1. Plato,The Republic(translated with introduction and notes by Francis MacDonald Cornford, London: Oxford University Press, 1945), book II, 360 a,b.
2. Unless otherwise stated, "income" refers to wage income throughout the paper.
3. Unveiling the Vote
4. I am grateful to a referee of theJournal of Social Philosophyfor pointing out two potential explanations for the secrecy surrounding wages. First, pay translates into social status, and the comparison of one's paycheque to those of one's peers can be the source of unwelcome insecurity. Second, the taboo against revealing one's income may also serve the interests of capital: The less workers know about the incomes of their peers, the less likely they are to form bonds of class solidarity. However, these explanations do not have any normative implications, they favor neither secrecy nor concealment, and I will consequently bracket them here.
5. In light of current executive pay packages, whose recipients seem to have no moral qualms about accepting them, this statement may appear somewhat blue-eyed. I will come back to this objection later in the paper.