Chapter 10 – Justice and Equality
What is justice?
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What is justice : generally similar to fairness.
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Justice has been defined as treatment in
accordance with desert.
Justice
1.
Justice has to do with how human beings
treat each other. Generally, if someone is born
with a disease, we do not claim they have been
treated unjustly.
2.
Justice is past looking.
Justice
3.
Justice is individualistic. Collectivism is generally considered unethical. I
can’t collect your test grades, average them out and give everyone the same grade
because some students deserve higher grades and some students deserve lower
grades. Collectivist thinking can be a result of either hasty or sweeping
generalizations. Any time we lump a group of people together and try to make
judgments about them. The poor, the rich, African Americans, Hispanics, women,
men, and so on. There are individual differences within groups. Some people are
skilled and some are unskilled. Some may be lazy and some may be hardworking,
and so forth. After World War II people tended to associate Germans with Nazi’s
but obviously all German’s were not Nazi’s so this was to label some people
unfairly.Is collectivism ever justified? Insurance rates? Unjust, but the only way to
make it just would involve a lot of work that would raise rates for everyone.
4.
Comparative justice – was Martha Stewart treated more harshly because
she was a women?
Justice
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Justice as equal treatment: Everyone should be
treated equally. What does this mean? Students with
good home lives vs. those with terrible home lives.
Those with no breakfast vs. those with breakfast.
Those that catch on quickly vs. those that don’t.
Utilitarian method might say to spend more time with
smart students. If a special needs child is placed in a
separate class is the child being treated equally? It is
hard to figure out in small cases? How in the world
would you do it in society?
Justice
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Two people get 90% on a paper. They are
numerically identical but qualitatively different.
Equal treatment: We don’t take an innocent
and a guilty person and tell them to split a 10
year sentence because the innocent person
does not deserve to serve jail time. So nobody
should get special treatment. But what about
the president with body guards?
Justice and Discrimination
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What does it mean to discriminate?
Discrimination originally meant to choose
Shouldn’t choose for irrelevant reasons. Now
we have to decide what is relevant and what is
not. If a teacher gives a higher grade to a
student because he/she is sexually attractive,
then that is not just, because sexual
attractiveness is irrelevant to what grade a
student should get.
Discrimination
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What about an employee who only takes a bath twice a year?
What about inviting people to a party? People discriminate all of
the time. But is it an injustice?
Is it an injustice if you are an employer and required by law not to
discriminate based on race or gender? Some employers think it is
discrimination because it is their money and they should have the
right to hire whoever they want.
Some features which we can’t control are sometimes relevant.
Maybe a bouncer at a bar should be strong, a football player
needs to be big and so forth. What about overweight bartenders?
What about hiring a few women that can do a job but distract the
men? Is it just to let them go?
Discrimination
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What about gay teachers? Some say that gay teachers will prey on
children but evidence does not back that up. There is a larger proportion
of heterosexual teachers who prey on girls than of homosexual teachers
that prey on boys. Should we get rid of all male teachers? If someone
can’t stand the thought of a gay teacher than should the gay teacher not
be allowed to teach or should the person learn to stand it. Or not
discriminate even if they can’t stand it.
Female reporters are allowed into male locker rooms.
Do minority groups deserve preferences because other members of their
group have been discriminated against?
Do people in minority groups deserve preference because they have
suffered from past discrimination?
Problem with discrimination: it is hard to get out of it.
Criteria of Desert
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Egalitarianism (page 329) Equality of opportunity – What does equality of opportunity mean?
Can we give everyone an equal opportunity.
Effort – Is each according to their effort just? How do we know if
someone is really trying as hard as they could? What if their
project is a failure? Should they be rewarded as much as a
person that has a successful project? What about grades?
Should someone that tries really hard but fails every test get an ‘A’
for effort? Do employers care about effort?
Need – page 335
Achievement – does improvement count? Generally, is the
student able to master the material?
Justice
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Justice and impartiality – stalkers, when can
you shoot at someone?
The veil of ignorance – distributive justice –
Rawls
Rawls
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Rawls argues that he has a theory wherein he can provide the framework for a just
society. In A Theory of Justice, he claims a just society can be established by a
unanimous consensus of players, because each player is to vote for the framework
of their society behind a veil of ignorance. According to Rawls, each and every
single rational person will use a maximin approach with regard to their decisionmaking strategies. The maximin rule states that all rational individuals will always
avoid the worst possible outcome if there is a possibility of grave danger. Rawls
claims this strategy would not be employed for every decision an individual would
make but that it would certainly apply when the worst possible outcome is a lifetime
of abject poverty, death, or a dire situation for future generations of your family. If
we did not know what our lot in life would be behind the hypothetical veil of
ignorance, we would be just to everyone (because we could be anyone) – the
theory is that I would be in favor of women’s rights, etc...because I wouldn’t know if
I would be a women or not. I would be in favor of protecting the disadvantaged
because I might be the disadvantaged. Rawls calls his justice distributive justice.
Nozick
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Contrast with Nozick:
Nozick gives a very famous (infamous?)Wilt Chamberlain example to show that
freedom of transfer makes equality, as well as any end-state theories, impossible
to achieve.
“Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate
attraction...He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game,
twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him...The
season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy their
tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty five cents of their admission price
into a special box with Chamberlain’s name on it...Let us suppose that in one
season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain ends up
with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than
anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income? Is this new distribution D2, unjust?”
Nozick
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Nozick argues that the only way to enforce D1 is to forbid voluntary
exchanges. I should also mention Nozick’s argument about side
constraints. He writes, “...the stronger the force of an end-state
maximizing view, the more powerful must be the root idea capable of
resisting it that underlies the existence of moral side constraints.” He
points out that each of us are distinct individuals that are not resources for
others. If anyone wishes to dispute this particular side constraint then
they must choose from three alternatives. (1) he must reject all side
constraints; (2) he must produce a different explanation of why there are
moral side constraints rather than simply a goal-directed maximizing
structure, an explanation that doesn’t itself entail the libertarian side
constraint; or (3) he must accept the strongly put root idea about the
separateness of individuals and yet claim that initiating aggression
against another is compatible with this root idea.
Nozick and Rawls
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There are criticisms of argument that voluntary exchange is always moral
and only voluntary exchange is more. Some critics also question his use
of the term voluntary because he argues that force and fraud are
prohibited but exploitation and misunderstood contracts are ok.
Nozick also confronts Rawls argument that we are all just winners or
losers of some natural lottery. Rawls has argued that talent is
undeserved, thus why should people that win the natural lottery fare
better than those that don’t? Rawls even goes on to say that people that
cultivate their talents have probably learned to cultivate them through
some sort of natural lottery (good parents, natural abilities, and so forth.)
Nozick and Rawls
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Nozick disagrees with Rawls. He writes:
“This line of argument can succeed in blocking the
introduction of a person’s autonomous choice and
actions (and their results) only by attributing everything
noteworthy about the person to certain sorts of
‘external’ factors. So denigrating a person’s autonomy
and prime responsibility for his actions is a risky line to
take for a theory that otherwise wishes to buttress the
dignity and self – respect of autonomous beings.”