Beyond choice: Rethinking the post-Rawlsian debate over egalitarian justice

Political Theory

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 36-67

  Stark, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

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EID: 0036101434     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591702030001003     Document Type: Review

References (100)

1. Jonathan Wolff, "Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos," Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1998): 110.
2. G. A. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics 99 (1989): 907. Or as Arneson characterized it in his latest version, his "equal opportunity principle distinguishes between sheer good or bad luck that rains on a person in ways that are beyond his power to control and good or bad luck that individuals enjoy as they voluntarily pursue life choices." See Richard Arneson, "Equality of Opportunity for Welfare Defended and Recanted," Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 492.
3. G. A. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics 99 (1989): 907. Or as Arneson characterized it in his latest version, his "equal opportunity principle distinguishes between sheer good or bad luck that rains on a person in ways that are beyond his power to control and good or bad luck that individuals enjoy as they voluntarily pursue life choices." See Richard Arneson, "Equality of Opportunity for Welfare Defended and Recanted," Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 492.
4. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," 923.
5. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 38.
6. Because of their more blended use of concepts of choice, Cohen and Sen in particular claimed to be neither resource- nor welfare-egalitarians, but rather to be advancing hybrid theories. Such claims, I note, have not convinced Dworkin, who believed Cohen's theory was simply welfare-egalitarianism "by another name," and that Sen's either "collapses into equality of welfare" or is "identical with equality of resources," depending on how one interprets it. As Dworkin put it, the "failure of these two [approaches] to establish genuine alternatives to [resource- and welfare-egalitarianism] suggests that the distinction between those two conceptions is a particularly deep one." See Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 286. For my purposes, though, it does not much matter whether Dworkin was mistaken about this. Assume he was. Even so, what distinguishes Cohen and Sen, as well as Arneson, from the most robust resource-egalitarians on one hand and the most unreconstructed welfare-egalitarians on the other hand is principally where, in Dworkin's apt phrase, they draw the " 'cut' between choice and luck" (Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 289). My discussion does not deny that there may be a spectrum of positions between the two poles. But I do claim that the problem - a problem which I suggest a way to resolving - is that differences between egalitarian philosophers, in their own self-conceptions, so frequently seem to come down to the question of where to draw the choice-luck cut. As for Dworkin himself, he distinguished himself from Cohen and Sen precisely because they "draw the chance/choice distinction differently from the way I do" (Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 289).
7. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," 934.
8. Arthur Ripstein, Equality, Responsibility, and the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 268.
9. Ripstein, Equality, Responsibility, and the Law, 268, 271.
10. Elizabeth Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 327.
11. Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?" 331.
12. Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?" 329, 330.
13. Notably, in a recent response to Anderson, Richard Arneson advanced a theory "responsibility-catering prioritarianism" (RCP) - that (1) also turns away from equality, in that what matters on RCP is whether an individual is badly off by some "objective" measure of welfare, but otherwise "involves no commitment whatsoever to the idea that it is morally desirable . . . that everyone's condition be equal": and (2) then reimports "choice," as he put it, in that those who are responsible for their being badly off by this objective measure have a smaller claim on social resources than those who are not responsible. See Richard Arneson, "Luck Egalitarianism and Prioritarianism," Ethics 110 (2000): 340.
14. Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
15. Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
16. Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1995), 65.
17. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," 914.
18. Eric Rakowski, Equal Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 109.
19. John E. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 238; see also Ian Shapiro, "Resources, Capacities and Ownership: The Workman Ideal and Distributive Justice," Political Theory 19 (1991), 62.
20. John E. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 238; see also Ian Shapiro, "Resources, Capacities and Ownership: The Workman Ideal and Distributive Justice," Political Theory 19 (1991), 62.
21. Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, 19.
22. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, 238-39.
23. Radin, Contested Commodities, 93.
24. Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 218.
25. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York, Basic Books, 1983), 6-11.
26. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 7; see also Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 13. I also do not mean to suggest that participants in the post-Rawlsian tradition have never themselves mentioned the importance of the social construction of goods. Scanlon has, for example, and so at one point has Dworkin with his principle of abstraction, although he generally relies much more extensively on what he called the "key distinction between chance and choice" (T. M. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 655-69; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 147, 287). But while such occasional arguments are supportive of the aims of my project - which is to offer a way of reconceiving the entire structure of the post-Rawlsian debate over egalitarian justice - they do not accomplish it. At most such arguments take the form of piecemeal interventions that help support one side in only one of the four debates; my purpose here is to show how the entire set of four - which no participant has described as anything but, at rock bottom, a contest over the boundaries of individual choice versus chance - can actually be totally reconceived as a debate over the social construction of goods. Subsuming Scanlon's and Dworkin's more explicit discussions of social goods, I also situate - within a reconceived structure - a far greater number of arguments whose assumptions about the social construction of goods are implicit or isolated, making those assumptions explicit and drawing out the connections between them. In so doing, I try to show the whole structure of egalitarian debate to be about something other than is commonly thought.
27. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 7; see also Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 13. I also do not mean to suggest that participants in the post-Rawlsian tradition have never themselves mentioned the importance of the social construction of goods. Scanlon has, for example, and so at one point has Dworkin with his principle of abstraction, although he generally relies much more extensively on what he called the "key distinction between chance and choice" (T. M. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 655-69; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 147, 287). But while such occasional arguments are supportive of the aims of my project - which is to offer a way of reconceiving the entire structure of the post-Rawlsian debate over egalitarian justice - they do not accomplish it. At most such arguments take the form of piecemeal interventions that help support one side in only one of the four debates; my purpose here is to show how the entire set of four - which no participant has described as anything but, at rock bottom, a contest over the boundaries of individual choice versus chance - can actually be totally reconceived as a debate over the social construction of goods. Subsuming Scanlon's and Dworkin's more explicit discussions of social goods, I also situate - within a reconceived structure - a far greater number of arguments whose assumptions about the social construction of goods are implicit or isolated, making those assumptions explicit and drawing out the connections between them. In so doing, I try to show the whole structure of egalitarian debate to be about something other than is commonly thought.
28. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 7; see also Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 13. I also do not mean to suggest that participants in the post-Rawlsian tradition have never themselves mentioned the importance of the social construction of goods. Scanlon has, for example, and so at one point has Dworkin with his principle of abstraction, although he generally relies much more extensively on what he called the "key distinction between chance and choice" (T. M. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 655-69; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 147, 287). But while such occasional arguments are supportive of the aims of my project - which is to offer a way of reconceiving the entire structure of the post-Rawlsian debate over egalitarian justice - they do not accomplish it. At most such arguments take the form of piecemeal interventions that help support one side in only one of the four debates; my purpose here is to show how the entire set of four - which no participant has described as anything but, at rock bottom, a contest over the boundaries of individual choice versus chance - can actually be totally reconceived as a debate over the social construction of goods. Subsuming Scanlon's and Dworkin's more explicit discussions of social goods, I also situate - within a reconceived structure - a far greater number of arguments whose assumptions about the social construction of goods are implicit or isolated, making those assumptions explicit and drawing out the connections between them. In so doing, I try to show the whole structure of egalitarian debate to be about something other than is commonly thought.
29. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 7; see also Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 13. I also do not mean to suggest that participants in the post-Rawlsian tradition have never themselves mentioned the importance of the social construction of goods. Scanlon has, for example, and so at one point has Dworkin with his principle of abstraction, although he generally relies much more extensively on what he called the "key distinction between chance and choice" (T. M. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 655-69; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 147, 287). But while such occasional arguments are supportive of the aims of my project - which is to offer a way of reconceiving the entire structure of the post-Rawlsian debate over egalitarian justice - they do not accomplish it. At most such arguments take the form of piecemeal interventions that help support one side in only one of the four debates; my purpose here is to show how the entire set of four - which no participant has described as anything but, at rock bottom, a contest over the boundaries of individual choice versus chance - can actually be totally reconceived as a debate over the social construction of goods. Subsuming Scanlon's and Dworkin's more explicit discussions of social goods, I also situate - within a reconceived structure - a far greater number of arguments whose assumptions about the social construction of goods are implicit or isolated, making those assumptions explicit and drawing out the connections between them. In so doing, I try to show the whole structure of egalitarian debate to be about something other than is commonly thought.
30. As Rakowski (Equal Justice, 110) put it, for full-fledged resource-egalitarians, "differences in effort should be classified with differences in endowments as instances of bad brute luck." Rawls - in a passage that has been subjected to numerous interpretations (see, e.g., Thomas Pogge's careful discussion in Realizing Rawls [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989], 65-86) - most famously denies that "a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities . . . for his character depends in large part on fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit" (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971], 104). Of course, for Rawls, this principle's implications for resource-egalitarian redistribution are mitigated by others, such as the difference principle and his own conceptions of moral desert, primary goods, and self-ownership - but there is little doubt that Rawls believes that abilities, including effort-making ability, are matters of luck, not choice.
31. As Rakowski (Equal Justice, 110) put it, for full-fledged resource-egalitarians, "differences in effort should be classified with differences in endowments as instances of bad brute luck." Rawls - in a passage that has been subjected to numerous interpretations (see, e.g., Thomas Pogge's careful discussion in Realizing Rawls [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989], 65-86) - most famously denies that "a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities . . . for his character depends in large part on fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit" (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971], 104). Of course, for Rawls, this principle's implications for resource-egalitarian redistribution are mitigated by others, such as the difference principle and his own conceptions of moral desert, primary goods, and self-ownership - but there is little doubt that Rawls believes that abilities, including effort-making ability, are matters of luck, not choice.
32. George Sher, Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 31-32; see also David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 7.
33. George Sher, Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 31-32; see also David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 7.
34. Ronald Dworkin, "Equality of Resources," Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981): 206-7.
35. Allen Buchanan, "Equal Opportunity and Genetic Intervention," Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 109.
36. Roemer's recently-advanced theory of "equality of opportunity" rests, likewise, on a distinction between coarse-grained/substitutable and fine-grained/nonsubstitutable views of social goods. Instead of operating at the coarse-grained level of "census-like" classes or "major categories," Roemer divided both abilities and the ability to exert abilities - effort - far more fine-grainedly into "types" and "centiles." In lieu of talking about job holders, he spoke of black male steelworkers and white female college professors. And, at this fine-grained level - the level at which Roemer believed it is most appropriate to interpret the goods in question - individuals' abilities (including their effort-making abilities) do not substitute for one another. Hence, some form of social compensation is mandated. See John E. Roemer, Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13.
37. Mikiro Otsuki, "Criteria for Distributive Equity: Characterization in Terms of Share Value," Journal of Economic Theory 71 (1996): 532-57.
38. Terrence E. Daniel, "A Revised Concept of Distributional Equity," Journal of Economic Theory 11 (1975): 94-109.
39. Don Herzog, "Envy: Poisoning the Banquet They Cannot Taste," Wicked Pleasures: Meditations on the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 149.
40. Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?", 294. Dworkin, likewise, expanded the scope of his own version of resource-egalitarianism by arguing that the "envy principle" should apply to "more abstract" rather than "less abstract" goods, which is why his auctioneer seeks bids on goods conceived (for example) as "iron ore" rather than "steel," or as "undeveloped land" rather than "fields of wheat." See Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 151-52.
41. Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?", 294. Dworkin, likewise, expanded the scope of his own version of resource-egalitarianism by arguing that the "envy principle" should apply to "more abstract" rather than "less abstract" goods, which is why his auctioneer seeks bids on goods conceived (for example) as "iron ore" rather than "steel," or as "undeveloped land" rather than "fields of wheat." See Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 151-52.
42. To speak of resources that an individual "wants" is not to smuggle in welfarist criteria here; as Dworkin put it, "equality of resources is understood to include some plausible version of the envy test." Resource-egalitarians can (and indeed must) look to individual wants in determining what entities in the world count as resources, and they stay away from welfarist notions as long as they refuse to make the equal satisfaction of those wants - as opposed to the equal provision of resources - their sine qua non. See Dworkin, "Equality of Resources," 312.
43. Radin, Contested Commodities, 93; Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 218.
44. Radin, Contested Commodities, 93; Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 218.
45. Anthony Kronman, "Talent Pooling," NOMOS XIII: Human Rights, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 59, 65-66, 68.
46. See Peter Vallentyne, "Self-Ownership and Equality: Brute Luck, Gifts, Universal Dominance and Leximin," Ethics 107 (1997): 326.
47. John Rawls, "Reply to Alexander and Musgrave," Quarterly Journal of Economics 88 (1974): 654.
48. Barbara Fried, "Wilt Chamberlain Revisited: Nozick's 'Justice in Transfer' and the Problem of Market-Based Distribution," Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995): 244.
49. Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 5.
50. G. A. Cohen, "Incentives, Inequality and Community," Tanner Lectures on Human Values 13 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 289, 296.
51. R. A. Musgrave, "Maximin, Uncertainty, and the Leisure Trade-Off," Quarterly Journal of Economics 88 (1974): 632.
52. Musgrave, "Maximin, Uncertainty, and the Leisure Trade-Off," 632.
53. Indeed, this must be the sense in which the abilities tax is more constraining than the income tax, since in one respect the reverse is the case. While the abilities tax requires the individual to work remuneratively a certain amount regardless of whether she wants to, taking the resulting income in a lump sum, beyond that point, she can keep all that she earns - meaning that at the margin, the abilities tax no longer even "influences" her work-leisure choices. By contrast, while the income tax does not require the individual to work remuneratively any particular amount, it necessarily exerts an influence over all work-leisure choices at the margin.
54. Andrew Levine, "Fairness to Idleness: Is There a Right Not to Work?" Economics and Philosophy 11 (1995): 253.
55. Levine, "Fairness to Idleness," 262, 264.
56. See, e.g., Andrew Williams's (modified) defense of resource-egalitarian redistribution against the "slavery of the talented" critique, which relied on an assumption that leisure is substitutable with other goods, such as beauty and income, in a way Levine denied (Andrew Williams, "Resource Egalitarianism and the Limits to Basic Income," Economics and Philosophy 15 [1999]: 101-2).
57. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, 319.
58. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, 321.
59. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, 322.
60. Ronald Dworkin, "Equality of Welfare," Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981): 229.
61. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," 923.
62. Rakowski, Equal Justice, 57.
63. Rakowski, Equal Justice, 59.
64. Rakowski, Equal Justice, 59; Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 661.
65. Rakowski, Equal Justice, 59; Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 661.
66. Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 13.
67. Dworkin, "Equality of Welfare," 202-3.
68. Dworkin, "Equality of Resources," 300.
69. Dworkin, "Equality of Welfare," 242-43.
70. Dworkin, "Equality of Welfare." 239.
71. Dworkin, "Equality of Resources," 299.
72. See also Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1990), 78.
73. Radin, Contested Commodities, 93; Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 218.
74. Radin, Contested Commodities, 93; Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 218.
75. Dworkin, "Equality of Welfare," 243.
76. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 661.
77. Gregory S. Kavka, "Disability and the Right to Work," Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992): 278-80.
78. Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, 43, 69.
79. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 655; see also Robert E. Goodin, "The Priority of Needs," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1985): 623.
80. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 655; see also Robert E. Goodin, "The Priority of Needs," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1985): 623.
81. This is not to deny that the question of how best to construct a particular good - as coarse-grained or fine-grained - will often be the source of strenuous debate. Scanlon, for example, considered a hard case - religion - asking whether it is something an individual "might or might not happen to have." "In our society," he wrote, some people are concerned with religion, others are not. Yet the claims of one's religious preferences not to be interfered with are thought to have a special urgency. But would this be so if it were not thought that religion or something like it has a central place in anyone's life? To which Cohen tellingly responded, We have to be careful about the level of generality at which interests are individuated. Faced with the putative counter-example of religion, Scanlon regresses to a higher level of generality: he says we think religion merits certain forms of protection because "religion or something like it" has a central place in anyone's life. . . . But . . . I cannot see what thing relevantly similar to religion appears in every normal person's life. What is at issue here between Cohen and Scanlon - what determines whether society has any obligations with respect to the good in question - is precisely how coarse- or fine-grainedly we should construct "religion." Cohen construed it in a more fine-grained ("individuated") way, as religion per se - as something people might or might not happen to have had - whereas Scanlon conceived it more coarse-grainedly as broader ("general") spiritual fulfillment - as something with a "central place" in people's lives. See Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 655-56; Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," 940-41.
82. This is not to deny that the question of how best to construct a particular good - as coarse-grained or fine-grained - will often be the source of strenuous debate. Scanlon, for example, considered a hard case - religion - asking whether it is something an individual "might or might not happen to have." "In our society," he wrote, some people are concerned with religion, others are not. Yet the claims of one's religious preferences not to be interfered with are thought to have a special urgency. But would this be so if it were not thought that religion or something like it has a central place in anyone's life? To which Cohen tellingly responded, We have to be careful about the level of generality at which interests are individuated. Faced with the putative counter-example of religion, Scanlon regresses to a higher level of generality: he says we think religion merits certain forms of protection because "religion or something like it" has a central place in anyone's life. . . . But . . . I cannot see what thing relevantly similar to religion appears in every normal person's life. What is at issue here between Cohen and Scanlon - what determines whether society has any obligations with respect to the good in question - is precisely how coarse- or fine-grainedly we should construct "religion." Cohen construed it in a more fine-grained ("individuated") way, as religion per se - as something people might or might not happen to have had - whereas Scanlon conceived it more coarse-grainedly as broader ("general") spiritual fulfillment - as something with a "central place" in people's lives. See Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 655-56; Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," 940-41.
83. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 665.
84. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," 655-56.
85. Jeff McMahan, "Cognitive Disability, Misfortune, and Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996): 5.
86. Larry Alexander and Maimon Schwarzschild, "Liberalism, Neutrality, and Equality of Welfare v. Equality of Resources," Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 99.
87. The criteria of substitutability and coarse-/fine-grainedness are not, of course, entailed by welfare-egalitarianism; they merely are not inconsistent with it and so remain available for welfare-egalitarianism to enlist. As Dworkin noted, We must be careful to distinguish . . . the compromise of a principle from its contradiction. A compromise reflects the weight of some independent and competing principle; a contradiction is a qualification that reflects instead the denial of the original principle itself. The question . . . is: Can the principles of equality of welfare be compromised . . . in such a way as to block the initially counter-intuitive results of that principle, like the proposition that people with champagne tastes should have more resources? Or is any qualification capable of barring those results rather a contradiction that concedes the final irrelevance of the principle? Dworkin, who did not consider the criteria of substitutability and coarse-grainedness, insisted on the latter. Those criteria, however, clearly fall into the category of "compromise," not "contradiction," and so, to use Dworkin's words, would not require welfare-egalitarians to "abandon" their theory. See Dworkin, "Equality of Welfare," 229.
88. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 139; and M. Rickard, "Sour Grapes, Rational Desires, and Objective Consequentialism," Philosophical Studies 80 (1995): 200.
89. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 139; and M. Rickard, "Sour Grapes, Rational Desires, and Objective Consequentialism," Philosophical Studies 80 (1995): 200.
90. George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker, "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum," American Economic Review 67 (1977): 76-90; and Serge-Christophe Kolm, Justice et equite (Paris: CNRS, 1971).
91. George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker, "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum," American Economic Review 67 (1977): 76-90; and Serge-Christophe Kolm, Justice et equite (Paris: CNRS, 1971).
92. TylerCowen, "The Scope and Limits of Preference Sovereignty," Economics and Philosophy 9 (1993): 256.
93. Kolm, whose views resemble Stigler-Becker's in an interesting way, focused not on the constancy of an individual's tastes over time but on the identity of tastes over individuals. "Fundamentally," in Kolm's view, "all individuals have the same needs, the same tastes and the same desires" - meaning, at least at this "fundamental" level, that there can be no such thing as adaptive tastes, tastes which different individuals tailor to their differing resource constraints (I here borrow Roemer's translation in Theories of Distributive Justice, 185). Again, what matters for my purposes is not whether it is the individual (as with Stigler-Becker), human beings more universally (as it is for Kolm), or & dialogue between them that lies at the root of tastes for goods so conceived; what matters is the possibility that in any given society a particular good might be constructed in this way - a way in which the problem of sour grapes ebbs - just as it might be constructed in such a way that the problem of sour grapes emerges.
94. Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 108-16.
95. At the "coarse-structure[d]" level, Lancaster wrote, we concern ourselves with "broadly conceived goods such as 'food' [and] 'clothing' "; at the "fine-structure[d]" level, with more "differentiated products." See Kelvin Lancaster, Modern Consumer Theory (Brookfield, UK: Edward Elgar, 1991), 59.
96. Becker himself makes an explicit equation between his view and a vindication of welfarism. See Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 145-46.
97. Alexander Rosenberg, "Prospects for the Elimination of Tastes from Economics and Ethics," Social Philosophy and Policy 2 (1985): 67.
98. Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 220; Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, 322.
99. Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 220; Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, 322.
100. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 26.