by Scott Soames
If the remuneration [for one’s efforts] did not correspond to the value that the product of a man’s efforts has for his fellows, he would have no basis for deciding whether the pursuit of a given object is worth the effort and risk.9
The market will generally offer for services of any kind the value they will have for those who benefit from them.10
It is not clear that this is defensible. In (relatively) free societies, income is correlated with the amount of money people (in the aggregate) are willing to pay those who provide goods and services they desire. Because of this, one imagines that if (i) the income needed to offer workers to produce social goods of equal value were always themselves equal, (ii) each individual were a reliable judge of what was truly valuable to him or her, and (iii) total social good were a simple aggregate of all individual good, then a general correlation between income and value to society might be both normatively desirable and roughly achievable in a free society. But (i) is likely to be false, (ii) is doubtful, and (iii) may be hard to establish.
To see the implausibility of (i), imagine two things, widgets and gidgets, the social value of which to a community are large but equal. Although individuals in the community need just one of each, many workers are capable of making widgets but very few are capable of making gidgets. Since it is necessary to offer a larger financial incentive to attract the needed gidget-makers away from other possible pursuits than it is to attract the needed widget-makers, the income of the former will exceed that of the latter, despite the fact that what each produces is of equal social value.11
In the case of (ii), it seems clear that most of us—myself included—are not terribly reliable judges about what is best for us. Many decisions we make turn out to be counterproductive. Sometimes this is so because we are ignorant of the means needed to achieve our ends. At other times it is so because of our misguided or insecure grasp of what our own most important ends really are—i.e., of what, ultimately, would be best for us. This all-too-human ignorance doesn’t mean we should turn our decisions over to others. In most cases, no one else knows what, all things considered, is better for us than we do ourselves, and no one cares about maximizing our good as much as we do. Regarding (iii), it goes without saying that no philosopher-king knows this about any of us, let alone how to maximize the aggregate good for all. In light of this, it is hard to see how the proposition that in a just society one’s income, and other material rewards, should correspond to the amount of social good for which one is responsible could ever be established.
The best conclusion for one who, like Hayek, prizes liberty is the one drawn by Robert Nozick (1938–2002): there is no rule determining the just distribution of income or wealth to individuals based on their needs, their merit, the value of their contributions, their efforts, or on any combination of these, or similar, factors.12 There can be no such rule because liberty subverts patterns. In any society that values liberty—including the liberty to dispose of assets to which one is entitled, without harming or coercing others—there will be many ways of legitimately acquiring, losing, or transferring material advantages which, when allowed to operate, will subvert any distributive norm.
As Nozick observes, the total set of material holdings at any one time results from activities in which
some persons receive their marginal products [the amount generated by the work they do], others win at gambling, others receive a share of their mate’s income, others receive gifts from foundations, others receive interest on loans, others receive gifts from admirers [or inheritances from relatives], others receive returns on investments, others make for themselves much of what they have, others find things, and so on.13
Because of this variety, there is no way to normatively correlate wealth and income with any foreseeable set of social characteristics. Suppose, for reductio, that some distributive norm DN is correct. Suppose the distribution of wealth and income satisfies DN at time t, and so is just; everyone is entitled to his or her material possessions at t. Being entitled, each is free to use or dispose of them—to devote them to oneself, to feed one’s passion for gambling, to donate them to causes one supports, to give them to loved ones, or to invest for profit. Since each is entitled to act in these ways, those who gain from the transactions—whether oneself or others—are entitled to what they get. Although this may produce a new distribution that violates DN, the way the new distribution arose guarantees that it must be just, thereby falsifying DN. In short, no distributive norm can be accepted without rejecting either (a) that one is free to use or dispose of what one is entitled to in ways that don’t harm or coerce anyone, or (b) that one who receives assets in this way from one entitled to them thereby becomes entitled to them. Since Hayek accepts (a) and (b), he should accept Nozick’s conclusion.14
Nozick illustrates his point in the following famous passage of his book. He begins by assuming that some norm D1 of just distribution is correct.
Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams.… He signs the following sort of contract with a team. In each home game, 25 cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him.… [P]eople cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate 25 cents of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain’s name on it.… [I]t is worth the price of admission to them.… [I]n one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income? Is this new distribution D2 unjust? If so, why? There is no question about whether each of the people was entitled to the control over the resources they held in D1.… Each … chose to give 25 cents of their money to Chamberlain.… If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with), isn’t D2 also just? … Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice?15
JOHN RAWLS: A THEORY OF JUSTICE
The reception of Rawls’s 1971 classic in the social sciences and in analytic philosophy was far greater than that of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. In philosophy there was nothing to match it in the previous 100 years. Its enthusiastic reception was due in part to a decades-long eclipse of influential normative inquiry in analytic philosophy that Rawls helped bring to an end, and in part to the philosophical support he lent the dominant ideology of the liberal welfare state.16 But mostly, the reception was due to the erudition and argumentative effort he marshaled to support that vision.
Rawls saw modern society as an intricate web of social cooperation from which we all benefit enormously, when measured against life outside society in a Hobbesian or Lockean state of nature. Since we are all moral equals and everyone depends on the cooperation of others, Rawls reasoned, each of us should have equal weight in establishing the fundamental rules allocating the burdens imposed by social cooperation and the benefits resulting from it. The most important of these were, he thought, rules governing the scope of individual liberties and the distribution of wealth. Because the rules must be backed by force, limiting one’s liberty to act in one’s own interest, they must be justified in ways agents would endorse. Thus, he searched for rules allocating benefits and burdens that would be unanimously adopted by rational, self-interested agents in a fair decision procedure.
The rules he arrived at are (i) and (ii), with (i) given priority over (ii).
(i) Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for all.
(ii) Primary goods like wealth and income (which are advantageous no matter whatever else one may want) are to be distributed throughout the population to maximize the position of the least advantaged members of society, and to be derived from offices and positions filled by fair competition under conditions of equality of opportunity.
Rawls’s attempt to derive (i) and (ii) rests on a conception of a fair procedure for
deciding the terms of our shared social contract. It would, he thinks, be unfair for one to insist on terms favoring oneself due to anything one doesn’t deserve. Since no one antecedently deserves one’s biologically inherited traits (good or bad), or characteristics arising from one’s (fortunate or unfortunate) childhood and adolescent environment, it would, Rawls thinks, be unfair for those who are ambitious, energetic, intelligent, creative, industrious, artistic, kind, honest, talented, or attractive in any socially desirable way, to bargain for a social contract rewarding these things. Why, after all, should others who are, through no fault of their own, ranked low on these dimensions agree to such a deal? Lacking the social capital needed to bargain with those who have more to bring to the deal, these less fortunately endowed agents would have little choice but to accept the terms dictated to them. Although this might lead to an agreement of sorts, it would not, Rawls thinks, arise from a fair decision procedure, and so would not yield fair and neutral principles of justice by which everyone could be expected to live.17
This conception of fairness leads him to pose the problem of justice as one in which agents in “the original position” deliberate the terms of a social contract behind a veil of ignorance without knowing any particular facts about themselves.
We want to define the original position so that we get the desired solution. If a knowledge of particulars is allowed, then the outcome is biased by arbitrary contingencies.… If the original position is to yield agreements that are just, the parties must be fairly situated and treated equally as moral persons. The arbitrariness of the world [e.g., of biological and environmental factors that lead individuals to have different qualities] must be corrected.18
Somehow we must nullify the effects of specific contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage. Now in order to do this I assume that the parties are situated behind a veil of ignorance.… [N]o one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of his psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism … I assume that the parties do not know the particulars of their own society.… [T]hey do not know its economic or political situation, or the level of culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original situation have no information as to which generation they belong.… [T]he only particular facts the parties know is that their society is subject to the circumstances of justice [e.g., that there are scarce resources and that social cooperation is needed to exploit them].… [T]hey [also] know the general facts about human society … the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology.19
The obvious upshot is the exclusion of all characteristics that distinguish one person from another. This transforms Rawls’s decision-making process from what is sometimes described as a social task in which real people try to find mutually acceptable terms of interaction into the solitary task of a rational, self-interested, genderless, Kantian cipher choosing a social future despite knowing nothing about itself except that it is member of a species described by certain scientific laws. Having purified the agent, Rawls believes that whatever rules it chooses must be just because the decision procedure used to derive them is fair.
Two further abstractions are imposed. Rawls requires his rational, self-interested agent, or agents, to be free of envy, and of any concern, positive or negative, for the welfare of others. Envy is excluded because agents in the original position are assumed to be rational, and rationality tells us that envy makes one worse off.20 The exclusion of affection for others is more complex.
Once we consider the idea of a contract theory it is tempting to think that it will not yield the principles we want unless the parties are to some degree at least moved by benevolence.… [But] the combination of mutual disinterest and the veil of ignorance achieves the same purpose as benevolence. For this combination of conditions forces each person in the original position to take the good of others into account.21
This may seem puzzling. Although those in the original position don’t know what they will most value when they enter society, they nevertheless seek to maximize their acquisition of primary goods, which are assets that will allow them to advance whatever their ultimate ends turn out to be. This—apart from any concern for or against the well-being of others—is the only concern guiding their choice.
The assumption of mutually disinterested rationality, then, comes to this: the persons in the original position try to acknowledge principles which advance their system of ends as far as possible. They do this by attempting to win for themselves the highest index of primary social goods, since this enables them to promote their conception of the good most effectively whatever it turns out to be. The parties do not seek to confer benefits or to impose injuries on one another; they are not moved by affection or rancor. Nor do they try to gain relative to each other; they are not envious or vain.… [T]hey strive for as high an absolute score as possible.22
How are agents in the original position forced to take the good of others into account? There is one, almost trivial, sense in which they must. Since they have no idea who they will be once the veil of ignorance is lifted, they cannot afford to ignore the good of anyone in the societies they are considering, lest they risk ignoring their own good. Still, I think Rawls has more in mind. He attaches great importance to the fact that those in the original position are presumed to be capable of a sense of justice.23
[The presumption] means that the parties can rely on each other … to act in accordance with whatever principles are finally agreed to. Once principles are acknowledged the parties can depend on one another to conform to them … their capacity for a sense of justice insures that the principles chosen will be respected.… If a conception of justice is unlikely to generate its own support [i.e., if a society organized around it wouldn’t win the allegiance of its citizens] … this fact must not be overlooked.… [The parties] are rational in that they will not enter into agreements they know they cannot keep, or can do so only with great difficulty.… Thus in assessing conceptions of justice the persons in the original position are to assume that the one they adopt will be strictly complied with.24
In short, Rawls assumes that agents in the original position would not choose any principles that would, if implemented, be widely rejected or disregarded by real self-interested people who know their interests and the social positions they occupy.
This constraint supplies two potential sources of support for the contention that those in the original position must take a robust interest in the good of others. First, if Rawls is right that deliberation in the original position represents an ideally fair procedure, then those in the original position will recognize the principles of justice they choose as fair. They will, for that very reason, believe that each citizen in a society organized around the principles will be able to see that his or her own good is protected to the maximum degree consistent with justice. Second, since those in the original position know the laws of human psychology, they know how zealously human beings promote their own interests, while also realizing how attached parents and children, husbands and wives, and friends and loved ones can be. Thus, those in the original position won’t select rules obedience to which would require citizens to forswear vigorous attempts to advance themselves or to severely restrict their ability to benefit those who are near and dear in order to benefit unknown strangers.
Given all this, we now turn to Rawls’s argument that his two principles would be chosen in the original position. The chief competitor to his principles ranks societies by average possession of primary goods; the more the better. This competitor can seem attractive if one judges the likelihood one will end up at or near the median to
be greater than the likelihood one will be among the least advantaged. Nevertheless, Rawls believes agents in the original position won’t opt for societies with greatest average utility. Knowing nothing about how likely they are to end up in any social category, and nothing about the wealth of the society they will enter, or the liberties it recognizes, they can’t rule out the possibility that the least well off may be desperate, even if life at the median is comfortable. In addition to crippling poverty, those at the bottom might have no liberty.25 They might also have descendants to worry about. Rawls remarks on “the desire to have one’s decision [in the original position] appear responsible to one’s descendants who will be affected by it.”26
We are more reluctant to take great risks for them than for ourselves; and we are willing to do so only when there is no way to avoid these uncertainties; or when the probable gains, as estimated by objective information, are so large that it would appear to them irresponsible to have refused the chance offered even though accepting it should actually turn out badly.27
Thus, Rawls imagines, agents in the original position would seek to guarantee their liberty and maximize their welfare, even if they turn out to occupy the lowest levels of society.28
Finally, he returns to the idea that the principles adopted in the original position must be ones we could honor no matter what social circumstances we find ourselves in.
[The parties] cannot enter into agreements that may have consequences they cannot accept.… A person [in the original position] is choosing once and for all the standards which are to govern his life prospects … there is no second chance. Moreover, when we enter an agreement we must be able to honor it even should the worst possibilities prove to be the case.29
