Distributive justice and freedom: Cohen on money and labour

Utilitas

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 393-412

  Fabre, Cécile ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956340561     PISSN: 09538208     EISSN: 17416183     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0953820810000312     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia (Oxford, 1974), p. 169. I have argued elsewhere that Nozick is correct, at least within the constraints of a sufficientist theory of distributive justice: proponents of coercive taxation are committed to the (temporary) conscription of labour. But Nozick is not correct (in my view) in rejecting coercive taxation on those grounds.
2. SeemyWhose Body is it Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the Person (Oxford, 2006), esp. ch. 3.
3. Unless otherwise specified, all sources in the text and notes are to Cohen's works. The latter will be referred to as follows: History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford, 1988) - HLF;
4. Self-Ownership Freedom and Equality (Cambridge 1995) - SO;
5. If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're so Rich? (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) - If;
6. Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, Mass., 2008) - RJE.
7. On that count, he finds himself in good company: thus, Ronald Dworkin is thought, by some, to be guilty of similar bias. SeeM. Cohen Christofidis, 'Talent, Slavery and Envy in Dworkin's Equality of Resources', Utilitas 16 (2004), pp. 267-87.
8. See the works mentioned in n. 5, as well as 'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice', Ethics 99 (1989), pp. 916-44.
9. In that respect, Cohen agrees with both Scheffler and Nagel, who defend agents' personal prerogative not to enslave themselves to the worst-off. See S. Scheffler, Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford, 1988)
10. and T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford, 1991).
11. For a very interesting discussion of what counts as socially useful labour, see S. White, The Civic Minimum (Oxford, 2003), ch. 5.
12. J. Carens, Equality, Moral Incentives and the Market: An Essay in Utopian Politicoeconomic Theory (Chicago, 1981).
13. See T. M. Wilkinson, Freedom, Efficiency and Equality (Basingstoke, 2000), for a discussion of the informational constraints faced by egalitarians. According to Nir Eyal, there is a further problem with the ethical solution, to wit, that teaching individuals to behave in such thoroughgoing and all-encompassing altruistic ways would in all likelihood necessitate considerable levels of intrusion. I do not take a stand on this issue.
14. See N. Eyal, 'Poverty Reduction and Equality with Strong Incentives: The Brighter Side of False Needs', in J. Ryberg, T. S. Petersen and C. Wolff (eds.), New Waves in Applied Ethics (London, 2008), pp. 182-216.
15. For a highly sceptical view on this point, see P. Casal, 'Rawls, Cohen, Mill, and the Egalitarian Ethos', unpublished typescript.
16. For the claim, which I develop in the remainder of this section, that justice might well impose a duty to provide personal services to those in need, see R. Arneson, 'Property Rights in Persons', Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992), pp. 201-30.
17. For a critical discussion of Cohen's egalitarian ethos, and an interesting account of what a (less demanding) Rawlsian ethos would look like, see M. Titlebaum, 'What Would a Rawlsian Ethos of Justice Look Like?', Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008), pp. 289-322.
18. 'The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom', Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983), pp. 3-33, at p. 20.
19. As far as I can see, Cohen does not separate those two reasons in his text, but I take my interpretation to be an accurate reading of the relevant passage at RJE, 219.
20. For a discussion of the relationship between the Kantian requirement and the thesis of self-ownership, see H. Steiner, 'Self-Ownership and Conscription', The Egalitarian Conscience - Essays in Honour of G. A. Cohen, ed. C. Sypnowich (Oxford, 2006), pp. 88-101. Interestingly in the present context, Steiner argues that the thesis of selfownership is compatible with the view that one may conscript someone else's labour for the sake of preventing and redressing the violation of third parties' own self-ownership rights.
21. M. Otsuka, 'Freedom of Occupational Choice', Ratio 21 (2008), pp. 440-53.