by Daniel Bell
Second, if political bodies are composed entirely of corporate groups, what happens to numerical majority rule? Do the few larger corporate bodies outvote the smaller ones? The blacks, for example, one of the most disadvantaged groups in American society, make up about 11 percent of the population. In a few cities they are a majority, but these cities do not have sufficient financial resources for rehabilitation or improvement. The sociologist Herbert Gans has argued that no numerical majority will ever tax itself, or redistribute its wealth, to aid a minority, so that in a majoritarian society the lot of the blacks will never be greatly improved. In consequence, he argues that if equality is to be achieved, minority groups should be given special veto rights in the society.85 This is, in effect, the principle of the “concurrent majority” which John C. Calhoun sought before the Civil War to protect the Southern states from being outvoted by the North.86 It is also the logic behind the idea of “community control” over social resources, such as schools, housing, and the like. But is there, then, any wider social or public interest? If corporate or community groups are to control the decisions which affect their lives, by what right can one deny a Southern community the right to practice segregation? And if a local group vetoes the passage of a highway through its neighborhood, does it not thus impose a higher tax cost on its neighbors by insisting on this relocation?
The purpose of inclusive representation of all minorities is to reduce conflict, yet the history of almost all societies shows that when polities polarize along a single overriding dimension—be it class, religion, language, tribe, or ethnic group—there is bound to be violent conflict, and when there are numerous “cross-cutting” identities—in Holland, where there are both class and religious political parties, Catholic and Protestant workers divide so that neither religion nor class wholly captures a single allegiance—there is a greater degree of check and veto power in the society.87 In short, can the principle of quota representation in the polity, defined along communal or particularistic lines, escape either the polarization or the fragmentation of the polity, and the fate of ataxia for the society?
RAWLS AND FAIRNESS
If Rousseau sought equality of result for the sake of virtue, and Mill equal representation proportionate to one’s interest for the purpose of utility, the contemporary philosopher John Rawls wants to establish the priority of equality for reasons of justice. As he elegantly declares, “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” 88
What is justice? It cannot be the greatest good for the greatest number, for the price of those magnitudes may be injustice for the lesser number. It has to be a distributive principle for judging competing claims—i.e. the appropriate division of social advantages. For Rawls, this is justice as fairness,89 and the foundation of fairness rests, initially, on two principles:
First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all (p. 60).90
The first principle deals with equal liberties of citizenship—freedom of speech, vote, and assembly; eligibility for office; and so on. The second deals with social and economic inequalities—the distribution of income and wealth, differences in the degree of authority, and the like. It is with the second principle that we are concerned. The controlling terms in the propositions are the ambiguous phrases “to everyone’s advantage” and “equally open to all.” What do they mean?
Rawls’s argument is complex, yet lucid. “Equally open to all” can mean either equal in the sense that careers are open to the talented, or equal in the sense of “equality of fair opportunity.” The first simply means that those who have the ability and the drive are entitled to the place they have earned. This is the conventional liberal position. But Rawls notes that it does not account for the distortion by social contingencies. “In all sectors of society,” Rawls writes, “there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed.... Chances to acquire cultural knowledge and skills should not depend upon one’s class position, and so the school system, whether public or private, should be designed to even out class barriers” (p. 73).
The liberal principle accepts the elimination of social differences in order to assure an equal start, but it justifies unequal result on the basis of natural abilities and talents. For Rawls, however, “natural” advantages are as arbitrary or random as social ones. It is not “fair opportunity.” “There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.... The extent to which natural capacities develop and reach fruition is affected by all kinds of social conditions and class attitudes. Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances. It is impossible in practice to secure equal chances of achievement and culture for those similarly endowed, and therefore we may want to adopt a principle which recognizes this fact and also mitigates the arbitrary effects of the natural lottery” (p. 74).
Therefore, Rawls concludes that one cannot equalize opportunity, one can only bend it towards another purpose—the equality of result. “No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society. But it does not follow that one should eliminate these distinctions. There is another way to deal with them. The basic structure can be arranged so that these contingencies work for the good of the least fortunate. Thus we are led to the difference principle if we wish to set up the social system so that no one gains or loses from his arbitrary place in the distribution of natural assets or his initial position in society without giving or receiving compensating advantages in return” (p. 102).91
The question thus turns from “equally open to all,” i.e. the distribution of chances for place, to the distribution of primary social goods or values, i.e. to the meaning of “everyone’s advantage.” That latter phrase, for Rawls, can be defined in terms of either the “principle of efficiency” or the “difference principle.”
The efficiency principle is congruent with what welfare economics calls “Pareto optimality.” The allocation of goods or utilities is efficient when one reaches the point where it is impossible to change an existing distribution pattern so as to make some persons (even one) better off without at the same time making some other persons (at least one) worse off. A utilitarian principle, “Pareto optimality” is interested only in a range of choices and is indifferent to actual bargains. For Rawls the difficulty with the principle of efficiency is that, as a matter of fairness, it cannot specify who should be better off or not worse off.
The “difference principle” simply means that if some persons are to be better off, the lesser advantaged are also to be better off, and in some circumstances even more so. If one gains, so must the others. “The intuitive idea is that the social order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate” (p. 75).92
This leads Rawls to his more general conception of social justice, or the social ideal:
All social primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored (p. 303).93
For this reason, too, Rawls rejects the idea of a meritocracy. Although the meritocratic idea is democratic, it violates the conception of fairness:
The [meritocratic] social order follows the principle of careers open to talents and uses equality of opportunity as a way of releasing men’s energies in the pursuit of economic prosperity and political domination. There exists a marked disparity between the u
pper and lower classes in both means of life and the rights and privileges of organizational authority. The culture of the poorer strata is impoverished while that of the governing and technocratic elite is securely based on the service of national ends of power and wealth. Equality of opportunity means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind in the personal quest for influence and social position. Thus a meritocratic society is a danger for the other interpretations of the principles of justice but not for the democratic conception. For, as we have just seen, the difference principle transforms the aims of society in fundamental respects (p. 107).
The difference principle has two implications for social policy. One is the principle of redress for individuals:
This is the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress, and since the inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for. Thus, the principle holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social position. The idea is to redress the bias of contingencies in the direction of equality. In pursuit of this principle greater resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life, say the earlier years of school (pp. 100–101).
The second is the more general principle that talent is to be regarded as a social asset, and its fruits should be available to all, especially the less fortunate:
[The difference principle] transforms the aims of the basic structure so that the total scheme of institutions no longer emphasizes social efficiency and technocratic values. We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out (p. 101).
We have here a fundamental rationale for a major shift in values: Instead of the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his ability,” we have the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And the justification for need is fairness to those who are disadvantaged for reasons beyond their control.
With Rawls, we have the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialist ethic. In this redefinition of equality as equity, we can observe the development of a political philosophy which will go far to shape the last part of the twentieth century, just as the doctrines of Locke and Smith molded the nineteenth. The liberal theory of society was framed by the twin axes of individualism and rationality. The unencumbered individual would seek to realize his own satisfactions on the basis of his work—he was to be rewarded for effort, pluck, and risk—and the exchange of products with others was calculated by each so as to maximize his own satisfactions. Society was to make no judgments between men—only to set the procedural rules—and the most efficient distribution of resources was the one that produced the greatest net balance of satisfactions.
Today we have come to the end of classic liberalism. It is not individual satisfaction which is the measure of social good but redress for the disadvantaged as a prior claim on the social conscience and on social policy.94 Rawls’s effort in A Theory of Justice is to establish the principle of fairness, but he pays little attention, other than using the generic term “disadvantaged,” to who is to be helped.95 His argument is set in social contract terms, and his “constitution of justice” is a bargain agreed to by individuals. Yet in contemporary society, inevitably, the disadvantaged are identifiable largely in group terms, and the principle of equity has become linked with the principle of quota representation.
The claim for group rights stands in formal contradiction to the principle of individualism, with its emphasis on achievement and universalism. But in reality it is no more than the extension, to hitherto excluded social units, of the group principle which has undergirded American politics from the start. The group process—which was the vaunted discovery of the “realists” of American political science (see the discussion in Chapter 5)—consisted largely of economic bargaining between functional or pressure groups operating outside the formal structure of the party system. What we now find are ethnic and ascriptive groups claiming formal representation both in the formal political structure and in all other institutions of the society as well.
These claims are legitimated, further, by the fact that America has been a pluralist society, or has come to accept a new definition of pluralism rather than the homogeneity of Americanism. Pluralism, in its classic conceptions,96 made a claim for the continuing cultural identity of ethnic and religious groups and for the institutional autonomy of cultural institutions (e.g. universities) from politics. Pluralism was based on the separation of realms. But what we have today is a thoroughgoing politicizing of society in which not only the market is subordinated to political decision but all institutions have to bend to the demands of a political center and politicize themselves in group representational terms. Here, too, there has been another change. In functional group politics, membership was not fixed, and one could find cross-cutting allegiances or shifting coalitions. Today the groups that claim representation—in the political parties, in the universities, in the hospitals and the community—are formed by primordial or biological ties, and one cannot erase the ascriptive nature of sex or color.
And yet, once one accepts the principle of redress and representation of the disadvantaged in the group terms that were initially formulated, it is difficult for the polity to deny those later claims. That is the logic of democracy which has always been present in the ambiguous legacy of the principle of equality.
THE REDEFINITION OF MERITOCRACY
Any principle inevitably has its ambiguities, for no moral situation is ever clear-cut, particularly in the case of equal opportunity versus equal result, since the conflict is between right versus right, rather than right versus wrong. What, then, are the difficulties and the contradictions in Rawls’s principle of fairness, and are they of sufficient weight as to render it nugatory?
First, what is the meaning of disadvantage? What is the measure of fairness? Is it objective or subjective? Often a sense of unfairness depends upon expectation and the degree of deprivation. But by whose standard? One measure, Rawls writes, “is a definition solely in terms of relative income and wealth with no reference to social position. Thus, all persons with less than half the median income and wealth may be taken as the least advantaged segment. This definition depends only upon the lower half of the distribution and has the merit of focusing attention on the social distance between those who have the least and the average citizen.” 97
But for most persons the question of unfairness or deprivation is not some fixed or absolute standard but a comparison with relevant others. We know from many sociological studies that large disparities of income and status are accepted as fair if individuals feel that these are justly earned, while small differences, if arbitrary, will often seem unfair. Orderlies in a hospital compare their income with that of a nurse but not that of a doctor. Thus relative deprivation and reference group (to use the sociological jargon) at each point stipulate the degree of disparity.98 But are we to accept the subjective evaluations of individuals as the moral norm, or an objective standard, and on what basis? 99 The point is not clear.
If disadvantage is difficult to define, there is a different kind of problem in the identification of “the least fortunate group.” Rawls writes: “Here it seems impossible to avoid a certain arbitrariness. One possibility is to choose a particular social position, say that of the unskilled worker, and then to count as the least advantaged all those with the average income and wealth of this group, or less. The expectation of the lowest representative man is defined as the average t
aken over this whole class” (p. 98).100
Problems of borderlines and shadings apart—and in practical terms these are great—the identification of social position in this fashion raises a serious psychological question. One of the important considerations of moral philosophy has been to avoid labelling, or public stigmatization, of the disadvantaged. This is one of the reasons why reformers have always fought a “means test” as the criterion for public aid and tried to provide help as a right. It is one of the reasons (administrative matters aside) why proposals for the redistribution of income have suggested that a stipulated sum be given to all persons, and that money above a certain level be recouped by taxation. Yet Rawls writes: “... we are entitled at some point to plead practical considerations in formulating the difference principle. Sooner or later the capacity of philosophical or other arguments to make finer discriminations is bound to run out.” But it is exactly at those points where principle has to be translated into rule and case that the problems of public policy and administration begin.
