The State by Anthony de Jasay
Page 20
One suspects, having got this far, that some notion of equality might be this value; we could in that case argue from equality and recommend a distribution as more just than another because it favoured the least favoured, without having to demonstrate that favouring the least favoured is just (which would be an argument for equality rather than from it).
The irony of it all is that had Rawls not tried and failed to prove in the doing, that a theory of distributive justice is possible, it would be much easier to go on believing the universalist claim for democratic values, i.e. (in essence) that equality is valuable because it is the means to the undisputed final ends of justice or utility or perhaps liberty, too, and hence it is rational to choose it. Rawls had made it easier for non-democrats to cry that the Emperor has no clothes.
In the basic, "justice as fairness" version of his theory, Rawls (to my mind successfully) showed that rational self-interested people would concede special terms to each other to regulate the permissible inequalities of burdens and rewards if the only available alternative on offer were their equality. It is self-evident that under his key "difference principle" (inequalities must benefit the least advantaged or else they must go) the corresponding unequal distribution, if there is one, is better for everybody. If it makes the worst-off better off than they would be under equality, it must a fortiori make the best-off even better off, as well as everybody in between. (If the facts of life, production functions or elasticities of supply of effort or whatever, are such that this is in practice not possible, inequalities fail to get justified and the principle commands the distribution to revert to equal.) In an egalitarian distribution, an egalitarian distribution tempered by the difference principle will be regarded as "just," i.e. chosen.
Taking equality as the base case (Rawls also calls it the "initial arrangement" and it is the "appropriate status quo" from which his theory can get going)-the natural presumption-and departures from it as requiring the Paretian justification of unanimous
preference,*33 is in unison with arguing from democracy to justice. That no one seems to protest that here the cart is before the horse, simply shows that Rawls is, at least on this point, quite at one with the evolving liberal ideology. (The critics who, declaring for liberalism or socialism, attack Rawls's ideological content, so to speak, "from the left," accusing him of being a Gladstonian relic, a disciple of the despised Herbert Spencer and an apologist of inequality, seem to me to have well and truly missed the point.)
But no majority vote can settle questions of justice. In the spirit of the liberal ideology, which considers people's rewards as subject to political review purportedly guided by some ultimate value, a change in distribution which favours someone at the expense of somebody else raises a question of justice. Answers can be sought by intuitionist or utilitarian arguments. (The latter, as I have contended in chapter 2, pp. 110-1, are really intuitionist ones at one remove.)
Intuitionist arguments are irrefutable and do not rise above the rank of affirmations. Rawls could have put forward his principles as deductions from the given end of equality qualified by Pareto-optimality. Equality (its ultimate goodness) would then have the status of an intuitionist value-affirmation, while Pareto-optimality would tautologically follow from (non-envious) rationality. However, in his ambition to square the circle, Rawls appears to want to deduce "the standards whereby the distributive aspects of society are to be assessed" entirely from rationality (p. 9). His justice must consist of "principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality" (p. 11). What the "initial position," the "appropriate status quo" needed to get the theory going really
amounts to is this: Rawls, in the formal core of the argument, takes out equality as an end and puts it back in as the rule imposed for playing the rational decision game.
He is plainly entitled to fix any rule he likes, but he cannot oblige rational people (or any other, for that matter) to join in the game and accept its outcome forever, unless they already share his commitment to the article of faith that unequal endowments of property and talent must not be allowed to shape a distribution if it is not to be unjust. Agreement on the justice of a certain principle of distribution will be the consequence of this shared commitment. Despite appearances, and the insistence that it is an application of decision theory, the argument is still dependent on the intuitionist affirmation (however disguised) that equality is prior and can give rise to justice. The "appropriate status quo" is the moment when the rabbit is safely in the hat, ready to be pulled out.
Unlike any other status quo, it is one where there is no social cooperation at all to start with, hence no "natural distribution" based on bilateral contracts, and where people can have no rational reason to suppose that if there were a "natural distribution," their share in it would be larger or smaller than their neighbours'. This is the effect of the much-discussed "original position," where complete ignorance of their own particulars (the "veil of ignorance") enables people to choose a distribution (which is what choosing principles to design institutions which will shape the distribution, really amounts to) out of interest unsullied by any consideration which could make one person's interest diverge from another's. Behind the veil of ignorance (which blots out not only morally arbitrary personal particulars, but also society's particulars, except for certain general
sociological and economic causalities), whatever principles people, henceforth moved by interest only (for their sense of justice is incorporated in the original position), choose in order to get some social cooperation, will give rise to a just distribution. The design of the original position ensures that whatever any person chooses every other person will choose, too, since all individual differences have been defined out of it. With unanimity, no occasion for interpersonal comparisons can arise.
It is one thing to acknowledge as formally unassailable the analytic statement that principles chosen in the original position will be those of justice, given that this is how they have been defined. It is another to agree that it is Rawls's principles that would be chosen; and yet another that what Rawls's principles represent is really justice. Each of these different questions has a contentious literature, most of which I cannot even acknowledge here. Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia, Part II, section II) seems to me to deal more thoroughly and devastatingly than most with the justice of Rawls's justice, while a rigorous (and to my mind convincing) argument that rational people in the "original position" would not choose his principles, is offered by Wolff in Understanding Rawls, chapter XV. (I shall be addressing a few supplementary remarks to this effect in the next section.)
Rawls's core arguments are protected by a tissue of less formal discourse designed, in the spirit of "reflective equilibrium," to enlist our intuitive agreement, appeal to our sense of the reasonable, and often to intimate that his justice is really little more than our plain prudential interest. Social justice is to be agreed to in part because, to be sure, we ought to be just, and because we like justice but in any event because it is a good idea, and because that is what elicits social peace. Such arguments echo
those that champions of the "third world," despairing of the generosity of rich white states, have lately been resorting to: give more aid to the teeming underdeveloped millions lest they go on multiplying, and drown you in their multitude, and rise up and burn your hayricks, or at the very least become clients of Moscow.*34 Also, give more aid so you may do more trade. The use of bribe or threat to induce us to do the right thing is hardly less blatant in Rawls. As Little puts it in his pithy paraphrase: (in the original position) "each participant would agree that anyone who is going to be rich in the society he votes for must be coerced to aid the poor, because otherwise the poor may upset the applecart and he would not choose to be an apple in so unstable a cart. This sounds to me more like expediency than justice."*35
3.3.29 Moreover, to read Rawls, coercion hardly enters into it and if it does, it need not hu
rt. The operation of the principles of justice lets us have our cake and eat it, have capitalism and socialism, public property and private liberty all at the same time. Rawls's blandness on these deeply contentious points is astounding: "A democratic society may choose to rely on prices in view of the advantages of doing so, and then maintain the background institutions which justice requires" (p. 281). Considering that "relying on prices" is synonymous with letting rewards be agreed between buyer and seller, to maintain background institutions which prejudge, constrain and retroactively adjust these rewards is, to put it no higher, to send contradictory signals to Pavlov's dogs. It is, in any case, an attempt to mislead the market about "relying on prices." In common with mainstream liberal opinion, Rawls must feel that there is no inconsistency; first, a market economy can be got to deliver its advantages "and then" the background institutions can do distributive justice while leaving the said advantages somehow intact. There is no inkling in any of this of the possibly quite complex unintended effects of having the price system promise one set of rewards and the background institutions causing another set to be delivered.*36
Lastly, we are to rest assured that a social contract which is powerful enough to override property, and which mandates the quintessential "background institution" (the state) to ensure distributive justice, does not invest the state with noticeably more power. Power continues to rest with civil society and the state develops no autonomy. Nor has it a will to use it in pursuit of its proper purposes. No genie is let out of any bottle. Politics is just vector geometry. To quote Rawls: "We may think of the political process as a machine which makes social decisions when the views of representatives and their constituents are fed into it" (p. 196). We may indeed, but it would be better not to.
Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay
Advanced Search
3. Democratic ValuesEgalitarianism as Prudence
Uncertainty about the share they will get is supposed to induce rational people to opt for an income distribution which only the certainty of getting the worst could make them choose.
A bird in the hand is best if we must have one and if two would be too many.
If the core of Rawls's Theory of Justice was vulgarized à outrance, it could perhaps be summed up thus: Devoid of the vested interests bred by self-knowledge, people opt for an egalitarian society allowing only such inequalities as improve the lot of the least advantaged. This is their prudent option, because they cannot know whether they would do better, or worse, in an inegalitarian society. Refusing to gamble, they take the bird in the hand.
Any sophisticated intellectual construction is inevitably reduced to some easily communicated vulgarization by the time it takes root in the broad public consciousness. Only the most robust arguments, whose core is of one piece, do not in such a process get reduced to pathetic fallacies. An author who needlessly invokes complex solutions to problems which have been assumed away to begin with, soon finds that for example he is publicly reputed to have "proved by game theory" that maximin (maximizing the minimum among alternative outcomes) is the optimal life-strategy for "prudent men," that "the conservative decision rule is to agree to moderately egalitarian social policies" and other words to this effect. Given the value of such terms as
"prudent" and "conservative," myths of this type are liable to sway many minds for some time to come, albeit for reasons which Rawls would be the first to disavow.
In his system, the characteristics of the "original position" (ignorance about one's vital particulars coupled with some selective general knowledge of economics and politics), and three psychological assumptions, together determine what people would decide if put in such a position. They will choose Rawls's second principle, notably the part of it enjoining the maximization of the minimum lot in an unknown distribution of lots, or "difference principle." (The case for saying that they will also choose the first principle concerning equal liberty, and bar any more-of-one for less-of-the-other type of compromise between liberty and other "primary goods," is much less open-and-shut, but we will not concern ourselves with that.) The first point at issue is whether the psychological assumptions leading to the maximin choice can properly be made about rational men in general, or whether they represent the special case histories of somewhat eccentric persons.
The end postulated for the rational man is the fulfilment of his life-plan. He ignores its particulars except that it takes a certain sufficiency of primary goods to fulfil it; these goods, then, serve needs and not desires.*37 However, it is hard to see what else makes a fulfilled life-plan into a worth-while end if it is not the expected enjoyment of the very primary goods which go into its fulfilment; they are the means but they must also be the ends.*38 The latter is really implied in their being goods whose index we seek to maximize (rather than merely bring to a level of adequacy) for the least-advantaged. Yet we are told that people are not anxious to have more of them once they have enough for fulfilling
the plan. They show no interest in its over-fulfilment! This position is ambiguous, if not downright obscure.
To dispel the ambiguity, one could suppose that people want to fulfil the life-plan, not because of the lifelong access to enjoyable primary goods for which it is a shorthand symbol, but as an end in itself. The life-plan is like climbing Piz Palu which we just want to do, and primary goods are like climbing boots, of no value except as tools. The life-plan either succeeds, or it fails, with no half-way house. It is not a continuous variable, of which it is good to have a little and better to have a lot. It is an either/or matter; we do not want to climb Piz Palu a little, nor can we climb higher than its peak. The lack of interest in more than a sufficiency of primary goods would then make sense, too, for who wants two pairs of boots for climbing one mountain?
This logical consistency between the end and the means (a necessary condition of rationality) would, however, be bought at the price of imputing to rational men much the same absolute view of the life-plan that saints have of salvation. Damnation is unacceptable; salvation is exactly sufficient and nothing else matters besides; it is nonsense to want more salvation. The life-plan is an un-analysable whole. We do not and need not know what the good is of fulfilling it. However, it seems meaningless to wish to more-than-fulfil it, and utter hell to fall short.
There is nothing irrational per se in imputing an uncompromising, saintly mentality to people engaged in devising distributive institutions; saints can be as rational or as irrational as sinners. The problem is rather that, unlike salvation which has profound meaning and content for the believer, the life-plan is emptied of
content if it must be abstracted from command over primary goods (i.e. if the latter are to be stopped from serving as ends); can it still be sustained that it is the goal of the rational man to fulfil it, though it looks an unexplained eccentricity to want to do so? Besides this, it is hardly worth mentioning that interpreting the life-plan as an ultimate end, and an all-or-nothing affair at that, is forbidden by Rawls's own view that it is a mosaic of sub-plans which are fulfilled separately and perhaps also successively (see chapter VII), i.e. not an indivisible goal in which you either succeed or fail.
3.4.8 The significance of this question resides in the role three specific psychological assumptions are called upon to play in making rational people "choose maximin." Take the last two first. We are told (1) that "the person choosing... cares very little, if anything, for what he might gain above the minimum stipend" (p. 154), and
(2) that he rejects alternative choices which involve someprobability, however minute, that he might get less than that, because "the rejected alternatives have outcomes that one can hardly accept" (p. 154). If these two assumptions were to be interpreted literally, the choosers would behave as if they had the single-point objective of climbing to a chosen mountain-top. They would go for a critical quantity (index number) X of primary goods like for a pair of nailed boots; less would be useless and more pointless.
3.4.9 If, in addition, they knew that opting for a society with a maximin-governed distribution of primary goods (income) would in fact produce for its least-advantaged members the critical stipend X, they would choose it regardless of the relative probabilities of getting a bigger, equal or smaller stipend in other kinds of societies. If worse alternatives are simply unacceptable and better ones leave you cold, it could not possibly matter how probable they are. Your maximand is discontinuous. It is the single number X. If you can get it at all, you take it. Talking of a "maximin" strategy and of "choice in the face of uncertainty" is the very paradigm of the red herring.
(What happens if a maximin-principled society turns out not to be rich enough to assure for everybody a high enough minimum stipend, such as X, sufficient to let them fulfil their life-plans? Rawls is satisfied that since such a society is both reasonably just and reasonably efficient, it can safely guarantee X for everybody [pp. 156 and 169]; the certitude of X, then, is a preferred alternative to facing incertitude.
This, of course, is as it may be. A society may be efficient, yet quite poor-the successive Prussias of Frederick William I and of Erich Honecker would probably both fit this bill-and people in the original position have no clue whether the efficient and just society they are about to devise might not be quite poor, too. James Fishkin takes the view that if a society can guarantee everybody's satisfactory minimum, it is a society of abundance "beyond justice."*39 On the other hand, if the stipend guaranteed by enacting maximin fell short of the critical X, people could not both regard the meagre guaranteed stipend as one they "can hardly accept" yet rationally choose it in preference to non-guaranteed, uncertain but more acceptable alternatives.)