Justice and Equality
Perhaps the most unacceptable moral feature of the market order, from the Marxian perspective, is the fact that capitalism results in a wide disparity of income and wealth. It is undeniable that some persons in a capitalist economy become wealthier, perhaps much wealthier, than others. We have seen, however, that the American people have traditionally regarded such unequal “outcomes” of the game of economic life as just or fair, in accord with the prevailing sense of justice. Indeed, inequality of material outcome has long been recognized as a necessary consequence of the consistent application of justice. Traditional justice requires strict adherence to the rule of law, which involves, among other elements, equal treatment under the law. Equality under law, as we have seen, means that that the same rules apply to every individual, regardless of status or group affiliation; the garbage collector is governed by the same rules as the president of the United States. Justice is blind. We have previously noted the ancient lineage of such a conception of justice, to which the early Greeks applied the term isonomia. Justice so conceived and applied will inevitably produce an economically diverse society encompassing a wide array of material outcomes. Human beings are distinctive individuals with distinctive propensities, talents, and values, as well as varying levels of education, ambition, perseverance, self-discipline, creativity, and other personal qualities. Individuals are also members of diverse family structures that transmit diverse cultural values and aspirations, as well as financial means, to their children. No two snowflakes are identical, and no two human beings are identical. Indeed Western civilization would come to treasure that fact, glorying in the uniqueness of the human person, the uniqueness of the individual.[76]
The central point with respect to justice, however, is that the universal application of identical laws to unique individuals who possess widely varying skills, abilities, and values must result in unequal economic or material outcomes, in an unequal distribution of wealth across society. If unique individuals are governed by identical rules, the outcome of their individual endeavors will never be uniform or equal by any material measure. In a market economy, some individuals—those will skills more highly valued by other members of society—will become relatively wealthier than others. The economic inequality that prevails in a market order is an inevitable consequence, not of injustice but, on the contrary, the consistent application of justice as traditionally conceived. Equal justice under law and economic inequality are two sides of the same coin.
The relation between traditional justice and economic inequality may be further brought to light by recalling the profound American conviction that every individual is endowed with certain natural and unalienable rights, the classic Lockean trilogy of life, liberty, and property. Justice and the rule of law secure to each individual not only life and liberty but also property, which of course includes income in the form of wages and profit earned from personal economic activity. We further recall the manner in which income is determined in a market economy. The income of any individual is ultimately determined by the subjective value that consumers place on his particular skills and abilities, a value that varies not only from consumer to consumer but also skill to skill. Consumers are typically willing to pay more for the skills involved in brain surgery than those involved in washing dishes because they value the former skills more highly than the latter. Moreover, the possession of particular skills varies greatly among individuals—not everyone can paint like Van Gogh, play baseball like Babe Ruth, or perform brain surgery. Individual income in a market economy is determined by an impersonal process ultimately dependent on the subjective value imputed to various goods and services by the consumer.
In a capitalist economy, the security of individual property rights conjoined with the subjective evaluation of consumers thus ensures that individuals whose skills are perceived as more valuable by their fellows will earn a higher income than those whose skills are perceived as less valuable. Such is the inevitable result of market exchange. Individuals who possess skills of relatively greater value to other members of society will be voluntarily offered more in exchange for such skills, while those individuals who possess less valuable skills will be offered less. The strict application of justice in a regime that honors universal individual rights to property requires that each individual be secured in the possession of any income so acquired, however great or meager. The simultaneous achievement of justice (equality under law) and income equality could only occur if every individual were to possess identical market skills that were identically valued by consumers. Such is obviously impossible, in violation of the nature of things.
Consequently, the only way to achieve an equal distribution of income among unique individuals, as socialist morality demands, is to violate justice as traditionally conceived. As previously discussed in the context of positive rights, attempts to achieve a greater equalization of wealth in a market economy invariably involve the political redistribution of wealth. Such necessarily involves violation not only of individual property rights (of those persons or groups whose wealth is involuntarily taxed for purposes of redistribution) but also the ancient ideal of equality under law. Individuals must be treated very differently if the goal is economic or material equality among persons of widely varying abilities and skills. Those with more valuable market skills and talents must be penalized and those with less valuable skills and talents must be subsidized or otherwise rewarded. Traditional justice and equality of economic outcome are intrinsically in conflict, and there is no way around this fact. Accordingly, socialists and fellow travelers uniformly reject the traditional conception of justice in favor of a competing conception—so-called “social justice”—a concept to which we return in a following section.
The Demand for a Desert-based Justice
We have seen that the sense of justice informing capitalist economic arrangements is intimately related to certain profound moral convictions implicit in the Western political tradition and particularly its American expression. First and foremost among these is the inherent value of the individual. Every person, as we have seen, is regarded as unique, inviolable, and “endowed by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights. Every person is entitled to a particular kind of moral treatment simply by virtue of his status as a human being. The free society, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is a “kingdom of ends, not of means.”[77] Each person is regarded as an end-in-himself, which means he may not be regarded as mere means—a mere tool—to be used in fulfillment of another person’s goals, including persons organized as government. The equality of individual worth—the inherent and uniform substantive value of every person—further demands that every person be governed by the same laws, a demand embodied in the Anglo-American ideal of equality under law. We have seen that application of identical laws to persons of varying talents and skills inevitably produces unequal economic outcomes. Economic success or failure in a market economy is determined not by the intrinsic worth of the individual, which is equal across all human beings, but rather by the value that other persons subjectively impute to his or her marketable skills, an entirely different criterion. The economic position of any individual does not reflect his inherent worth as a human being. The market does not reward inherent personal worth but merely the ability to produce goods and services of instrumental value to other individuals. The rich are not rich because they are superior persons, morally or otherwise, and the poor are not poor because they are inferior persons. Persons are richer or poorer depending upon their ability to produce goods or services that other members of society will voluntarily purchase. There is little or no relation between such economic outcomes and personal or moral merit. Wicked people can and do prosper, while saints can and do starve. The market does not reward objective moral worth but rather the subjective and utilitarian worth of particular skills to market participants.
The absence of intrinsic connection between personal moral worth and economic status, however, seems a
hard lesson to grasp. Human history has been marked by a persistent and recurring yearning for so-called “desert-based justice,” a state of affairs wherein the economic status of every individual directly and transparently corresponds to his moral status. It would undoubtedly be gratifying to witness universal material prosperity among good human beings and universal poverty and want among the wicked: people should get what they “deserve.” Such a moral yearning, however, while understandable, cannot be fulfilled by a market economy, or, indeed, by any form of economic arrangement. An individual who purchases an automobile in the free market is not thereby rewarding the seller for being a good person nor is the seller rewarding the buyer for being a good person. The buyer values what the seller has produced, not his personal moral qualities, and the seller values the money the buyer offers in exchange for the automobile, not the personal moral qualities of the buyer. An individual who applies for a job expects that the potential employer will evaluate the skills he brings to the firm, not his personal moral worth. No applicant for employment wants to stand in moral judgment before the potential employer as if the latter were God.
Not only is such the common practice and expectation in a market economy, but personal moral merit cannot be rewarded in a modern capitalist economy, however much participants might yearn to do so. As has been discussed, contemporary market relations constitute an “extended order of human cooperation” that encompasses the globe; income or economic outcome is determined by an impersonal process that involves millions and millions of persons largely unknown to one another.[78] As we have seen, an individual who purchases a can of cat food is partially if unwittingly determining the income of every person directly or indirectly involved in its production. Buyers in a modern market economy generally have no way of knowing the identity of such persons, let alone whether they are good or bad people from a moral point of view. Nor do sellers generally have any way of knowing either the identity or the personal moral merit of those to whom they sell their goods or services. It is impossible to consciously “distribute” income in a developed market economy, according to personal merit or any other criteria. Any individual’s income represents the value of his particular contribution to the production of a final good or service, a value impersonally and subjectively imputed by buyers, most of whom do not and cannot know the individual’s personal identity, let alone his personal circumstances or moral merit. Such qualities are, and must be, largely unknown to both buyers and sellers in a spatially extended market order such as contemporary American society.
For such reasons, the yearning for a desert-based justice cannot be fulfilled in a market economy. Such a conclusion, however, is not unique to capitalism but applies with equal force to any form of collectivized, socialized, or command economy. Desert-based justice, again, involves the correspondence of economic success to personal moral goodness and economic failure or poverty to moral wickedness. The only means of approaching such a goal in a centralized economy, wherein resources are controlled by government, is to allow political authority to distribute material resources based on a standard of desert. That is, public officials would have to evaluate the personal moral merit of each and every individual and decide whether or not the individual is deserving of material reward. It is difficult to conceive an arrangement more disastrous to human wellbeing. Each individual would literally have to stand before their political superiors as if before God, proving his or her moral worth, merely to obtain the basic means of subsistence. Government officials would literally possess power of life and death over every individual in society, whose very existence would depend on his ability to convince the powers-that-be of his moral worth. No human being, however, whatever their political power or status, possesses either the right or competence morally to judge other human beings in such a fashion. Desert-based justice cannot be realized on earth unless and until government officials become God. Needless to say, such is unlikely to occur.
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The justice intrinsic to capitalism, then, like the justice implicit in the game of baseball, is not an outcome- or desert-based justice but rather a procedural or rule-based justice. It is “blind” in the sense that every individual, regardless of personal circumstance, is to be governed by the same law. Traditional justice entails both universal enforcement of established rules of just conduct and indifference to the consequences or outcomes produced by observance of such rules. Justice, like law and economic theory, concerns not the goals of human action but rather the means by which they may be pursued. Economic outcomes, like the outcomes of baseball games, are thus regarded as fair or just so long as they are achieved by fair or just means. Only persons bear moral agency, which means that justice is always and everywhere an attribute of individual human behavior within a context of human relations; it can be attributed to an “outcome” only in a loose or metaphorical sense. Justice is achieved, whatever the material consequences, so long as people treat one another fairly in their mutual relations, and fairly means in accordance with the prevailing legal and moral rules, explicit and tacit, of a given society.
In American society, and Western society more generally, the prevailing rules of justice and morality have traditionally been conceived as objective rules of right and wrong, deriving from a source independent of human preference—deontological rules deriving from what is, from what is right-in-itself and what is wrong-in-itself. It is intrinsically right, right-in-itself, that human life be preserved; it is intrinsically wrong, wrong-in-itself, to murder an innocent person. On such a traditional view, government does not “make” the rules of justice but rather enforces a pre-existing order of right and wrong—the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” championed by Locke and his American counterparts and discussed in a previous volume. Such is the tacit conception of justice informing Madison’s resolute conviction that “justice is the end of government; it is the end of civil society.”
The Morality of Private Property
We have seen that capitalism, as Marx correctly perceived, is inseparable from the institution of private property. The morality of the market system thus stands or falls, to a large extent, on the morality of private property. The word property derives from the Latin proper—“characteristically belonging to the being or thing in question.”[79] With respect to the institution of private property, the being in question is of course a human being; “property” is that which “characteristically belongs to” a human being. Property—what one owns—represents an extension of a human being’s selfhood, personhood, or individuality. Indeed it is difficult to conceive of a human being without property of some kind, something he considers his own, even if simply his personal identity and physical body.
The concept of property, then, relates to the nature of things, more particularly, the characteristics of human being or personhood. Human beings universally share the same nature, which means that human beings universally possess property (that which “characteristically belongs to” a human being). The legitimacy of private property has nevertheless long been a matter of controversy, and the protection actually afforded individual property has varied considerably throughout history. The main concern of the present discussion, however, is not the particular protection afforded property in various societies over time but rather the general moral justification for the institution of private property. The short defense of the morality of private property is simply to invoke the near-universal condemnation of theft. In almost every society known to man, stealing is condemned as immoral and prohibited in one way or another.[80] The prohibition of theft presupposes the legitimacy of private property: theft can only be morally wrong if private property is morally right. The universal moral and legal injunction against taking a person’s property without his consent implies that the person is morally entitled to regard his possessions—his property—as his own. Indeed, even human infants and children display evidence of holding such an assumption. A young child who bursts into tears when his toy is rudely ripped from
his hands seems to express a sense of violation even if yet unable to articulate the experience.
A more elaborate defense of private property, one that would become central to American political thought, was provided by John Locke. We recall that, according to Locke, the primary reason people leave the state of nature by compacting to form and live under civil government is precisely the “preservation of [their] property.” Locke, as we have seen, employed the term property in both the broad and classic sense of “life, liberty, and estate” and the narrow contemporary sense of material possessions. The right to private property, he argues, is derived from the individual’s prior right of self-possession. Every individual, Locke says, “has a property in his own person” (on loan, so to speak, from God, its ultimate possessor) and thus in his own body and labor.[81] The right of private property is established, he concludes, when an individual “mixes” his labor, which he owns by the natural right of self-possession, with the resources of the earth.
Locke acknowledges that God originally gave the earth and all its resources to mankind in common. Property is originally communal, not individual, property. He attempts, however, to explain how originally communal property eventually comes to be held by the individual by right. Imagine, he says, an individual in the state of nature who exerts himself to pluck an apple from a tree and then eats the apple to allay his hunger. What, Locke asks, gives the individual the right to engage in such actions, that is, to pluck and eat an apple that does not belong to him personally but rather to all men in common? He answers that such a right is established by the individual’s initial exertion of labor, established at the moment he plucks the apple from the tree. Locke recognizes that some persons may regard such an act as a violation; the individual has taken the resource given to all men in common without the consent of its rightful owners—all mankind. On such a view, the individual’s appropriation of the apple is, in effect, mere theft. Locke, however, denies such a claim and rather asserts the legitimacy of the individual’s actions. Yes, he acknowledges, God did give the earth to mankind as their common possession. He further argues, however, that God is a rational Being who also desires mankind to flourish and multiply. Accordingly, He could not have intended that each individual obtain prior permission from all other persons on earth before legitimately using or appropriating any common resource. If such were morally obligatory, all men would perish: it is clearly impossible to obtain the unanimous permission of all mankind. God, then, could not have intended such prior permission because he did not intend the destruction of mankind. Furthermore, Locke continues, the resources of this earth were intended for employment by the “industrious and rational,” not the “quarrelsome and contentious.”[82] For such reasons, he concludes, property by right belongs to the individual who possesses the drive, energy, and rationality to exert his labor in employing the resources of the earth for his own benefit or benefit of others.[83]
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