Taking people as they are?

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 363-386

  Cohen, Joshua ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 1442306182     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2001.00363.x     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. References to Cohen's writings are included in the text: IIC: "Incentives, Inequality, and Community," in Grethe B. Peterson, ed., Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 13 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992);
2. WAI: "Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 26, no. 1 (1997): 3-30;
3. PAI: "The Pareto Argument for Inequality," Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 160-85;
4. IYE: If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
5. Cohen's most recent work focuses on these methodological questions. See his "Rescuing Justice From Constructivism" (manuscript, April 2001). My presentation here indicates one way that Quinean holism influences Rawls's argument for justice as fairness.
6. Standard responses to Cohen's criticisms (in the literature and in informal discussion) are of two kinds. One claim is that Rawls is right to restrict the application of the difference principle to institutions and policies and not to extend it to the social ethos or to individual preferences and attitudes (to the shape of the labor supply function), either because public institutions are the proper object of collectively chosen principles or because of the excessive informational demands of an unrestricted difference principle or because of the intrusive informational demands of such a principle. See Andrew Williams, "Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27. no. 3 (1998): 225-47;
7. Jonathan Wolff, "Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27, no. 2 (1998): 97-122. A second claim is that Cohen exaggerates the distance of his view from Rawls's, since Cohen acknowledges that at least some incentive demands are reasonable, and is committed to allowing that an even wider range is reasonable.
8. See David Estlund, "Liberalism, Equality, and Fraternity in Cohen's Critique of Rawls," The Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1998): 99-112.
9. Although I agree with the second claim, and think there is some force to the first, both lines of argument may leave the unfortunate suggestion that justice as fairness has no way, and perhaps needs no way, to respond to the kinds of intuitively objectionable incentive inequalities that I explore in section II. The same point applies to Thomas W. Pogge, "On the Site of Distributive Justice: Reflections on Cohen and Murphy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 29, no. 2 (2000): 137-69.
10. The argument for the difference principle sketched in this paragraph focuses on the idea that persons can reasonably expect to be treated by others with the respect owed to equals. Rawls claims that being treated with such respect fosters self-respect (it provides the "social basis" of self-respect), and that self-respect is a fundamental precondition for living a good life. These two claims together imply that being treated by others with respect is in a person's rational interest - that being treated with respect as an equal contributes to the person's good. This conclusion, in turn, enables Rawls to import any ethical argument about the treatment that persons can reasonably expect from others as elements of being treated with respect (for example, the argument for the difference principle briefly sketched in the text above) into the original position as an argument based on judgments of rational advantage made under ignorance. Thus, suppose we think that all members of a society are treated with respect as equals only if they are all treated in accordance with principle P. Then it is also true that being treated in accordance with P provides social support to self-respect, and therefore helps to ensure that each person lives well. The ethical argument is that adopting P is required to treat everyone with respect as an equal. The original position argument, then, is that P would be chosen under ignorance by persons concerned with their own good - and who are therefore concerned with their self-respect, and therefore with being treated with respect by others (which by hypothesis depends on adopting P). So the original position argument does not really model the ethical argument by presenting an independent argument about rational choice under ignorance; it assumes the force of the ethical argument, and uses it, while also making the additional substantive (and controversial) assumptions about the connections between respect from others, self-respect, and a person's good required to present it as a step in an argument about what is rationally advantageous.
11. For defense of such a duty on the grounds that the acknowledgment of it would benefit the least advantaged by eliminating the need for incentive inequalities, see Joseph H. Carens, "Rights and Duties in an Egalitarian Society," Political Theory 14, no. 1 (1986): 31-49.
12. Although probably not the right way, as the quotation from Rawls at the start of this essay indicates.
13. "Assessable" does not mean "alterable," much less that their alteration ought to be made a matter of public policy.
14. Although I focus on cases of Ascriptive Group Preferences, what matters, as the last sentence in the text indicates, is the assignment of negative weight, not that the groups are ascriptively, rather than, say, confessionally, defined.
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse, trans. Victor Gourevitch, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 184.
16. Of course, large dispersions are often condemned because of their effects on political equality or equality of occupational opportunity. I put those possibilities aside because those concerns are supposed to be covered in justice as fairness by the requirements of the fair value of political liberty and fair equality of opportunity.
17. Erin Kelly, ed., Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 66.
18. In this case, as in the others, the preferences of people who are paid incentives may be completely typical of the society. Indeed, preferences in the society may be completely uniform. What distinguishes the circumstances of those who get the incentives from those who do not may simply be that the former possess a scarce resource or talent.
19. John Rawls, Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 468, emphases added.
20. Williams, "Incentives," and Estlund, "Liberalism."
21. I suspect that people will generally agree, too, that incentive demands in Greedy / Needy cases are worse than such demands in cases of Class Preferences. I am grateful to Paula Casal for correcting an earlier draft on this point.
22. For a summary of the major empirical studies on labor supply elasticity for men, see John Pencavel, "Labor Supply of Men," in Orly Ashenfelter and Richard Layard, eds., The Handbook of Labor Economics, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1986), 3-102.
23. My translation from Rousseau's Lettres a Malesherbes, in J.-J. Rousseau, Ouevres completes, vol. 1, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1959), p. 1136.
24. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, p. 184, emphasis added.
25. In an excellent (and as-yet) unpublished paper, Roxanne Fay argues this point with considerable force. I have benefited greatly from reading her account and discussing it with her.
26. See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 16, on the differences that the different forms of democracy make. I am treating the two kinds of democracy as polar types, although of course they come in degrees.
27. Of course, a solidaristic ethos may explain both consensualism and greater equality.
28. Philippe Aghion, "Inequality and Economic Growth," in Aghion and Jeffrey Williamson, Growth, Inequality, and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 73.
29. For discussion of the issues in this paragraph, see Aghion, "Inequality," pp. 68-73,
30. and Richard Freeman and Lawrence F. Katz, ed., Differences and Changes in Wage Structures (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. the introduction by Freeman and Katz.
31. In the "Basic Structure," Rawls discusses these two kinds of reasons in sections IV and V, respectively. The second kind of reason, having to do with the effects of social arrangements on identity and culture, is not mentioned in Theory of Justice in the initial discussion of why the focus of the theory is the basic structure (see p. 7), although it is introduced later, at p. 229, in the account of justice and political economy. For discussion of the two distinct reasons, see Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, pp. 52-57.
32. Rawls, "Basic Structure," in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 269.
33. Theory of Justice, p. 125.
34. Theory of Justice, Ibid., p. 478.
35. Theory of Justice, Ibid., p. 470.
36. Restatement, p. 67.
37. Restatement, p. 67. Ibid.
38. Ibid, note 35.
39. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 269.
40. "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review, 64 (1997): 765-807.