liberal moral intuition. In this paper we analyze how disabled individuals who take part in economic activity should be compensated in order to respect these two intuitions. The paper asks how a system of disability compensation should be structured and what the level of such compensation should be. It also analyzes how the answer to these questions depends on whether or not the disabled individuals are held responsible for their choice of work effort.