R.H. Tawney, “Equality in Historical Perspective”
The inequalities of the past had been arbitrary, not the result of personal capacity, but of social and political
favoritism.
Industrial society has inequalities, but these are OK because they are the expression of individual
achievement or failure to achieve.
They deserved moral approval because they corresponded to merit, and they were economically beneficial
because they offered a system of prizes and penalties.
The notion is that anyone can be wealthy and powerful. This is a world in which class privilege and tyranny
were impossible and so even though there were disparities of wealth and power, there are still no classes,
since it is open to anyone to become wealthy and powerful.
Unfortunately, this is all a figment (equality of opportunity) because some people have stunted or sterilized
capacities caused by social environment. Others have advantages because they are favored or pampered.
So equality of opportunity is a figment.
EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS A FICTION – LEADS TO THE TADPOLE PHILOSOPHY
The analogy to the tadpoles (“Tadpole Philosophy”) – the consolation it offers for social evils consists in the
statement that exceptional individuals can succeed in evading them. (see p. 95) The tadpole philosophy
doesn’t work – “as though opportunities for talent to rise could be equalized in a society where the
circumstances surrounding it from birth are themselves unequal!”
“The existence of such opportunities in fact, and not merely in form, depends, not only upon an open road,
but upon an equal start. It is precisely, of course, when capacity is aided by a high level of general wellbeing in the milieu surrounding it, that its ascent is most likely to be regular and rapid, rather than fitful and
intermittent.
People who possess exceptional gifts applaud a society that is organized around offering careers to
exceptional talent, but they rarely understand the scope and implications of what they are preaching. It is a
statistical impossibility for more than a small fraction of the poor to enter the ranks of the rich, and a
community can’t be organized on exceptional talent alone.
Social well-being depends on cohesion and solidarity, not just upon intelligent leadership. We need a high
level of culture, a strong sense of common interests, and that society is about everyone, not just the elite.
Individual happiness doesn’t mean simply that people can get richer and live a better life of comfort and
distinction, but that they lead a life of “dignity and culture” even if they don’t rise. There is to be dignity no
matter what. A good society is one in which “common men should be free to make the most of their
common humanity.”
NOT EVERYONE CAN BE SUCCESSFUL. DIGNITY AND CULTURE MUST BE PROMOTED. COMMON
HUMANITY MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT.
It is not enough just to open advancement opportunities to the few who can manage to get them; a society
must also create a decent civilization for those who can’t or won’t climb an economic ladder. “It is right in
attaching a high significance to social mobility; it is wrong in implying that effective mobility can be secured
merely through the absence of legal restraints, or that, if it could, economic liberty would be a sufficient
prophylactic against the evils produced by social stratification. Men live in the present and future, not in the
past.”
“The formal equality of rights between wage-earner and property-owner becomes the decorous drapery for a
practical relationship of mastery and subordination.”
“Inequality of power is tolerated, when the power is used for a social purpose approved by the community,
when it is not more extensive than that purpose requires, when its exercise is not arbitrary, but governed by
settled rules, and when the commission can be revoked, if its terms are exceeded. Inequality of
circumstance is regarded as reasonable, in so far as it is the necessary condition of securing the services
which the community requires.”
“The phenomenon which provokes exasperation, in short, is not power and inequality, but capricious
inequality and irresponsible power; and in this matter the sentiments of individuals correspond, it may be
observed, with the needs of society. What a community requires is that its work should be done and done
with the minimum of friction and maximum of cooperation. Gradations of authority and income derived from
differences of office and function promote that end; distinctions based, not on objective facts, but on
personal claims – on birth, or wealth, or social position – impede its attainment.”
POWER AND INEQUALITY ARE INEVITABLE, BUT IRRESPONSIBLE POWER AND CAPRICIOUS
INEQUALITY ARE NOT. CAN’T BASE THESE THINGS ON CAPRICIOUS FACTS LIKE BIRTH OR
WEALTH OR SOCIAL POSITION, BUT ON WHAT A PERSON HAS WORKED FOR, WHAT A PERSON
DESERVES.
F.A. von Hayek, “Equality, Value and Merit,” from the Constitution of Liberty
Why base an argument for equal treatment on the false assumption that everyone is equal?
“Nothing . . . is more damaging to the demand for equal treatment than to base it on so obviously untrue an
assumption as that of the factual equality of all men. To rest the case for equal treatment of national or racial
minorities on the assertion that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality
would justify unequal treatment; and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in
forthcoming. It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated
alike in spite of the fact that they are different.”
Get rid of the belief in factual equality. “It is just not true that ‘all men are born equal.’ We may continue to
use this hallowed phrase to express the ideal that legally and morally all men ought to be treated alike. But
if we want to understand what this ideal of equality can or should mean, the first requirement is that we free
ourselves from the belief in factual equality.”
“Equality before the law and material equality . . . are not only different but are in conflict with each other;
and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.” “From the fact that people are
very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and
that the only way to place them in an equal position would be treat them differently.”
“It is true that particular people may be worse off because of the superior ability of some new competitor in
the field; but any such additional ability in the community is likely to benefit the majority. This implies the
desirability of increasing the abilities and opportunities of any individual does not depend on whether the
same can also be done for the others – provided, of course, that others are not thereby deprived of the
opportunity of acquiring the same or other abilities . . .”
“Though either may affect the value which an individual has for his fellows, no more credit belongs to him for
having been born with desirable qualities than for having grown up under favorable circumstances.” -- this is
the claim of the egalitarians.
The question is whether there is a case for changing our institutions to make it so that those
advantages caused by environment are eliminated. “Are we to agree that ‘all inequalities that rest on birth
and inherited property ought to be abolished and none remain unless it is an effect of superior talent and
industry’?” It is TAWNEY’s POSITION THAT THIS IS THE CASE. INEQUALITIES BASED ON BIRTH AND
INHERITANCE SHOULD BE ELIMINATED UNLESS BASED ON TALENT AND INDUSTRY.
Von Hayek holds that this is not the case.
The family puts forth cultural heritage. “To admit this is merely to recognize that belonging to a particular
family is part of the individual personality, that society is made up as much of families as of individuals, and
that the transmission of the heritage of civilization within the family is as important a tool in man’s striving
toward better things as is the heredity of beneficial physical attributes.”
Maybe unequal education is the problem? Egalitarians tend to concentrate on unequal advantages due to
education.
This isn’t going to work. “This conception that all should be allowed to try has been largely
replaced by the altogether different conception that all must be assured an equal start and the same
prospects. This means little less than that the government, instead of providing the same circumstances for
all, should aim at controlling all conditions relevant to a particular individual’s prospects and so adjust them
to his capacities as to assure him of the same prospects as everybody else. Such deliberate adaptation of
opportunities to individual aims and capacities would, of course, be the opposite of freedom. Nor could it be
justified as a means of making the best use of all available knowledge except on the assumption that
government knows best how individual capacities can be used.”
“If really all unfulfilled desires have a claim on the community, individual responsibility is at an end.”
This is why the function of government can’t be to remove all discontent. Even Mill said that envy was the
most anti-social and evil of all passions.
We can’t base everything on merit, either. “In a free system it is neither desirable nor practicable
that material rewards should be made generally to correspond to what men recognize as merit and that it is
an essential characteristic of a free society than an individual’s position should not necessarily depend on
the views that his fellows hold about the merit he has acquired.”
‘Merit’ means “attributes f conduct that make it deserving of praise, that is, the moral character of
the action and not the value of the achievement.”
The problem is that “inborn as well as acquired gifts of a person have a value to his fellows which
does not depend on any credit due to him for possessing them.” “The value which a person’s capacities or
services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything that we can call moral
merit or deserts.”
“Assessable merit in this sense presupposes that we can ascertain that a man has done what
some accepted rule of conduct demanded of him and that this has cost him some pain and effort. Whether
this has been the case cannot be judged by the result: merit is not a matter of the objective outcome but of
subjective effort. The attempt to achieve a valuable result may be highly meritorious but a complete failure,
and full success may be entirely the result of accident and thus without merit.”
“It would clearly not serve our purpose if we let all who have honestly striven share in the prize.
Moreover, to do so would make it necessary that somebody have the right to decide who is to be allowed to
strive for it.”
“The fact is, of course, that we do not wish people to earn a maximum of merit but achieve a
maximum of usefulness at a minimum of pain and sacrifice and therefore a minimum of merit. “It is only the
value of the result that we can judge with any degree of confidence, not the different degrees of effort and
care that it has cost different people to achieve it.”
“Though most people regard as very natural the claim that nobody should be rewarded more than
he deserves for his pain and effort, it is nevertheless based on a colossal presumption. --- It presumes that
some human beings are in a position to determine conclusively what a person is worth and are entitled to
determine what he may achieve. It presumes, then, what the argument for liberty specifically rejects: that
we can and do know all that guides a person’s action.” This is the exact opposite of a free society. –
anything that makes the position of individuals correspond to idea of moral merit. “It would be a society in
which people were rewarded for duty performed instead of for success, in which every move of every
individual was guided by what other people thought he ought to do, and in which the individual was thus
relieved of the responsibility and the risk of decision.”
“In our dealings with other men we feel that we are doing justice if we recompense value rendered
with equal value, without inquiring what it might have cost the particular individual to supply us with these
services. What determines our responsibility is the advantage we derive from what others offer us, not their
merit in providing it.”
“If the pursuit of a hobby produces a special skill or an accidental invention turns out to be
extremely useful to others, the fact that there is little merit in it does not make it any less valuable than if the
result had been produced by painful effort.”
“A society in which it was generally presumed that a high income was proof of merit and low
income of the lack of it, in which it was universally believed that position and remuneration corresponded to
merit, in which there was no other road to success than the approval of one’s conduct by the majority of
one’s fellows, would probably be much more unbearable to the unsuccessful ones than one in which it was
frankly recognized that there was no necessary connection between merit and success.”
“The principle of distributive justice, once introduced, would not be fulfilled until the whole of society
was organized in accordance with it. This would produce a kind of society in which all essential respects
would be the opposite of a free society – a society in which authority decided what the individual was to do
and how he was to do it.”
CAN’T ARGUE THE POSITION THAT PEOPLE DESERVE THINGS BASED ON MERIT; WOULD ARGUE
AGAINST FREEDOM AND BE OPPRESSIVE.
John Rawls, “Justice and Equality,” from A Theory of Justice
Justice concerns the basic structure of society, which is the major social institutions that distribute
rights and duties and determine division of advantages from social cooperation. Major institutions are
economic and social arrangements.
This basic structure is the subject of justice because its effects are PROFOUND AND ARE THERE
FROM THE START.
The principles of justice are the object of the original agreements – free and rational persons concerned to
further their own interests would accept the principles of justice in an initial position of equality as defining
the fundamental terms of their association. This is justice as fairness.
They decide in advance how they are to regulate claims against one another and what is the
foundation charter of their society. A group of persons must decide once and for all what is to count among
them as just and unjust.
The two Principles:
1.
Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar
liberty for others.
2.
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to
be to everyone’s advantage, and attached to positions and offices open to all.
The basic liberties of citizens are political liberty (vote, eligible for public office) and free speech and
assembly; liberty of conscience, freedom of thought; freedom of the person and to hold property; freedom
from arbitrary arrest and seizure.
The second principle applies to the distribution of income and wealth and the design of organizations making
use of differences in authority and responsibility. While the distribution of wealth and income need not be
equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage.
The first principle is prior to the second. Departure from institutions of equal liberty cannot be justified by
greater social and economic advantages. The two principles are a special case of a more general
conception of justice such that
All social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be
distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage.
So, injustice is inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.
The two principles rule out cases in which a person gives up liberties in return for economic gains when he
figures his political rights are marginal, anyway. The two principles don’t permit that sort of exchange
between basic liberties and economic and social gains.
The first principle requires that certain rules, those defining basic liberties, apply to everyone equally and
that they allow the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all.
The second principle, applying to institutional forms, refers to expectations of representative individuals.
Neither principle applies to distributions of particular goods to particular individuals who may be identified by
their proper names.
The second principle insists that each person benefit from permissible inequalities in the basic structure.
The second part of the second principle is the LIBERAL PRINCIPLE OF FAIR EQUALITY OF
OPPORTUNITY.
It may be possible to improve everyone’s situation by assigning powers and benefits to positions even
though access to them is restricted. But the principle of open positions forbids this. It expresses the
conviction that if some places were not open on a basis fair to all, those kept out would be right in feeling
unjustly treated.
In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.
In pure procedural justice, there is an independent criterion for what is a fair division, a criterion defined
separately from and prior to the procedure which is to be followed. And in this case, it is possible to devise a
procedure that is sure to give the desired outcome.
A trial is an example of imperfect procedural justice. Even though the law is carefully followed, and the
proceedings fair and properly conducted, it may reach the wrong outcome.
Pure procedural justice obtains when there is no independent criterion for the right result. The outcome is
correct or fair, whatever it is, provided that the procedure has been properly followed.
A distinctive feature of pure procedural justice is the procedure for determining the just result must actually
be carried out; for in these cases there is no independent criterion by which reference to which a definite
outcome can be known to be just.
Utilitarianism does not interpret the basic structure as a scheme of pure procedural justice. For the utilitarian
has an independent standard for judging all distributions, whether they produce the greatest net balance of
satisfaction. In this theory, institutions are more or less imperfect arrangements for bring about the end.
Thus given existing desires and preferences, and the natural continuations into the future which they allow,
the statesman’s aim is to set up those social schemes that will best approximate an already specified goal.
Since these arrangements are subject to the unavoidable constraints and hindrances of everyday life, the
basic structure is a case of imperfect procedural justice.
Regardless of what an individual’s rational plans are in detail, it is assumed that there are various things
which he would prefer more of rather than less. With more, these people can generally be assured of
greater success in reaching their ends. The primary social goods are rights and liberties, opportunities and
powers, income and wealth.
Good is the satisfaction of rational desire.
While persons in the original position do not know their conception of the good, the do know that the prefer
more rather than less primary goods. And this information is sufficient for them to know how to advance
their interests in the initial situation.
The two principles of justice express and egalitarian conceptions of justice.
First, the difference principle gives weight to considerations singled out by the principle of redress. This is
the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress; and since inequalities of birth and natural
endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be compensated for. Society must give more attention
to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions. Greater
resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, and over a certain
time of life, maybe the early years of school.
The difference principle would allocate resources in education to improve the long term expectations of the
least favored. If this end is attained by giving more attention to the better endowed, it is permissible;
otherwise not. And in making this decision, the value of education should not be assessed solely in terms of
economic efficiency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a
person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide FOR EACH
INDIVIDUAL A SECURE SENSE OF HIS OWN WORTH.
Those who have been favored by nature may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the
situation of those who have lost out. The naturally advantaged are not o gain merely because they are more
gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help
the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting
place in society. But it does not follow that we should eliminate these distinctions.
The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust – nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some
particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal
with these facts.
The difference principle also expresses a conception of reciprocity. It is a principle of mutual benefit.
Suppose a case in which if A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.
The difficulty is to show that A has no grounds for complaint.
The difference principle also provides an interpretation of the principle of fraternity. In comparison with
liberty and equality, fraternity has had a lesser place in democratic theory. Most think that fraternity
expresses attitudes of mind and forms of conduct without which we would lose sight of the values expressed
by liberty and equality. Fraternity is a certain equality of social esteem.
The difference principle does correspond to a natural meaning of fraternity; namely, the idea of not wanting
to have greater advantages unless this is to the benefit of others who are less well off. Members of family
commonly do not wish to gain unless they can do so in ways that further the interests of the rest.
The ideal of fraternity: many have felt that it has no proper place in political affairs. But if it is interpreted as
incorporating the requirements of the difference principle, it is not an impracticable conception.
Once we accept it we can associate the traditional ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity with the democratic
interpretation of the two principles of justice as follows: liberty corresponds to the first principle, equality to
the idea of equality in the first principle together with equality of fair opportunity, and fraternity to the
difference principle.
Equality of opportunity means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind in the personal quest for
influence and social position. Thus a meritocratic society is a danger for the other interpretations for the
principles of justice but not for the democratic conception.
The confident sense of their own worth should be sought for the least favored and this limits the forms of
hierarchy and the degrees of inequality that justice permits.
Robert Nozick, “Equality versus Entitlement,” from Anarchy, State and Utopia
Argues against patterned principles of justice. Nozick’s view is the entitlement theory – that
individuals have a right to their holdings as long as they acquired them fairly, regardless of the overall
pattern of holdings.
A principle of distribution is patterned if it specifies that distribution is to vary along with some natural
dimension, weighted sum of natural dimensions, or lexicographic ordering of natural dimension.
Almost every suggested principle of distributive justice is patterned: to each according to his moral merit, or
needs, or marginal product, or how hard he tries, or the weighted sum of the foregoing, and so on.
Von Hayek argues that we can’t know enough about each person’s situation to distribute to each according
to moral merit (but would justice demand it if we did?) and he goes on to say that our objection is against all
attempts to impress on society a chosen pattern of distribution, whether it is an order of equality or
inequality. However, Hayek concludes that in a free society there will be distribution in accordance with
value rather than moral merit; that is, in accordance with the perceived value of a person’s actions and
services to others.
Distribution according to benefits to others is a major patterned strand in a free capitalist society (Hayek
points this out) but it is only a strand and doesn’t constitute the whole system of entitlements. No doubt
people will not long accept a distribution they believe is unjust. People want their society to be and to look
just. But must the look of justice reside in a resulting pattern rather than in the underlying generating
principles?
We feel more comfortable upholding the justice of an entitlement system if most of the transfers under it are
done for reasons.
To think that the task of a theory of distributive justice is to fill in the blank in “to each according to his
______” is to be predisposed to search for a pattern; and the separate treatment of “from each according to
his ______” treats production and distribution as two separate and independent issues. On an entitlement
view these are NOT two different questions. Whoever makes something is entitled to it. The situation is
NOT one of something’s getting made, and there is an open question of who is to get it. Things come into
the world already attached to people having entitlements over them. From the point of view of the historical
entitlement conception of justice in holdings, those who start new to compete treat objects as if they
appeared from nowhere, out of nothing.
FROM EACH A THEY CHOOSE, TO EACH AS THEY ARE CHOSEN.
Example of Wilt Chamberlain. People pay an extra 25 cents of their admission to see him play. He gets the
extra money and makes much more than the other players. To the people who pay, it is worth it. Is
Chamberlain entitled to the income? Suppose that D1 is a just distribution, and people move from it
voluntarily to D2, transferring their shares they were given under D1, now isn’t D2 also just? Didn’t having
the things in D1 entitle these people to give it to WC if they wanted to? After someone transfers something
to WC, third parties still have their legitimate shares; their shares are not changed.
People often work overtime even in societies in which their needs are met because they care about things
other than needs. Persons either must do without some extra things they want, or allowed to do something
extra to get some of these things. No end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice an be
continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives.
To maintain a pattern, one must either continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources as
they wish to, or continually (or periodically) interfere to take from some persons resources that others for
some reason chose to transfer to them.
One might object that all persons will choose to refrain from actions that would upset the pattern. THIS IS
UNREALISTIC BECAUSE: it supposes that all will most want to maintain the pattern (what if they don’t,
should we ‘reeducate’ them or force them to comply?) and it supposes that each can get enough info about
his own actions and the actions of others to discover which actions will upset the pattern and that diverse
and far-flung persons can coordinate actions to fit into the pattern.
People often claim we should alter social institutions to achieve greater equality, but they don’t often argue
for that.
On the entitlement theory of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to
alter the situation merely by looking at a distributional profile or at facts such as these. It depends on how
the distribution came about.
The entitlement conception of justice in holdings makes no presumption in favor of how equality, or any
other overall end state or patterning. It cannot be merely assumed that equality must be built into any theory
of justice.
Imagine Bernard Williams who says that the only proper criterion for distribution of medical care is medical
need. Well, then, the only proper criterion for distribution of barbering services is barbering need. But if
someone becomes a barber because he likes talking to lots of people, is it unjust of him to allocate his
services to people he likes? Or if he works as a barber to earn money to pay tuition, may he cut the hair
only of those who pay or tip well? Does a gardener have to allocate services to the lawns that need him
most?
In what way does the situation of a doctor differ? Why must his activities be allocated via the internal goal of
medical care? Society somehow arranges things so that the doctor allocates according to need. The
society might pay him to do this. Why MUST society do this? Presumably, because medical care is
important and people need it. This is true of food as well, but farming doesn’t have an internal goal that
refers to other people in the way doctoring does. When the layers of Williams’ argument are peeled away, it
turns out that society should make provision for the important needs of all its members. He ignores,
however, where these things come from.
Equality might be the minimal egalitarian goal, but it is question for being too weak. Two ways to attempt to
provide such equality: worsening the situations of the more favored, or improving the situation of the less
favored.
The model of a race for a prize is often used in discussions of equality of opportunity. A race where
someone started closer to the finish line than others would be unfair, as would a race where some were
forced to carry heavy weights, or run with pebbles in their sneakers. But life is not a race in which we all
compete for a prize which someone has established; there is no unified race, with some person judging
swiftness. Instead, there are different persons separately giving other persons different things. No
centralized process judges people’s use of the opportunities they had; that is not what the processes of
social cooperation and exchange are for.
Suppose there is someone who decides to give goods to someone else who satisfies certain conditions, but
does not care who the individual person is who gets the goods. Now suppose there is someone who could
have satisfied the conditions, but didn’t have the opportunity. The person having better opportunities can be
viewed not merely as being better off, but as someone blocking or impeding the person having lesser
opportunities from becoming better off. Impeding another by being more alluring in exchange is not to be
compared to directly worsening the situation of another, as by stealing from him.
Feeling the power of such questions does not give a reason for overturning the entitlement theory.
Would my impeding the other suitor’s winning of my wife justify taking some resources from others to pay for
cosmetic surgery for him to look better, or to make him more intelligent in some way, or get him some kind of
trait that will equalize our chances of being chosen? No such consequences follow. Is it unfair that a child
be raised in a home with a swimming pool, and using it daily, even though he is no more deserving than
some other kid whose home has no pool? Should such a situation be prohibited.
No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other
people have rights and entitlements over. The particular rights over things fills the space of rights, leaving
no room for general rights to be in a certain material condition.
Ronald Dworkin, “Equality of Resources”
Argues an alternative to the view that different people be equally happy or that their desires be satisfied to
equal degrees.
Example of the shipwreck. People on the island distribute goods equally. They do so according to the envy
test. “No division of resources is equal if any person would prefer someone else’s bundle of stuff to his own
bundle.” Imagine that there’s some way to distribute so that nobody would envy anyone else’s bundle of
stuff.
What happens after the initial distribution? Suppose they are free to trade and produce as they wish – now
the envy test will fail. Somebody will prefer the other bundle to the one they now have in, say, 5 years.
Lots of this is influenced by luck. Option luck and brute luck. Option luck is how gambles work out. Brute
luck is how risks play out that are not deliberate gambles.
Is it consistent with equality of resources that people should have different income or wealth in virtue of
differing option luck?
The life chosen by a gambler contains a factor of risk; someone who chooses not to gamble has decided
that he prefers a safer life. People should pay the price of the life they decide to lead. The price of a safer
life is foregoing any chance of the gains the gambler might get. So we have no reason to object to a result
in which those who decline to gamble have less than some who don’t.
Now compare the situation of those who gamble and win to those who gamble and lose. The possibility of
loss was part of the life they chose.
If winners were made to share their winnings with losers, then no one would gamble, as individuals, and the
kind of life preferred by both the winners and losers would be unavailable.
For the effect of redistribution from winners to losers in gambles would be to deprive both of lives they
prefer, which indicates, not simply that this would produce an unwanted curtailment of available forms of life,
but that it would deprive them of an equal voice in the construction of lots to be auctioned.
We may have special reasons for forbidding some forms of gambles – we might have paternalistic reasons
for limiting how much a person may risk.
What about insurance? Consider a man blinded, or not. The man who insured against blindness would
have been the loser if he had not gone blind. If neither goes blind, the one who bought insurance had bad
option luck, but good brute luck – he spent resources that could have been better spent otherwise. But in a
case like this, he would have no claim from the man who did not insure himself and survived unhurt.
Once the equality of resources is established at the outset, and corrected to provide for handicaps, it would
be disturbed by production and trade. Suppose somebody is proficient at producing tomatoes. Now others
will begin to envy his bundle of resources.
People wish to lead their lives in different ways, and they acquire different bundles of resources in the
auction and use them differently thereafter. Each of the other people would prefer the stock of person A to
his own, but suppose none of them wanted to live their lives the way he did? If we look at envy differently,
as a matter of resources over an entire life, and we include a person’s occupation as part of his bundle of
goods, then o one envies A’s bundle, and the distribution can’t be unequal on that account.
Suppose A, who is successful, enjoys hard work and thus makes no sacrifice. He prefers working hard to
anything else. But this can’t be an argument, under equality of resources, that he should gain less in money
or other goods by his work than if he hated it, any more than it argues against charging someone a low price
for lettuce, which he actually prefers to truffles.
C, who likes to farm but can’t grow anything, wouldn’t bit enough for farming land to take the land from
person A. If he did, he would have to settle for less in the rest of his life. He would then envy the package
of A’s occupation and wealth.
If we continue to insist that envy is a necessary condition of equality of resources, then our initial auction will
not insure continuing equality, in a real world of unequal talents for production.
The starting gate theory of equality of resources is not coherent. If people start in the same circumstances,
don’t steal or cheat, then it is fair that people keep what they gain from their own skill. This theory is very far
from equality of resources. It is hardly a coherent theory of the political at all. It holds that justice requires
initial equal resources. It holds that justice requires laissez-faire combined with a Lockean theory of mixing
labor. But the two ways of thinking can’t live together comfortably because what if we suppose that any
time is a good time to determine equality? Then if justice requires an equal auction when they land on the
deserted island, it must require a fresh, equal auction from time to time thereafter; and if justice requires
laissez-faire therefore, it must require it when they land on the island.
The starting-gate theory, that people start off equal but grow unequal through efforts, is an indefensible
combination of different theories of justice. Something like that makes sense in a game like Monopoly, but it
can’t hold a political theory together.
Dworkin’s principle – that if people of equal talent choose to live different lives it is unfair to redistribute
halfway through those lives, makes no appeal to the starting gate theory. It is based on the idea that the
equality in question is equality of resources devoted to whole lives. His theory doesn’t suppose an equal
division of resources is appropriate at one moment in a person’s life and not at any other. It argues that
resources available to a person at any moment must be a function of resources available or consumed by
him at others, so that the explanation why someone has less money now might be that he has consumed
expensive leisure earlier.
We must allow the distribution of resources to be ambition-sensitive. People must be permitted to retain the
gains that flow from decisions in an equal auction followed by free trade.
The slavery of the talented. If their talent pays less than some other thing they can do, can we permit this?
No. The principle that people shouldn’t be penalized for talent is part of the principle relied on in rejecting
the idea that people should be allowed to retain the benefits of superior talent. If A is required to purchase
leisure time or the right to a less productive occupation at the cost of other resources, then A will envy
another package.
So we should turn to the periodic redistribution of resources through an income tax.
What is the difference and what are the connections between D’s conception of equality of resources and
Rawls’s theory of justice?
The Diff principle is not fine tuned. There is a degree of arbitrariness in the choice of any description of the
worst-off group. There is a mythical average or representative member of that group. It is insufficiently
sensitive to distributions above the worst-off class.
Does justice really require the much greater loss to everyone but the poorest in order to prevent a very small
loss by them?
It is really and exclusively the situation of the worst off group that determines what is just?
Rawls assumes the difference principle ties justice to class, not as a matter of second-best practical
accommodation to some deeper version of equality which is more individualized, but because the choice in
the original position, which defines what justice even at bottom is, would for practical reasons be framed in
class terms from the start.
All projects supporting equality of resources as a political ideal must fail – because some theory of equality,
like resources, is necessary to explain why the original position is a useful device. It is too self-sustaining.
An original position can’t be the starting point of political philosophy. It requires a deeper theory that
explains why the OP has the features that it does and why people would choose particular principles.
Will Kymlicka, “Justice and Minority Rights” from Multicultural Citizenship
There is a general view that if a way of life is to attract adherents, and if a way of life is unable to maintain
adherence, that is unfortunate, but not unfair. Giving political recognition or support to particular cultural
practices or associations is unnecessary and unfair. It is unnecessary, because a valuable way of life will
have no difficulty attracting adherents, and it is unfair because it subsidizes some people’s choices at the
expense of others.
Proponents of this sort of strict separation of state and ethnicity say that the state shouldn’t interfere with the
cultural market-place – it shouldn’t promote or inhibit the maintenance of any particular culture. Rather, it
should respond with ‘benign neglect’ o ethnic and national differences.
This view is mistaken and incoherent.
The state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities and thereby disadvantages others. Once we
recognize this, we need to rethink the justice of minority rights claims. Kymlicka argues that some selfgovernment rights and polyethnic rights are consistent with and required by liberal justice. Three sorts of
arguments to defend these measures:
Equality, historical agreement and diversity. Equality is the only one considered here.
The general argument is the accommodation of differences it the essence of true equality and group specific
rights are not needed to accommodate our differences.
In some cases, claims for group-specific rights are simply an attempt by one group to dominate another. But
some minority rights actually eliminate rather than create inequalities. The viability of their societal cultures
may be undermined by economic and political decisions made by the majority. They could be outbid or
outvoted on resources or policies that are crucial to the survival of their societies and cultures.
The sacrifice required of non-members by the existence of these rights is far less than the sacrifice
members would face in the absence of such rights.
Rawls and Dworkin emphasize the importance of rectifying unclose inequalities.
In the real world, most indigenous people are struggling to maintain a bare minimum of land needed to
sustain the viability of their communities. But it is possible that their land holdings could exceed what justice
allows.
So the ideal of ‘benign neglect’ is not in fact benign. It ignores the fact that the members of a national
minority face a disadvantage which the members of the majority do not face. The idea that the government
could be neutral with respect to ethnic and national groups is false. Refusing to provide education in a
minority language is almost inevitably condemning that language to ever-increasing marginalization. The
government cannot avoid deciding which culture will be supported. It can’t refuse official recognition to
minority languages on the ground that this violates “the separation of state and ethnicity.” This shows that
the analogy between religion and culture is mistaken because you can have a state without an established
church, but you can’t have a state without a language. States in the American southwest and Hawaii were
only offered statehood when the national minorities were outnumbered by immigrants and settlers with the
“right” language.
So the real question is what is the right way to distribute powers, recognize languages, and draw
boundaries. The answer is that we should aim at ensuring that all national groups have the opportunity to
maintain themselves as a distinct culture if they choose to do so.
Decisions about which aspects of one’s culture are worth maintaining should be left to the choices of
individual members. For the state to intervene at this point and support particular options or customs, while
penalizing or discouraging others, would run the risk of unfairly subsidizing some people’s choices.
Decisions about government holidays were made when there was far less religious diversity, and people just
took it for granted that the workweek should accommodate Christian beliefs. But these decisions can be a
significant disadvantage to members of other religious faiths. Having an established work week that favors
Christians, one can hardly object to exemptions for Muslims or Jews on the ground that they violate the
separation of state and ethnicity.
Public holidays are another significant embarrassment for the ‘benign neglect’ view.
But there is no way to have a complete ‘separation of state and ethnicity’. In various ways, the ideal of
‘benign neglect’ is a myth. There is no reason to regret the fact. There is no reason to regret the existence
of official languages and public holidays, and no one gains by creating unnecessary conflicts between
government regulations and religious beliefs. The only question is how to ensure that these unavoidable
forms of support for particular ethnic and national groups are provided fairly – that is, how to ensure that
they don’t privilege some groups and disadvantage others.
Iris Marion Young, “Displacing the Distributive Paradigm,” from Justice and the Politics of Difference
Criticizes many theories of justice for focusing on the allocation of material goods and neglecting or
distorting inequalities that stem from social relations.
Social justice means the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression. Any aspect of social
organization and practice relevant to domination and oppression is in principle subject to evaluation by
ideals of justice.
Philosophical theories of justice tend to restrict the meaning of social justice to the morally proper distribution
of benefits and burdens among society’s members.
Distributive issues are important to a satisfactory conception of justice, but that isn’t all there is to it. There
are two major problems with the distributive paradigm:
1.
It tends to focus thinking about social justice on the allocation of material goods. It ignores the
social structure or institutional context that helps determine distributive patterns. Important issues
are decision making power and procedure, division of labor, and culture.
2.
When metaphorically extended to non-material social goods, the concept of distribution represents
them as though they were static things, instead of a function of social relations and processes.
The conceptions of domination and oppression, rather than distribution, ought to be the starting point of a
conception of social justice.
The distributive paradigm sees social justice as the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens
among society’s members. These are wealth, income and other material goods. The distributive definition
of justice often includes nonmaterial goods such as power, rights, opportunity and self respect. But the
distributive paradigm has a tendency to conceive social justice and distribution as coextensive.
Walzer claims that it is more appropriate to criticize the structure of dominance itself. But he uses the
language of distribution to talk about social justice – it’s odd how he does it. When speaking of the family,
he actually speaks of the distribution of love and affection.
The distributive paradigm assumes a single model for the analysis of justice – all situations in which justice
is an issue are analogous to the situation of people dividing a stock of goods and comparing the size of the
portions individuals have. The individuals are externally related to the goods they have, and their only
relation to one another that matters is comparison of the goods they have. This assumes social atomism.
The distributive paradigm is also pattern oriented – it evaluates justice according to an end-state pattern that
appear on the social field. It assumes a static conception of society. There are two problems with the
paradigm:
1.
2.
It tends to ignore and presuppose the institutional context that determines material distribution.
When extended to non-material goods and resources, the logic of distribution misrepresents them.
The immediate provision of basic material goods for people now suffering severe deprivation must be a first
priority for any program that seems to make the world more just. But in contemporary American society,
many appeals to justice are about something different.
An example is when a plant is closing in a small town. Discussion of possible compensation makes the
people snicker; the point is not that they are out of jobs and lack money, the point is that no private party
should have the right to decide to decimate the local economy. Justice may require that former workers and
other members of the community have the option of taking over and operating the plant themselves. These
two cases concern not so much the justice of material distributions as the justice of decision making power
and procedures.
Arab-Americans are rightly outraged the way they are depicted on TV – as sinister terrorists or princes. The
injustice here is not material distribution, but cultural imagery and symbolism.
Another example is a person who enters mindless numbers into a computer terminal. The complaint is not
about money – the person might be paid quite a bit for this – but the primary issues of justice concern the
structure of the division of labor and a right to meaningful work.
A focus on the distribution of material goods and resources inappropriately restricts the scope of justice,
because it fails to bring social structures and institutional contexts under evaluation.
The Marxist analysis of the distributive paradigm provides a fruitful starting point, but it is both too narrow
and too general. Capitalist class relations are not the only phenomena of social structure that the
distributive paradigm fails to evaluate. Some feminists point out that contemporary theories of justice
presuppose a family structure without asking how social relations involving sexuality, intimacy, children and
household labor ought to be organized. So, they neglect issues within a family.
The Marxist criticism is too vague, too. It tends to obscure the institutional context within which distributions
take place. That context is more than a “mode of production.” It includes any structures and practices, rules
and norms that guide them, and the language and symbols that mediate social interactions, the institutions
of state, family, and civil society, as well as the workplace. They condition people’s ability to participate in
determining actions and their ability to exercise and develop capacities.
When philosophers ask about just principle for allocating jobs and offices, they typically assume a
stratification of positions. They assume a hierarchy and division of labor in which some jobs carry
autonomy, decision making power, authority, income and access to resources while other positions lack
these. Rarely do theorists ask whether such a definition and organization of social positions is just.
She focuses her discussion on 3 primary categories of non-distributive issues: decision-making structure
and procedures, division of labor, and culture.
1.
2.
3.
Economic domination derives at least as much from the corporate and legal structures and
procedures that give some persons power to make decisions about investment, producing,
marketing, employment, interest rates, and wages that affect millions of other people.
Division of labor can be understood distributively and non-distributively. Distributively, how do
people get the jobs they have? Nondistributively, how do the occupations get defined? Feminist
claims about the justice of a sexual division of labor have been posed both ways. Feminists have
questioned the justice of a pattern of distribution of positions that finds a small portion of women in
the most prestigious jobs. They have also questioned the conscious or unconscious association of
many occupations or jobs with masculine or feminine characteristics.
Culture includes symbols, images, meanings, stories and so on – the ways in which people
communicate with each other. The symbolic meanings that people attach to other kinds of people
and to actions, gestures, or institutions often significantly affect the social standing of persons and
their opportunities.
Distributive logic focuses on end state patterns rather than on social processes. The distributive paradigm
implies a misleading or incomplete social ontology.
The DP implicitly assumes that social judgments are about what people have, how much they have, and
how it compares with what others have.
What does distributing a right mean? Altering the situation so that everyone has these rights would not
entail that the formerly privileged wouldn’t have them anymore or that they would have less. Rights are not
fruitfully conceived of as possessions. Rights refer to doing more than having, to social relationships that
enable or constrain action.
Talk of distributing opportunities involves the same sort of confusion. Opportunity is a condition of
enablement, which usually involves a configuration of social rules and social relations, as well as an
individual’s self-conception and skills.
Opportunity is a concept of enablement rather than possession; it refers to doing more than having. A
person has opportunities if he or she is not constrained from doing things, and lives under the enabling
conditions for doing them.
Being enabled or constrained refers more directly to the rules and practices that govern one’s action, the
way other people treat one in the context of specific social relations, and the broader structural possibilities
produced by the confluence of a multitude of actions and practices.
Black and white children often don’t have equally enabling educational opportunities even when all the
resources are the same. Opportunity thus has a wider scope than distribution.
Many writers on justice talk of distributing self-respect. Self-respect names not some possession or attribute
a person has, but her or his attitude toward her or his entire situation and life prospects. While Rawls does
not speak of self-respect as something distributed, he does suggest that distributive arrangements provide
the conditions for self-respect.
People have or lack self respect because of how they define themselves and how others regard them,
because of how they spend their time, because of the amount of autonomy and decision making power they
have in their activities, and so on. Self-respect is relations and processes in which the actions of individuals
are embedded.
The DP tends to conceive of individuals as social atoms, logically prior to social relations and institutions.
Conceiving justice as a distribution of goods among individuals involves analytically separating the
individuals from the goods. This conception of the individual as a substance to which attributes inhere fails
to appreciate that individual identities and capacities are in many respects themselves the products of social
processes and relations.
The DP must conceptualize all issues of justice in terms of patterns. This is a static social ontology.
Nozick argues that end-state, static approaches are inappropriately ahistorical. End state approaches, he
says, operate as though social goods magically appear and get distributed. They ignore the processes that
crate the goods and produce patterns, which they find irrelevant for evaluating justice. For Nozick, only the
process is relevant to evaluating distributions. If individuals begin with holdings they are entitled to, and
undertake free exchanges, then the distributive outcomes are just, no matter what they are. This entitlement
theory shares with other theories a possessively individualistic social ontology. The theory does not take
into account structural effects of the actions of individuals that they cannot foresee or intend, and to which
they might not agree if they could. Nevertheless, Nozick’s criticism of end-state theories for ignoring social
processes is apt.
She disagrees with Nozick that end-state patterns are irrelevant to questions of justice.
Even though more women earn degrees in business, a pattern of distribution of managerial positions
clusters women at the bottom and men at the top persists. Assuming that justice ultimate means equality for
women, this patterning is puzzling. We need to ask what’s going on. Why is the pattern reproduced even in
the face of efforts to change it. Answering that question involves evaluation of a matrix of rules, attitudes,
interactions, and policies as social processes that produce and reproduce the pattern.
The pattern orientation of the distributive paradigm tends to lead to abstraction from institutional rules and
relations and a consequent failure to bring them into evaluation. Without a more temporal approach to
social reality, a theory of justice cannot conceptualize exploitation, as a social process by which the labor of
some unreciprocally supports the privilege of others.
Dworkin brackets issues of power in his discussion of equality, and considers only welfare, the distribution of
goods, services and income.
Bring power under the logic of distribution misconstrues the meaning of power. Conceptualizing power in
distributive terms means conceiving power as kind of stuff possessed by individuals in greater or lesser
amounts. There is a problem with this concept of power.
1.
2.
3.
Thinking people have power, that it’s an attribute, hides the fact that power is a relation, not a thing.
The atomistic bias of the DP leads to a focus on particular agents or roles that have power, on the
model of ruler and subject. This dyadic modeling misses the larger structure of agents and actions
that mediates between two agents in a power relation. One agent can have institutionalized power
over another only if the actions of many third parties support and execute the will of the powerful.
Distributive understanding of power misses the structural phenomenon of domination. It is not
something that can be traded, exchanged, and distributed.
In saying that power and domination have a structural basis, I do not deny that it is individuals who are
powerful and who dominate.
A distributive understanding of power tends to conceive a system of domination in which power, like wealth,
is concentrated in the hands of a few. It is not the case. Contemporary welfare corporate societies witness
the ironic situation in which power is widely spread and diffused, yet social relations are tightly defined by
domination and oppression.
The scope of justice is wider than distributive issues. Ancient thought regarded justice as the virtue of
society as a whole, the well orderedness of institutions that foster individual virtue and promote happiness
and harmony among the citizens. Modern political thought abandoned this that there is a natural order in
society that corresponds to human nature. Seeking to liberate the individual to define his own ends, modern
pol. Theory restricts the scope of justice to issues of distribution and the minimal regulation of action among
self-defining individuals.
Young won’t revert to Plato’s conception of justice, but it is important to broaden the understanding of justice
beyond usual limits in contemporary discourse.
Agnes Heller and Habermas – justice is primarily the virtue of citizenship, of persons deliberating about
problems and issues collectively in institutions and actions, under conditions without domination or
oppression, with reciprocity and mutual tolerance of difference.
All have to be able to express their needs.
Politics – all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural
meanings as they are subject to collective action and decision-making. This sense of politics concerns the
policies and actions of government and state, and also rules, practices and actions in an institutional
context.
Questions of justice do not merge with questions of the good life. The liberal commitment to individual
freedom, and the consequent plurality of definitions of the good, must be preserved in any reenlarged
conception of justice.
Social justice in the sense she intends continues to refer only to institutional conditions, and not to the
preferences and ways of life of individuals or groups.
Any definition of human nature is dangerous because it threatens to devalue or exclude some acceptable
individual desires, cultural characteristics, and ways of life. Even thought eh DP carries an individualist
conception of society, which considers individual desires and preferences private matters outside the sphere
of rational discourse, it assumes a quite specific conception of human nature It implicitly defines human
beings as consumers, desirers and possessors of goods.
People are possessors and consumers, but adding an image of people as doers and actors helps to
displace the DP. The framework of distribution leads to de-emphasizing the values and failure to inquire
about institutional conditions that promote them.
Justice is not identical with the good life as such. Values comprised in the good life can be reduced to two
general ones:
1.
2.
Developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience
Participating in determining one’s actions.
These are universalist values in the sense that they assume equal moral worth of all persons, and justice
requires their promotion for everyone. To these two general values correspond two social conditions that
define injustice:
1. oppression, the institutional constraint on self-development
2. domination, the institutional constraint on self-determination
People live within structures of domination if other people or groups can determine without reciprocation the
conditions of their action, either directly or by virtue of the consequences of their actions.
Not everyone subject to domination is also oppressed. Hierarchical decision making structures subject most
people in our society to domination in some important aspect of their lives. Many of those people
nevertheless enjoy significant institutionalized support for the development and exercise of their capacities
and the ability to express themselves and be heard.