Introduction

Abstract

This chapter situates philosophical discussions of taxation with reference to the strongly contrasting approaches to tax, property, and justice embodied in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The twelve chapters of the book are situated against the opposing philosophical poles provided by the libertarian and Rawlsian approaches to tax, and we describe in particular the further development of the Rawlsian view by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel in their book The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, which is a focal point for a number of the following chapters. We explain why and how taxation should be seen as central to political philosophy, given the importance of tax policy for both domestic and global justice, and given the close connections that taxation has to issues of property rights, democracy, public justification, state neutrality, stability, political psychology, and a range of other issues.