When justice matters

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 433-459

  Schmidtz, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34250338234     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/511734     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. For example, a Mercator Projection makes Greenland look as big as Africa, when the latter in fact is fourteen times bigger. Such a map will be useful to a seasoned navigator, but to someone more naive, it could be altogether misleading. This does not mean Mercator Projections are wrong, exactly. They are distorted in ways that matter for some users with some purposes. By contrast, a map depicting South America as round would simply be wrong.
2. Citations in the text, except where otherwise noted, are to Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
3. Barry asks, "What if the vested interests own the media, finance the hired guns such as [Charles] Murray, and fill the airport bookshelves with superficially authoritative books?" (235). Superficially? Curious to see what Barry considers deeply authoritative, I checked the citations in the chapter from which this quotation is drawn. There are twenty-five. The first is the aforementioned mention of Murray. Fourteen are to Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? (New York: Basic, 2003), Barry's source for the tip that Murray is the hired gun of a right-wing conspiracy. One reference is to the New York Times. Three references are to a work of political satire called The Little Book of New Labour Bollocks. And six references are to the Guardian. Overall, nineteen of the book's twenty chapters cite the Guardian. In a book with thirty-seven pages of notes, many of them statistical references, I find no references to the U.S. Census Bureau or any country's comparably reputable statistical bureau. I find two references to sources commonly deemed authoritative: one to U.S. Department of Education statistics on the percentage of students in nonsectarian schools; another from the U.S. Department of Justice on the increasing prison population. Regarding media bias, obviously there is some. Just as obviously it is neither systematic nor one-sided. We all have a full menu: from the National Review to the Guardian, or more respectably, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times.
4. Barry starts one chapter by saying, "I shall lay out the facts, as I have come to understand them, in the next chapter. These are the basis for well-founded fears, and those who belittle them are liars" (243).
5. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-221, Income in the United States: 2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003), table A-1.
6. Another way in which, as Barry sees it, things are getting worse is that families are fragmenting. Why? One suggestion (for which I thank Elizabeth Willott): land has become far less valuable compared to forms of "new property" such as job skills, to a point where a prospect of inheriting the farm no longer counts as a reason to stay home, so we don't. We move to where our job skills are worth the most.
7. Class is a structural characteristic in a caste society and was so in Europe. In North America, by contrast, income quintiles are nothing but a matter of convenience for statisticians. Nothing requires today's Americans to remain in a particular town, a particular occupation, or a particular income range, or to abstain from seeking higher education. The rigid class structure Marx observed in nineteenth-century Europe is not a feature of twenty-first-century North America.
8. To his credit, Barry acknowledges that Marx's view that a socialist Utopia would not need a robust liberal respect for individual rights was a recipe for the horrors of Stalin and Mao (22-23). What robust individual rights does Barry have in mind? Barry has a chapter called "Rights and Responsibilities," but I found no answer there. One of that chapter's few references to rights mentions "the reeking hypocrisy of the rhetoric about rights carrying personal responsibilities" (147), leaving me doubting that Barry's conception of rights and mine have much in common. I am not saying that Barry does not believe in individual rights. I suspect he does, and I accept at face value his stated wish to dissociate himself from Stalin and Mao, but he does not say how he would do so in concrete terms.
9. John Rawls says that "even though justice has a certain priority, being the most important virtue of institutions, it is still true that, other things equal, one conception of justice is preferable to another when its broader consequences are more desirable" (A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971], 6).
10. Henry Shue, "Global Environment and International Inequality," International Affairs 75 (1999): 531-45, 532.
11. A negative externality, sometimes called a spillover cost, is the part of an action's cost that affects bystanders. To internalize externalities is to minimize the extent to which bystanders have to bear the costs of other people's choices.
12. This paragraph is a digest of Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic, 1984), 110-11.
13. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
14. I do not deny that many situations are like Trolley in some respect. We sometimes actively put people at risk in the hope of saving others. Suppose that soldiers are sent on a dangerous rescue mission. (They are conscripts, they did not volunteer for the mission, and they are subject to court-martial if they disobey.) Less like Trolley, but more common, are situations where we choose between rescuing a larger number or a smaller number. However, I don't mean to soften the claim made above: everyday experience is more like Hospital than like Trolley. In the real world (has there ever has been an exception to this rule?) a doctor who kills one to save five is not straightforwardly choosing between maximizing utility and respecting rights but is instead ignoring that hospitals presuppose a rule of law: they work only when patients can count on doctors to understand that it is not a doctor's place to decide whether to kill the few for the sake of the many.
15. Barry seems more sanguine about letting people choose narcotics. The "legalization of marijuana in the United States and taking a public health rather than a punitive approach to other drugs, would have the prospect of halving the prison population all by itself; the United States has more people in jail on drug offenses than all those in jail in western Europe on all offenses put together" (220). The issue is too complex for me to take any position with confidence, but surely Barry is right to insist we can do better than we are doing now in coping with the drug traffic.
16. Between 1900 and 2001, life expectancy for whites rose 63 percent, from 47.6 to 77.7 years. Life expectancy for blacks rose 119 percent, from 33.0 to 72.2 years. National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "Death is on the decline for babies, adults, and older people alike, with AIDS, homicide, cancer, and heart disease all claiming fewer lives." National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC, as reported by the Associated Press, September 16, 2002. (For up-to-date figures, try http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/.) Undeniably, the persisting difference between 77.7 and 72.2 years matters. Just as undeniably, it matters relatively little next to the difference between 33.0 and 72.2. (For a discussion of the more complex question of what has been happening at the twentieth income percentile, see the chapter on "Equality and Opportunity," in Schmidtz, Elements of Justice.)
17. Elizabeth S. Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337, 288.
18. Ibid., 288.
19. Ibid., 306.
20. Gerald F. Gaus, Political Concepts and Political Theories (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 143.
21. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3.
22. Ibid., 15-16.
23. David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 144.
24. David Schmidtz, "How to Deserve," Political Theory 30 (2002): 774-99. For the most recent version of this material, see the chapter on "Deserving a Chance," in Schmidtz, Elements of Justice.
25. As Jeremy Waldron observes, the point of the money "was to mark - with something that counts in the United States - a clear public recognition that this injustice did happen, that it was the American people and their government that inflicted it, and that these people were among its victims" ("Superseding Historic Injustice," Ethics 103 [1992]: 4-28, 7).
26. See Linda Radzik, "Making Amends," American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2004): 21-42, for further discussion.