If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich?

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 4, Issue 1-2, 2000, Pages 1-26

  Cohen, G A ^a  

^a ALL SOULS COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Egalitarianism; Equality; Justice; Marxism; Weakness of will

Indexed keywords

EID: 73949126258     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1009836317343     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Or, to express the question under the refinements of it that are introduced in Section 3below: "Since you're an egalitarian, how come you think it's OK for you to be so rich?" (what chiefly exercises me is the apparent inconsistency of the beliefs held by rich people who really do believe in egalitarianism). For criticisms of an earlier version of this paper, I thank John Baker, David Bakhurst, Brian Barry, Paul Boghossian, Paula Casal, Miriam Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Keith Graham, Betsy Hodges, Susan Hurley, David Miller, Liam Murphy, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, Guido Pincione, Joseph Raz, John Roemer, Michael Seifert, Horacio Spector, Chris Sypnowich, Hillel Steiner, Larry Temkin, Peter Vallentyne, Frank Vandenbroucke, Robert Van der Veen, Alan Wertheimer, Martin Wilkinson, Bernard Williams and, above all, Arnold Zuboff, with whom I spent many instructive (for me) hours arguing about these matters.
2. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 657.
3. For a fuller statement of that Rawlsian view, see section III of my "Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997), pp. 3-30. That article is largely given over to a refutation of the stated view.
4. That last question is related to the question about the demands of justice on individuals in an unjust society, but not identical with it, since there exist non-egalitarian conceptions of justice (which will not here be discussed) and non-justice justifications of equality (two of which are noticed in Sections 5 and 6 below). [The questions are also different in that mine asks what a belief (egalitarianism) commits its holder to, while the question about the demands of justice in an unjust society does not take that form.]
5. I do not mean that there is nothing which her egalitarianism should prompt her to do. Perhaps she should work politically for more equality: that suggestion will not be investigated here, but the second sentence of Section 7 below introduces a distinction that bears on it.
6. I do not myself think that: see Section 3 below.
7. I here set aside "egalitarians," if there can be such, who get their money through exploitation, fraud, and so forth.
8. Someone might ask me: "If you're the egalitarian who wrote 'If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?', how come you're so rich?
9. See footnote 3 above.
10. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
11. A rejection of Kagan's position follows from the remarks on consequentialism in the final paragraph of section 6 below.
12. In recent years, British Conservative propagandists have had a field day deriding Labour leaders who have appeared not to practise the (massively watered-down but still somewhat) egalitarian principles that they preach. In April of 1996 the Tories went so far as to put out a board game, called Hypocrisy! (price £19.99), in which, for example, you gain three hypocrisy points for sending your child to a grammar (that is, selection by merit) school. See The Guardian, April 30, 1996, p. 3.
13. Labour politicians are made of the same human clay as socialist professors. Unfortunately - politics being what it is - they are less well placed than professors are to acknowledge the possibility of a gap between their principles and their practice. This is no doubt one reason why they have recently striven to deform those principles: see my "Back to Socialist Basics," New Left Review, 207 (1994), which is reprinted in Jane Franklin (ed.), Equality (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977), where it is followed by a sharp reply ("Forward to Basics") by Bernard Williams, to which I hope to publish a counter-reply.
14. I don't say that I can imagine no answer to the caller's question. Maybe this would have been a good answer to it: "The people's party should be funded by the people, not by millionaires (even if it is quite proper for millionaires to serve in the people's party's cabinet).
15. David Lodge, Small World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 127-129.
16. See"A Pleafor Excuses," inhis Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 146.
17. See R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), Chapter 3.
18. It may be that only a minority of rich egalitarians would profess this belief. What fascinates me is that many intelligent and reflective ones do profess it.
19. Strictly, then, my question is: "Since you're an egalitarian, how come you think it's OK for you to be so rich?" To give that question an especially sharp edge, imagine a poor person posing it: see Sections 3 through 11, and especially p. 274 of my "Incentives, Inequality, and Community," in Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume XIII (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), pp. 261-329.
20. That question might be a good response to a question which is not ours, to wit: If you're so rich, how come you're an egalitarian?
21. For an excellent treatment of the difference between justice-based and non-justice- based justifications of equality, see David Miller, "Equality and Justice," Ratio 10 (1997), pp. 222-237.
22. You might regard a society where 99 people have 1.09 each and one person has 10 as more divided than one in which 98 people have 1 each and each of two have 10, because no one is so isolated in the second society as the sole rich person is in the first: a self-sacrificing rich donor might make his society more like that first one than it was.
23. What is perhaps a variant of the division defence was suggested to me (in jest) by Nicholas McBride: "I hate inequality because I hate the attitudes it engenders, and, in particular, an attitude of contempt for the poor on the part of the rich. But since I, ex hypothesi, hate and lack that contempt, there is no call for me to give my money away.
24. In an extreme variant of this justification for personal inaction, the rich egalitarian says -I have often heard this said - "But I want everybody to have the sort of life I have." This variant need not detain us here. For either its proponent accepts that her view implies that equality is impossible, in which case that view falls outside our brief, which is to see whether those who believe that an egalitarian society is desirable and feasible have good reason not to engage in some do-it-yourself self-expropriation; or she projects future resource levels which belong to the realm of fantasy.
25. Note that this justification for greater equality is, in certain circumstances, a justification for (greater) inequality - when, for example, it is not possible for everyone to have a good life. This shows that it is not a justice justification of inequality, since no one could claim that the regressive procedures (such as making the quite miserable rather more miserable so that the nearly un miserable can be made un miserable) required to promote its aim in the contemplated circumstances serve justice.
26. Speaking more generally, that is, not about this defence of the rich egalitarian in particular, it amazes me how often some (sufficiently) rich member of an audience listening to this paper protests that, while he would be very happy to give a lot of money away, he is unclear what the best way to do it is, because he cannot tell, for example, which charity has the lowest administrative costs. The premiss of his resistance is sound, but his inference, that he therefore cannot reasonably act on his philanthropic wish, is absurd. Who would say: I'd love to go out to eat, but, since I can't tell which is the best restaurant, I'll stay at home? It is rational to go to any restaurant than which you judge none to be better, after a reasonable amount of reflection. When self-sacrifice is in the offing, people reject manifestly rational procedures that they do not hesitate to use when the advancement of self-interest is at stake.
27. A complication should be noted here. Rich egalitarians do not believe that they enjoy unblemished moral entitlement to their large holdings. But few of them think themselves as unentitled to their holdings as plain ordinary thieves and embezzlers are to theirs (in a just-or even in an unjust - society). If you acquire according to an unjust property law, it does not follow that you acquire unjustly, and the question whether you unjustly hold what you have acquired therefore lacks a straightforward answer. It matters to the egalitarian rich that they got what they have without violating the rules of the game they perforce face, but it also matters that they condemn those rules. "Perforce": recall the wonderful sentence that opens Karl Marx's summary statement of his theory of history: "In the social production of their life, men enter into relations that are indispensable and independent of their will" [A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1904), p. 11]. They cannot offer a plain "yes" or a plain "no" in answer to the question: do you have a right to your wealth? That complexity affects how they think about their behaviour, in subtle ways that need more consideration than I have as yet been able to devote to this aspect of our topic.
28. Some might think that one should abstain from benefiting from injustice even when that self-denial would benefit no one, but I am not here addressing the breast-beating position, according to which it is wrong to be rich when others are poor, even if the only way to rectify the situation is to burn one's money. Our rich egalitarians are not being asked to engage in counter-Paretian behaviour.
29. The excuse/justification distinction is explained at the end of Section 3 above.
30. Specification of a principle of equality is not the same as a statement of the reason for affirming it, which is an issue that I did raise, in Section 4 above.
31. The qualification is necessary because one might believe that, in some areas, including this one, the moral truth is itself imprecise (even if it is not as imprecise as non-philosophical statements about these matters typically are).
32. For a masterful treatment of the contrasts and connections between these egali-tarianisms, see Derek Parfit's Lindley Lecture on "Equality or Priority" (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1991).
33. Their position is the one that I sketch in "Incentives, Inequality, and Community," pp. 266-270.
34. I here report Dworkin's response to a query that I pressed.
35. See Ronald Dworkin, "What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources," Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981), pp. 285ff.
36. On the distinction between causal and normative fundamentality, see my Self- Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Chapter 8, Section 2.
37. Compare Oscar Wilde's case for equality: "The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody" [The Soul of Man under Socialism (London: Journeyman Press, 1988), p. 1].
38. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 265-268.
39. Many people, including, notably, John Rawls, would deny that a society which functions under egalitarian state legislation is one in which people are forced to give (unilaterally), rather than forced to share a collective product in an equalizing way. But I stand with Nozick and against Rawls on this matter (see my Self-Ownership, Chapter IX, Section 5), and Nagel does not disagree with Nozick on this particular score.
40. The redistribution defended by Nagel falls short of the full egalitarian prescription, on any interpretation thereof, but what matters in our discussion of Nagel is the contrast between state-imposed and voluntary redistribution, on whatever scale may be regarded as appropriate.
41. "Libertarianism without Foundations," in J. Paul (ed.), Reading Nozick (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), pp. 199-200, my emphases.
42. Recall the distinction invoked at p. 8 above between moral weakness and weakness of will.
43. For elaboration of this point, see Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 249-250 [I do not agree with everything Narveson says there, and certainly not with his preposterous charge that Nagel's "moral imagination [has] been reduced to pudding" (p. 249)].
44. "Costly" and "difficult" overlap in ordinary language: the distinction that I draw here is a quasi-technical one, got by focussing on those uses of the relevant words in which they are not semantically interchangeable with each other. See my Karl Marx's Theory of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 238-239.
45. The evident truth that a desirable job for a given person must be neither too difficult nor too easy for him proves that difficulty and cost [which is by definition (in itself) undesirable] are entirely distinct, conceptually. If difficulty were, as such, a form of cost, then, other things equal, one would always want the job that is least difficult. But of two jobs whose other costs are indeed equal, one wants one of optimal difficulty, that is, of a difficulty neither too great nor too small, rather than one of the least difficulty.
46. At any rate if we prescind from the complication noticed five paragraphs ahead ("Difficulty ⋯").
47. For people, that is, who can reasonably deny that, in declaring that it is this costly for them, they are confessing to a contemptible, and, therefore, unjustifiable, degree of selfishness: recall that we must avoid the misinterpretation of Nagel that I tried to deflect at pp. 22-23 above.
48. I mean that the concepts that I have isolated are frequently confused. This point is independent of that made in footnote 42, that the corresponding words are often used interchangeably.
49. Schematically: the prospective money cost CAUSES difficulty in decision which CAUSES an extra cost (in the process of decision itself).
50. I supply a fuller, but still incomplete, treatment of the "rich egalitarian" problem in If You 're An Egalitarian, How Come You 're So Rich?, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2000.