Abstract
G. A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality proposes that both concepts need rescuing from the work of John Rawls. Especially, it is concerned with Rawls’ famous second principle of justice according to which social primary goods should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to the benefit of the worst off. The question is why this would ever be necessary if all parties are just. Cohen and I agree that Rawls cannot really justify inequalities on the basis given. But he also thinks equality is the correct analysis of justice, though he provides no actual direct arguments for this. He does, however, provide a striking analytical argument claiming that fundamental principles of justice must be fact insensitive, and that Rawls’s view of justice violates this requirement. I argue that the requirement is itself misconceived and that principles of justice cannot possibly be fact insensitive in the sense developed by Cohen. Few philosophers share this view of Cohen’s—which I argue is due to several conceptual mistakes. With these ironed out, the contractarian view, broadly speaking, is seen to be plausible and powerful. Meanwhile Cohen appears to embrace intuitionism, a stance that cannot possibly be acceptable in social philosophy. In the end, Cohen is successful in arguing that Rawls cannot have what he wants, but neither is Cohen successful in claiming that justice is equality.
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Notes
Cohen (2008).
All parenthetical otherwise unattributed numbers are to pages in Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality.
“Were all men possessed of so inflexible a regard to justice that, of themselves, they would totally abstain from the properties of others; they had for ever remained in a state of absolute liberty, without subjection to any magistrate or political society. But this is a state of perfection, of which human nature is justly deemed incapable.” (Hume 1985, p. 474)
I am, to be sure, a graduate of that institution, but not many will dispute that I am a rather atypical Harvardian!.
ONeill (2009, p. 225).
Schmidtz (2006).
Nozick (1974, p. ix).
Cohen (2000).
It has become fashionable of late to claim that libertarians have the same problem, the claim drawing on Nozick’s somewhat ill-considered ponderings in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The claim is that today’s patterns of holdings in wealthy countries lean, over centuries, on violence and fraud in earlier transactions, infecting all subsequent transfers down to the present. Or it is even alleged that Nozick calls upon a “Lockean Proviso” that calls for some measure of equalization of holdings got from “initial acquisition.” Both are wrong, not to mention that virtually all great wealth today is not at all dependent on transfers from the past, being a result of ingenious transaction by entrepreneurs who started out near penniless. (The first American black billionaire, whose remote ancestors were slaves, came on stream a few years back, for example.) See Narveson (2002, 2009). Meanwhile, this problem as it affects egalitarianism is intrinsic, so long as the proclaimed equality is such that many are well above the level the theory entitles them to.
Narveson (2002, Chap. 2).
Narveson (1978, p. 288).
Nozick (1974, p. 195).
To use the expression memorably deployed by Frederic Bastiat in his terse libertarian classic (2004).
Rawls (1971, p. 151).
I so argue, for example, in Narveson (2007, pp 13–20).
I have a go at it in Narveson (2001).
See Rector (1995, pp. 241–256). See esp. pp. 246–247.
Narveson (2010a, pp. 19–20).
Narveson (2003).
In Europe, classical musicians are accustomed to having their fees much increased by large subsidies from their governments. I wonder what the egalitarian in Cohen thinks about that. In the United States—until recently at any rate—by contrast, most artists are paid by sale of services to willing buyers and willing private patrons. Why should Cohen not think that the U.S. system is more just—seeing that the taxes devoted to the subsidy of high culture in countries that do that are considerably paid by the poor-to-middle classes, while the cultural institutions thus supported are patronized by very few of them.
Perhaps Cohen implicitly relies on the well-known arguments of Rachels [(1991, pp. 176–186), see especially pp. 180–182] and others to this end. In that connection, see footnote 16 above.
Rawls (1971, p. 151).
As noted above, Cohen later in Rescuing Justice and Equality appears to be almost entirely renouncing those familiar implications of claims about what is required by justice. See below.
The colleague was J. Minas; I do not remember where he got it, though he did, he said, get it from somewhere.
Narveson (1988/2001, pp. 184 ff).
All such real-world examples need to be taken with many grains of salt and interpreted with much caution.
Hume (1985, Section III, Part II): “Render possessions ever so equal, men’s different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence and, instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community.”
Which others? That is another vexed issue. Cohen very likely thinks, like Rawls, in terms of fellow members of their respective political communities—but not, I suspect, the other nearly 7 billions of humans who, nevertheless, should be subjects of justice—should they not?
Cohen’s intuition on this point diverges sharply from just about everyone else’s, so far as I know.
But, as I have noted twice, in a later section in his book, astonishingly, he seems to take it all back. See my discussion of Chapter 5 of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality, below.
Lucas (1980, p. 191).
I do not think it would, or did, work with Cohen himself, whose salary and perks as the holder of a chair at Oxford were certainly very far above what an ordinary English factory worker was paid—or for that matter, your typical British academic.
That is the problem Cohen wrestled with—to my view unsatisfactorily—in his earlier book, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
Cohen quotes from Rawls (1971, p. 75).
Even there, we must be narrower: justice is getting what is due, which is usually what comes to us by virtue of agreements freely made. Those do indeed have a rough correspondence to natural talent, but that correspondence is not what makes them just. It is the relation to freely made agreements that does that.
Preferences as such—that is, intrinsic preferences such as Cohen’s for equality appears to be, are not irrational, but nor are they rational. If we are going to classify some preferences as “rational,” that should be because there is a good reason for having them—even if you do not already have them or do have their contraries. Reasoned preferences can indeed differ in rationality—and I am claiming here that “preferences” for theories of social moralities should be of that kind. As well, I think that the preference for a libertarian social morality is more rational than that for an egalitarian one.
It makes sense, but of course assessing actual “initial conditions” in the farthest-out sense of “initial” may be beyond the reach of anthropological science. In any case, it will only be equal in that everyone’s real income will be close to zero.
Rawls’ appreciation of this point is not clear to me. He notes that the “distribution” of talents and so forth via the “natural lottery” is “morally arbitrary”; but “morally arbitrary” does not mean unfair, and I am unclear whether Rawls really does think that nature is unfair rather than merely arbitrary—though obviously, he is entitled to think only the latter.
In the text the word “do” occurs instead of “be”; I assume this is a typographical error, as “do” makes no grammatical sense in the sentence in which it is used.
Mill (1910, pp. 44–45).
Cohen does address the question of basic structure in his Appendix I to this chapter of Rescuing Justice and Equality. Alas, it makes things no clearer. In it he observes that Rawls characterizes a notion of a “well-ordered society” as one in which “everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice.” (147) [Quoted from Rawls (1971, p. 4)]. This prompts Cohen to observe that it is hard to see why any coercion should be necessary in such a society. Or maybe the idea is that there will still be a few deviants who need punishing and so for that reason some coercion may be envisaged, but still, it would not have entered into the notion of a basic structure.
This, alas, seems to avoid the issue. What everyone could be accepting is that if anyone were tempted to do something other than what the accepted principles permit, then it would be in order to use coercion either by way of punishment or deterrence. The essential reference to coercion would thus be retained, but retained where it belongs: namely, hypothetically, in constructing the normative theory—not in constructing the local police force, which seems to be what Cohen thinks Rawls is discussing. On p. 148, Cohen appears to anticipate this. But he leaves it hanging: “Perhaps one could argue that the question of what it would be right to coerce, if necessary, is the appropriate question to ask in determining what justice is even if, in the achieved society, nothing needs to be coerced either for miscreant or for assurance reasons. We might say that justice is what warrants coercive imposition where coercion is necessary for it to be observed.” Since this seems to undo most of what he has written on this subject previously, one must wonder why it is not given a bit more attention. It seems to be given none, which makes one wonder what he thinks he is doing in this chapter.
The source of this unfortunate confusion, I suspect, lies in an ambiguity similar to one indulged, with similarly unfortunate conceptual effects, by David Gauthier when he defines the “market” as a “morality-free” zone (Gauthier 1986, pp. 83–112). But all he meant by this was that if we had what he calls a market, with all actors in it sticking to the defining strictures, then everything done in it would be morally permitted—not that no moral notions of any sort can even be applied to those actions. And similarly, when Rawls states (if he does) that the family is not part of the basic structure, he means that what goes on in it is morally alright, not that it is impossible even to raise the question whether it is. Presumably Rawls would agree that if a man murders his wife, the officers of the law may nevertheless be appropriately called in.
And there is, after all, a very strong argument against the idea. People simply have no interest, as such, in equality. They do have an interest in keeping themselves alive, in promoting their own comforts and projects, and for this reason have a great interest in others’ not intervening to undo their efforts. How an interest in equality as such is supposed to emerge is the question. The answer, I believe, is: by some serious confusions.
We should cavil at this term, since what you get from me in payment for services rendered is not a “reward” for those services, as if I were a kindergarten teacher handing out gold stars to my hardworking little charges, but rather, it is a payment for them, rendered due by the fact that this is what we agreed I would do for you given that you do that service for me. The idea that what we get from each other in commerce is a bunch of rewards and incentives is off the mark; what we get are the things we agreed on, in the circumstances. Those do, to be sure, have the effect of incentives. But what makes them part and parcel of justice is their agreed character, not the psychological effects of them as such.
Rawls (1971, p. 528.
I have elsewhere catalogued a number of confusions in which people have engaged in the course of attempting to justify equality (see Narveson 2002, pp. 49–62). Cohen seems to have indulged in a couple of these: confusion of the notion of impartiality with that of equality, and the above noted confusion, between arbitrariness as a relevant criticism of a modest set of relevantly possible actions as identified by previously accepted principles, versus “moral arbitrariness” as a property of the universe. Obviously the universe is morally arbitrary, but it is not on that account immoral. But mostly, he insists that justice is equality and that this cannot be argued for.
I add that from the point of view of a typical European bottom-class person in the year 835, the situation of people in the G8 countries today probably would look rather like just that—we are all, including the park-bench occupants, wealthy by their standards… There is perhaps a moral there.
We think here of Canadians going to the U.S. for medical treatment that they either cannot get in social-democratic Canada, where it is “free” if provided, or else they can get it faster (almost certainly) or, they think, better (sometimes, probably) at substantial cost to themselves. While political writers in Canada tend to decry the need to do this, few deny that people should be allowed to do this if they want to.
I think of an acquaintance who paid $50,000 to have a state-of-the art artificial knee installation in New York, New York instead of waiting a year or so to get it “free” in Ontario, Canada.
Arneson (1990).
The famous remark is from Nozick (1974, p. 163).
My flirtations with anarchist theory are exemplified recently in Narveson (2008, especially Chapter 8).
Aristotle (1941, p. 935).
Thomas Aquinas writes: “I answer that … a law is imposed on others by way of a rule and measure.” (Aquinas 1988, p. 17). In the preceding pages, it is made clear that what the law directs is all members of the community.
This is reinforced by the fact that, after all, fundamentally our entire natural environment is a matter of luck, so that to remove all luck-induced “advantages” would be to destroy the human race.
Hobbes (1950, p. 131).
de Jasay (2010, pp. 121–122).
See Narveson (2002, pp. 203–224).
See the item referred to in the previous footnote.
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Narveson, J. Cohen’s Rescue. J Ethics 14, 263–334 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9080-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9080-0