Equality, priority, and positional goods

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 471-497

  Brighouse, Harry ^a   Swift, Adam ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745457685     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/500524     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. From the now extensive literature, see esp. D. Parfit, "Equality or Priority?" and
2. Larry Temkin, "Equality, Priority and the Levelling Down Objection,"
3. both in The Ideal of Equality, ed. M. Clayton and A. Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 81-125 and 126-61;
4. H. G. Frankfurt, "Equality as a Moral Ideal," Ethics 98 (1987): 21-43,
5. repr. in his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 134-58;
6. Roger Crisp, "Equality, Priority, and Compassion," Ethics 113 (2003): 745-63;
7. Larry Temkin, "Egalitarianism Defended," Ethics 113 (2003): 764-82.
8. The view that the worse off, or worst off, should have priority admits of much further specification, some of which may be set out by contrasting Rawls's difference principle with other variants of the Priority View. First, although Parfit's seminal discussion presents the difference principle as prioritarian, the Priority View holds that benefiting a person matters more the worse off she is absolutely, whereas Rawls's difference principle contains irreducible reference to relativities. For Rawls it is because they are worse off than others that benefits to the worse off matter more, whereas on the Priority View the value of the benefit depends only on how badly off they are in absolute terms. This creates scope for terminological confusion: some regard the ineliminability of relativities on the Rawlsian view as grounds for deeming that view 'egalitarian'. We prefer to restrict the term 'egalitarian' to those, like Temkin, who believe there is value in equality that gives us reason to level down, on which construal neither the difference principle nor the Priority View are egalitarian. Second, the difference principle urges us to maximize the absolute position of the worst off, but it seems more plausible to regard the claims of the worst off as particularly weighty without their being that weighty. The Priority View, while holding that benefits are more valuable the worse off someone is, more modestly leaves open the issue of how much more valuable they are. For this last point, see Parfit, "Equality or Priority?" 101.
9. For the state of the art, see the five papers in Economics and Philosophy 19 (2003).
10. F. Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 175.
11. In this book, the fullest discussion of positional goods and their economic significance, Hirsch distinguishes between goods that are positional because they are physically scarce (like Old Masters and natural landscapes) and those whose scarcity is social (like desirable jobs and social status). Among the socially scarce positional goods he distinguishes those that bring satisfaction precisely because they are scarce (snob value) and those that bring satisfaction as a consequence of their intrinsic character but are such that how much satisfaction they bring is influenced by how many others have or are pursuing them. Most of our analysis focuses on the last kind of good, but much of it is relevant to the other kinds of positional good Hirsch is concerned with. See 28-50, esp. 50. Although much discussed by economists, positional goods have been somewhat neglected by philosophers. For notable exceptions, see J. Lichtenberg, "Consuming Because Others Consume," Social Theory and Practice 22 (1996): 273-97;
12. M. Hollis, "Education as a Positional Good," Journal of Philosophy of Education 16 (1984): 235-44,
13. and "Positional Goods," Philosophy 18 (1984): 97-110.
14. A. Wertheimer, "The Equalization of Legal Resources," Philosophy & Public Affairs 17 (1988): 303-22.
15. T. Scanlon, "The Diversity of Objections to Inequality," in his The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 202-18, 205.
16. Here we are discussing cases where fair competitions are better than unfair ones in being better for at least some of the competitors. We thus set aside the ways in which fair competitions might be valuable for others (e.g., spectators may be better off watching a fair race than an unfair one).
17. For the view that, in the case of opportunities for the development of merit, it is not reasonable to define a fair chance as an equal chance, see E. Anderson, "Rethinking Equality of Opportunity," Theory and Research in Education 2 (2003): 99-110, 106. Anderson, however, is not conceiving those opportunities in competitive terms and would thus presumably deny that the goods instrumental to them are subject to the case for leveling down which appeals to the value of a fair competition. If, as we suggest, egalitarian thinking is particularly at home in competitive contexts, then clearly a good deal is likely to turn on which contexts are conceived in competitive terms.
18. David Estlund, "Political Quality," Social Philosophy and Policy 17 (2000): 127-60,
19. repr. in his Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 175-212 (page numbers are to Democracy).
20. R. K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions," in his Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1968), 73-138.
21. Similarly, there are various reasons why abolishing expensive private schools in the United Kingdom might tend to improve the absolute quality of the education of those in the state sector (e.g., peer group effects or increased funding owing to the inclusion of the affluent) ; see A. Swift, How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (London: Routledge Falmer, 2003).
22. S. Bowles and H. Gintis, "The Inheritance of Inequality," Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (2002): 3-30, 17.
23. For a useful assembling of current research on this issue, see S. Bowles, H. Gintis, and M. Osborne-Groves, eds., Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
24. R. Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality (London: Routledge, 1996);
25. Michael Marmot, The Status Syndrome (New York: Times Books, 2004). We simplify their thesis here for dialectical purposes; we shall present a more complex account in Sec. VII.
26. B. Frey and A. Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Well-Being (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
27. R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
28. Scanlon, "The Diversity of Objections to Inequality," 204.
29. We focus on this article on the adverse effects of inequality on those who have less rather than more of the goods that are unequally distributed. Of course it may also be that inequality has adverse effects on those who have more of them. Presumably, if material inequality deprives people of the good of living in a society characterized by fraternal or solidaristic social relationships, then that loss is suffered as much by the rich as by the poor.
30. Indeed, the intrinsic value of a person's education may depend in a positive-sum rather than zero-sum way on the extent to which other people are educated. See M. Hollis, "Positional Goods," Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 19 (1984): 97-110, who calls this "horizontal positionality." A person's ability to enjoy playing cricket depends on there being a range of other people who can play roughly as well as he does and is even enhanced by there being many around who are better than him but still willing to play against him. One's enjoyment of literature is enhanced by the existence of others who are educated in the relevant traditions and depends on there being some who excel at the execution of, and others who excel at critical reflection on, the arts. And so on.
31. R. Arneson, "Against Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity," Philosophical Studies 93 (1999): 77-112;
32. M. Clayton, "Rawls and Natural Aristocracy," Croatian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2001): 239-59.
33. This follows as long as b is given any weight at all relative to - and not only lexical priority over - a within the principle. For Rawls's own uncertainty about according it lexical priority, see John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 163.
34. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 356-63;
35. H. Brighouse, "Political Equality injustice as Fairness," Philosophical Studies 86 (1997): 155-84.
36. Estlund, "Political Quality," 179.
37. Estlund, "Political Quality," Ibid., 181.
38. Estlund, "Political Quality," Ibid., 182.
39. Estlund disagrees. In his view, "departures from fairness are not always unfair" and "a procedure is unfair only if it wrongly departs from fair procedure" (Estlund, "Political Quality," ibid., 186).
40. He concedes that his politically inegalitarian scheme "is not internally fair since extra influence can be bought by those who can afford it. But it is not unfair, and it is a fair procedure to have if the improvement it brings in the epistemic value of the procedure would be acceptable to all in a fair hypothetical choice procedure" (Estlund, "Political Quality," ibid., 187). For us, it is unfair if those with more resources can use them to increase their chances of winning the election, or the legal case - even if that is justified by the fact that the inequality in input brings with it also greater total input, thereby increasing the likelihood of achieving the independently right result. Fairness would be achieved by distributing the same total amount of resources equally - and the absence of such a distribution is, for us, an unfairness.
41. Marmot, The Status Syndrome, esp. chaps. 6 and 7.
42. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 133.
43. It would then become interesting to consider the extent to which middle-class parenting practices are as they are because they have the effect of improving children's chances of future reward, as opposed to being simply "different," with future rewards as an unintended by-product. This distinction is central to Swift's analysis of justifications for sending one's children to unusually goods schools in How Not to Be a Hypocrite.
44. See J. A. Maantay, "Zoning, Equity and Public Health," in Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease, ed. R. Hofrichter (San Francisco: Wiley, 2003), 228-50,
45. cited in B. Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Oxford: Polity, 2005).
46. For Cohen's critique, see G. A. Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
47. For discussion, see L. Murphy, "Institutions and the Demands of Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998): 251-91;
48. A. Williams, "Incentives, Inequality and Publicity," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998): 226-48;
49. David Estlund, "Liberalism, Equality, and Fraternity in Cohen's Critique of Rawls," Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 99-112;
50. T. Pogge, "On the Site of Distributive Justice: Reflections on Cohen and Murphy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000): 137-69;
51. and A.J.Julius, "Basic Structure and the Value of Equality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 321-55.
52. We are talking here specifically about distributive justice, which we equate with fairness. On other conceptions of justice - e.g., where a person is treated unjustly if a right of hers is violated - then there may be justice grounds for permitting distributive injustice. For example, if a parent has the right to pursue her children's interests to some reasonable extent, justice may require that she be permitted to pursue those interests even at the cost of creating a distributive injustice (or unfairness) between those children and others. On this analysis, it will of course be crucial what weight considerations of distributive justice are to be given relative to these other justice considerations.
53. Williams, "Incentives, Inequality and Publicity," rightly objects that Cohen's extending the site of distributive justice beyond the basic structure to individual motivations and actions deprives it of the valuable property of publicity. We accept both that it is valuable for citizens to live by, and know each other to be living by, public rules and that there will be insuperable difficulties in knowing precisely what justice demands of us as individuals, especially in the absence of assurance that others are acting justly. Neither of these considerations, however, seems to us reason to reject the view that individual motivations and actions are, in principle, susceptible to judgments of justice. For us, publicity is a condition of legitimacy rather than of distributive justice, and even in the absence of the information that would be needed precisely to identify what distributions are just, there are surely cases where an individual has grounds for judging that she is receiving greater (or lesser) benefits than she would were benefits distributed justly.
54. G. A. Cohen, "Incentives, Inequality and Community," in Equal Freedom, ed. Stephen Danvall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 302-3;
55. Estlund, "Liberalism, Equality, and Fraternity in Cohen's Critique of Rawls."