Basic structure and the value of equality

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 321-355

  Julius, A J ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644898061     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2003.00321.x     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ig71), p. 7.
2. G. A. Cohen, "Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice," Philosophy & Public Affuirs 26 (1997): 3-30;
3. Liam Murphy, "Institutions and the Demands of Justice," Philosophy 6 Public Afairs, 27 (1998): 251-91.
4. One defense from which I learned is Thomas Pogge, "On the Site of Distributive Justice: Reflections on Cohen and Murphy," Philosophy C Public Affuirs 29 (2000): 137-69;
5. I am also indebted to Pogge's earlier development of a Rawlsian basic structure view in his Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 15-47.
6. The opposition between deontological and teleological or consequentialist ethical views does not offer a notably stable or informative map of many of the disagreements that are routinely referred to it. So I should mention that it will not really do any work in my arguments. I will argue for a version of the view that parties to social interaction treat one another unfairly unless they aim for equality, and that fair treatment in interaction is their reason to aim for equality. Some people think that people should aim for equality only because it is a better outcome (cf. Derek Parfit, "Equality or Priority?" in The Ideal of Equality, ed. Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams [Hampshire: St. Martins Press, 20001).
7. If you think that these two views are incompatible, and that it is helpful to mark their opposition with the labels of "deontology" and "teleology," that's great. But don't worry if you disagree. (You might disagree, for example, if you define teleological views as holding that you can represent right action as maximizing some real-valued function of humanly alterable variables, and if you think that interactive fairness is a possible argument of such a function.) I am using "deontology" as a convenient conventional label for the view that I defend, and I will not directly pit that view against the claim that equality is to be sought because it is a better outcome.
8. In this respect I echo arguments of Pogge, Realizing, pp. 20-28
9. Charles Beitz, Political Theory und International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979) I PP. 143-53.
10. I will discuss distributive justice in the distribution of unspecified goods, without prejudice among alternative ways of filling in that blank. The distributive principle that I defend, a version of Rawls's difference principle, is egalitarian and not prioritarian in the following sense of that distinction: Egalitarian judgments of the justness of distributions make ineliminable reference to the relative positions of pairs of people; prioritarian views do not. (If these judgments can be represented by comparing the values of functions, prioritarian judgments can be represented by functions that are additively separable in individual good levels, and egalitarian judgments cannot;
11. see John Broome, Weighing Goods: Equality, Uncertainty and Time [Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991], pp. 177-84.) In undertaking to account for the value of equality, then, I plan to account for such relativity-regarding judgments, but not for the rightness of "levelling down," since I don't think that it is right.
12. The label of dualism is due to Murphy, "Institutions," p. 254.
13. Cohen, "Action"; earlier installments are G. A. Cohen, "Incentives, Inequality, and Community," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 13, ed. Grethe B. Peterson, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), pp. 263-329
14. G. A. Cohen, "The Pareto Argument for Inequality," Social Philosophy and Poky 12 (1995): 165-85;
15. later page references for Cohen's "Incentives" are to its reprinting in Equal Freedom, ed. Stephen Darwall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 331-97.
16. These deeply resistible assumptions about the organization of production in a just society are, for Cohen, argumentative concessions to the defenders of wage differentials; in Section IX I briefly consider how the picture changes when we revoke them.
17. John Rawls, "The Basic Structure as Subject," in Political Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 268-69;
18. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 53-54, 60-62.
19. As I have said in Section I, I do not claim to be defending any of Rawlsk views. But I have conceded that externalization is an important Rawlsian commitment, and I have announced that I am abandoning that idea in my own arguments about basic structure. So it might seem that to group my arguments with Rawls in any way is to misappropriate Rawls;
20. I should explain why I suppose that I am still in the same neighborhood. I believe that Rawls's preoccupation with basic structure reflects not one but at least two distinct moral ideas. One idea is externalization. A second is the thought that social structures constituting societywide distributional mechanisms give rise to a set of sui generis obligations binding on the people who inhabit them, and that justice or a big, self-contained piece of justice consists in the satisfaction of those obligations. I am going to work on the second of these ideas. See Section V for a further attempt to locate the contrast between them.
21. I am not going to elaborate the ways in which choice and context might justify framing;
22. I will argue that both kinds of justification necessarily fail in respect of the socially interdependent framing to which I turn next in the text, so for my purposes it does not matter how these suggestions are fleshed out.
23. Justification under this constraint resembles in one way Thomas Scanlon's contractualist justification of moral principles (What We Owe to Each Other) [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)). Scanlonian people are to look for principles that no one can reject who is herself looking for such principles. The latter proviso on rejection is grounded on the assumption that everyone is interested in finding principles for the general regulation of behavior; the constraint that I am discussing has as its narrower foundation the assumption that everyone must justify using her interaction with others to produce goods for herself.
24. Thomas Nagel, "Equality," in his Mortal Questions (New York Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 23.
25. This set need not exhaust the physically and social-structurally limited range of possible structures. As I will mention in Section V, we might need to throw out some possible structures because they fail other requirements of justifiable framing.
26. For convenience I cast it in terms of a requirement of equality rather than the maximin defended in N, but the section's arguments are general to a larger class of egalitarian requirements including both.
27. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (NewYork Basic Books, 1974), p. 223;
28. compare Dennis McKerlie, "Equality," Ethics 106 (1996): 274-296.
29. See Nagel, Equality and Partiality, pp. 99-102;
30. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 1-3.
31. McKerlie, "Equality," p. 285.
32. Nozick, Anarchy, pp. 185-86.
33. Nozick, Anarchy, pp. 189-97.
34. Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), pp. 234-54.
35. Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (New York Cambridge University Press, 2000).
36. Cohen's admission of an individual prerogative in the context of his incentives argument ("Incentives," p. 370) was prompted by criticism from Samuel Scheffler, and follows Scheffler's more general proposals for "an agent-centered prerogative" in Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (New York Oxford University Press, 1982).
37. Cohen, How Come?, pp. 151-52;
38. Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3-4. Murphy offers this observation of complacency in a discussion of beneficence, not justice.
39. Cohen, How Come?, p. 150;
40. Murphy, "Institutions," p. 282, n. 73.
41. Murphy, "Institutions,"p p. 290-91.
42. Cf. Murphy, Moral Demands, p. 98.
43. Murphy, "Institutions," p. 281.
44. See especially Pogge, "Reflections," pp. 149-52;
45. Andrew Williams, "Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998), pp. 225-47.
46. A reviewer for this journal points out that this objection does not get started if strict equality is replaced as the distributive ideal by some weaker prioritarian goal. For then the ideal tax structure will preserve some inequality, so that under it there exist strictly worseoff people whose interests give skilled workers reason to work long hours. I suppose that this way out is open to Cohen, but it considerably lowers the stakes in his critique of Rawls.
47. Cohen, "Incentives," pp. 339-47,355-72.
48. Pogge ("Reflections," p. 150) reaches a similar interpretation of Cohen's proposal and objects to it on grounds related to those given in the next paragraph of the text.