“I know why u homies want to make like John Rawls
You just wish that u were Marxists but u haven’t got the balls”
[Gilbert Ramsay et al, The Philociraptor Rap]
This post is in part a good excuse to cite the epigraph above, which deserves to be much better known. In a somewhat (ahem) direct way, it touches and encapsulates much of my attitude to Rawlsian liberalism.
For a more _academic_ presentation, you might want to read my two papers that, by a bizarre coincidence, came out on the same day last week:
“Why the ecological crisis spells the end of liberalism: The ‘difference principle’ is ecologically unsustainable, exploitative of persons, or empty”, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
and
“The difference principle is not action-guiding”, in CRISPP 14:4 (pp.487-503).
(Also, my shortly-forthcoming piece on “Beyond an ungreen-economics-based political philosophy: Three strikes against the difference principle”, in the International Journal of Green Economics (2011) Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.167–183. And, of related interest, my “Religion as sedition: On liberalism’s intolerance of real religion”, in Ars Disputandi vol.11, just published last month: http://http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000394/article.pdf .)
For a more popular, shorter, political ‘bloggish’ presentation of the same ideas, see my “No red without green: why any socialism must be an eco-socialism” in the Compass ebook ‘Good Society/Green Society? The Red-Green Debate’. One place that you can find this is 1 scroll down, at: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=13232.
Finally, if you want to see how annoyed all this kind of thing makes Rawlsians, then have a read of my http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/rupert-read/philosophical-and-political-implications-of-spirit-level-response-to-gerry-ha – and the comments thereto. What I point up there is that the Rawlsian difference principle is willing to allow substantial inequalities, because doing so will allegedly be best for the worst off. But if Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett, Michael Marmot, Danny Dorling et al are right, then the more substantial the inequalities, the worse off _everyone_ will be, _especially_ the worst off.
We might call this an empirical refutation of the difference principle…
So, homies, where do we/you go from here?
I think that any quote that replaces “you” with “u” is not a quote that deserves repeating. But anyway.
The Spirit Level has made a bit of a splash in political philosophy. The main thesis is entirely plausible (namely, that increased inequality comes hand in hand with decreased wellbeing). And TSL certainly raises some good questions. For instance, it serves as a modest rebuttal to Frankfurt’s conviction that equality is not in itself valuable. The case against Frankfurt is hardly slam-dunk, but it’s at least persuasive.
But just because TSL raises interesting philosophical questions, that does not mean it provides clear-cut answers to questions of policy. The fact is, the current socio-political situation is completely out of step with what the difference principle recommends. We can fault Rawls for not having a very sophisticated view on what institutions are, but we can’t accuse him of legitimating a system of capitalism headed by a class of internationally privileged grifters. If the grifters are unnecessary for the decent functioning of the basic institutions of society, and are profiting in ways that make others worse-off than they would have been otherwise, then from the standpoint of justice we ought to have the grifters removed.
Also, claims like “the main reason that the poor are poor is simply that the rich are rich” are too simple. Sometimes, the rising tide lifts all boats. For example, notice the difference between the two time-periods, which Robert Reich called the “Great Prosperity” and the “Great Regression”. During the period of 1947-1979, the rich got richer… but so did the poor. Something was working, sort of.
(Of course, you might (rightly) call into question whether or not these gains were ill-gotten; e.g., whether the forms of growth were ecologically sustainable, and whether or not the Bretton-Woods system was ultimately at the expense of the global south. Such concerns would be well-placed, and a good conversation could come out of them. But I only mean to interrogate the slogan, “the poor are poor is simply that the rich are rich”, not to reject all your points.)
As Ben points out, you’re being a bit unfair to Rawls.
Rawl’s difference principle does not serve to justify inequality per se, but to justify inequality only if it betters the lot of the worst off in society: for example, to reward educators with higher pay who have good results teaching children with learning problems from a poor background, thus, bettering the children’s possibilities to earn a good income.
Thus, if the book, the Spirit Level, shows that inequality never betters the lot of the worst off, then on Rawlsian principles there would be no reason for any inequalities.
Far from being an apologist for neoliberalism, Rawls suggests that democratic socialism might be a model for a just society. (I can find the reference in my old copy of Theory of Justice, if you wish).
That Rawls is not a Marxist does not have much to do with a supposed lack of balls, but with the cold war climate (and Rawls’ own personal convictions) in which Rawls wrote his Theory of Justice. Rawls tries to give reasons for a just society to a U.S. academic public which was basically anti-communist and anti-Marxist. Whether his reasoning stands the test of time is another issue.
It is possible to construct scenarios that fit either POV.
Consider a steady state economy, with no growth, and production at some natural limit, and almost irrespective of human influence.
A good example is water as wealth in say Africa. No amount of messing around will make it rain more than it does, and the water either ends up divided proportionately, or not. The cake is fixed: the squabble is over the share.
But in a context where resource is human limited the exact reverse applies.
Say wealth is oil..and we are at a stage in development where oil resources well exceed the ability to drill for it and process it. IF that resource were divided equally, no one would get any oil: No one individual has the power to accumulate enough capital to take the risk to drill for it, and neither will they club together, pool their wealth and do so IF THE MOMENT THEY STRIKE RICH, THEY GET NO DIFFERENTIAL REWARD.
In other words socialism and Marxism is the doctrine of the steady state: It deals unequivocally with the disposal of wealth, but not its creation.
Capitalism and I guess Rawlianism is the applicable doctrine to expansion.It deals with the creation of wealth, but not its disposal per se, beyond remarking that without the wealth incentive people don’t create wealth.
This of course is the paradox of ‘to each according to his needs’ The way to get ahead is to be more needy. Viz the panoply of begging victims that seems to comprise the socialist society today. ‘My need is greater than yours, gimme!’
This of course results in wealth destruction, as ‘from each according to his abilities’ leads inevitably to people downplaying abilities so as to give less, and up-playing needs so as to receive more…
(A far cry from what I am sure Marx intended, but then he has always seemed to me to be a few pence short of a shilling..)
As with most things philosophical the arguments seem to take place in a vacuum: any one who has run a business that actually creates anything knows that at one level, there is the struggle to create it, requiring capital and definite incentive management, and at the other level, there is the sharing of the rewards. The tragedy is so few people ever have to do this, sitting as most academics do in funded academia, where the socialist principle of ‘my budgetary needs are greater than yours’ and the total intellectual and spatial distance between the academic activity and the actual generation of wealth seems larger than even the vast egos involved….;-)
And that is the problem with single valued ideologies, that offer one size fits all solutions to problems that are diverse and complex.
There’s a whole other discussion to be had on that topic.
‘When trying to get a car without and engine from A to B, how come the competing strategies of ‘all get behind and push’ are so at odds with the strategy of ‘all jump in and let the handbrake off’?
I am sure learned people might argue the case interminably,until some humble engineer remarks that ‘it depends on whether its going uphill at the time’
Thanks Ben, S.W. . As you will see if you have a chance to read the papers that are referenced in my post here, I address these points. It is indeed for ecological reasons that the Reichian argument doesn’t any longer help Rawls: see my CNS piece. As for Rawlsians collapsing the difference principle into pure equality: that would be great, but, as I point out in my CRISPP piece, that would in effect mean the end of the difference principle. Because it wouldn’t justify any DIFFERENCES any more.
Thanks Leo. As Herman Daly argues, capitalist economics, on which Rawls in practice relies, is indeed only appropriate to those brief moments in history in which there is a ‘steady-state’ of expansion. In the real long run steady-state, as I discuss in my CNS piece (and in my Compass Red-Green piece), there is no more room for capitalism, nor for Rawlsianism.
Ah Rupert, but is that so?
We are not a hunter gatherer society any more, or yet again. We depend on a complex technical and social infrastructure to survive as a ‘civilised society’ Marxism is the doctrine of the hunter gatherer, to whom the world is full of stuff and all may pick it, and there is no property…
I think you are exactly wrong in that socialism is the coming thing: In fact I would say it is completely dead, only upheld by the forces of inertia, so to speak.
It may be that traditional capitalism is also dead, in that there are no projects available to increase wealth by deploying capital.
And yet, to anyone who has to undergo a temperate winter, the concept of storing enough food and fuel to survive it cannot be abandoned. We have the concept of personal property, and of theft. For good reasons. And personal property is capital of one sort or another.
Likewise to even sustain society in its current state requires at least infrastructure replacement: That is not done simply by wishing it so, and neither will people undertake it without gaining thereby. So the concepts of increased benefit and increased benefit as a consequence of socially useful labour, must still apply.
In this context,. socialism is actually the most likely agency to destroy civilisation, that there is. Socialism inevitably takes us directly to a hunter gatherer society with zero capital, and complete collapse of a state that functions solely to distribute wealth, never to create it.
As I said,. viewing things from an ivory tower is all very well, until the foundations start to subside, then you may need to figure out what you are going to pay the builder with when appeals to their selflessness fall on deaf ears. And your theories are regarded as completely worthless when they don’t actually hep get their hands on the necessary cement.
In short, our society does not depend on academic philosophers half, or even 1% as much as it depends on a small cadre of specialised technologists, who have the ability to keep it functioning. And there is no reason or them to continue to do that if they reap no increased benefit from doing so.
You may go to a dentist and demand free treatment. But the dentist who gives it to you will not last if his suppliers and staff fail to work for nothing also.
In short the argument for capitalism as a means to make it all better, may have gone, but trust me, the argument to keep it for fear of things getting much much worse, is still extremely valid.
The socialists would have us all equally miserable starving and dying. I say that the human race’s survival depends on at least a few people having a life that is qualitatively better than that.
(As long as they don’t waste the privilege with profound, but unrealistic and irrelevant philosophical arguments).
If you truly believe that, I suggest you relocate to Zimbabwe, where the correct and valid application of pure Marxist principles has resulted in a socialist paradise the world has never known.
Instead of fat cat farmers employing capital and labour to produce food, the land was given to the people. Who were unable to hire labour, or attract capital, and so it simply was worthless to them.
You may consider that a better solution than inequality. I do not.
There are a few different things on the table here.
First, it’s unclear that TSL set out to show that all inequality is a detriment. They set out to show that more equality is better; that is not the same as showing that strict equality is best. This is the point I made in connection to Reich.
Second, there’s the point you address in CNS (which is unrelated to the point I made when bringing up Reich). There, you argue that Rawls’s lexical ordering of the liberty principle above the difference principle lead to a dilemma: either it produces problems for future generations, or it collapses into egalitarianism. Admittedly, the first horn of the dilemma seems like a plausible and interesting critique of Rawls’s theory, and I’ll say no more about it.
The second horn is what I’m worried about. Presumably — though this isn’t clear — you’re thinking of ways that an advocate of the difference principle might avoid the first horn of your dilemma by (contra Rawls) forcing the just savings principle to strictly constrain the difference principle. Hence, you reason that the difference principle collapses into egalitarianism “if it turns out that any difference between incomes… produces a result that is ecologically unsustainable”. In order to show that the antecedent is true, you provide a citation to two works co-written by the same author (Meadows et al 1972; Meadows et al 2004). That’s a deferral, not an argument.
Also, I do not have any reason to think that the claim is true. Suppose I work in a community garden, carefully monitoring my external influences. Suppose that the community garden requires management and coordination with wider distributors. Suppose that we’re all run according to a system that has internalized all known externalities, or at least has developed some kind of responsible scheme for managing our ecological footprint: it obeys the just savings principle. There is no reason to suppose such a system must have a division of labor in which some people are compensated equally to others. A syndicate might possess a class structure to compensate workers who occupy different roles according to the relative worth of their contributions. That’s the difference principle in action, since that extra compensation is what is required in order to acknowledge the use/exchange value of the manager, without whom the gardens would not run as well as they could.
But this is not the sort of thing that this paper talks about. Instead, the argument proceeds by noting some problems for our practical approaches towards reaching a sustainable end-state. (Hence, the Contractions and Convergence model.) But that’s a practical problem, and Rawls’s Theory of Justice is primarily concerned with an ideal conception of justice.
Of course, as practical problems go, this one’s a doozy, well worth discussion. And if philosophers can help solve it, great. But perhaps the one thing the philosophers can help us see about the practical environmental issues (and their relationship to global justice) is that the way that we phrase the problem will matter to whatever answers we’re going to get.
For example, you ask how we can resist the pressure for growth in a system that is designed to maximize individual self-interest. The phrasing of that claim matters. For the glib answer is, we do not have any such system; we live in griftopia, not a liberal paradise. Putting the glib answer aside, it seems to me that, to whatever extent that we do live in a system that seeks to maximize individual self-interest, economic growth can be limited in part by limiting the growth of the population. Making the labor pool more scarce might increase the pressure on power elites to help institute a system that takes class mobility seriously.
I should have been more explicit on my first point. Reich’s numbers support of the idea that you can have economic growth where all classes make significant gains. This is evidence against the idea that the market is or must be a zero sum game. If the premise “the main reason that the poor are poor is simply that the rich are rich” is weak sauce, then it’s not going to help support the claim that all inequalities are deleterious.
Thanks Benjamin. My argument for why it will not be plausible in your community garden for there to be significant inequalities, in a steady-state economy, is that those inequalities will be permanent. I make that argument at length elsewhere, including in my IJGE piece that is just about to appear, entitled “Beyond an ungreen-economics-based political philosophy”. I claim that the difference principle is not (in Rawls’s terms) ‘congruent’, in a steady-state society, only in a growthist society.
No problem. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I think.
Bon appetit!
I still dispute that, because an overall steady state society still needs new stuff, even if only to replace old stuff.
Until and unless we have an utterly stable population and a robot slave society that generates everything we need and the only game is social distribution of it..but even there, the distributors (unless they are robots too) will always manage to get a bit more cake..
And there will always be resource or wealth class scarcities.
We cant ALL have a yacht. There aren’t enough berths. Does that mean NO ONE should have one.
If so, who should get it? Lottery?
That is the problem with this academic analysis: The real world is not homogeneous, it’s lumpy, and as long as it needs people to run it, as well as gain benefit, those that lose leisure time to make it work need some recompense to make it worth their while.
I became disillusioned with the PURELY academic approach very early on in my engineering career. Faced with a need to design an electronic circuit, I was urged to use the new computerised design facility at my place of work. I duly did so and built what it said was optimal. Well, it was pretty good over a very narrow band, but not when exposed to wider swings..Why? because the simplistic academic model was only an approximation to the real actual transistor in it.
Likewise later on I was too busy to trace a fault in a unit that I knew to be faulty, so an academic consultant was called in to pinpoint the faulty area..in my design or in a bought in unit. I knew that the problem only occurred when we attached the bought in unit, and disappeared if it was removed, but anyway, politics is politics so two weeks later the consultant announced that his calculations exonerated me. ‘I could have told you that in 30 seconds’ I said ‘How’?’ ‘Simply by removing that part and replacing with a dummy load: Look. It’s fine’.
Human beings are not perfect identical components in the circuitry of society. Anything but, and neither, even if they were, should they get treated equally. It’s possible to take the same transistor, operate it at low current for low noise and economy, or high current for power, in which case you need to spend a little money on getting the heat out of it or it will die.
In the same way what people do must result in different rewards, appropriate to their actual context. To fail to do that is actually UNfair on the people concerned.
People doing sweaty manual labour need more baths and more food. People doing stressful planning work probably need more leisure activities of a physical nature. The costs are not identical to these people.
That’s a crude physical level analysis. Likewise if you put someone in a particularly crucial role it makes a lot of sense to treat them very well indeed. You don’t want to underpay the man with his hand on a large sum of someone else’s money. You don’t want to overwork a brain surgeon to the point of exhaustion, or a truck driver either.
Academics simply don’t understand work outside the public sector. They think wealth is ‘just there’ and the only thing that matters is allocating it ‘fairly’
But even if overall GDP is flat, that’s still no reason to not have diversity of reward.
It is accepted however, that growth based rules of thumb like ‘every body gets richer’ no longer apply. The only way for everybody to get richer in that scenario is when the population actually shrinks..
But even with a flat GDP its extremely dangerous to go for uniformity of reward. It totally removes any material incentive from tacking the tougher issues.
In short, if being good and socially useful nets you no more than being a total social parasite, why would anyone bother? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Dream on, Comrade Reed!