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Article Excerpt
The term "political" egalitarianism is used here, not to refer to equality within the political sphere, but rather in John Rawls's sense, to refer to a conception of egalitarian distributive justice that is capable of serving as the object of an overlapping consensus in a pluralistic society. (1) Thus "political" egalitarianism is political in the same way that Rawls's "political" liberalism is political. The central task when it comes to developing such a conception of equality is to determine what constraints a principle of equality must satisfy in order to qualify as "freestanding," or to be justifiable in a way that does not presuppose the correctness of any one member of the set of reasonable yet incompatible "religious, philosophical, and moral" doctrines that attract large numbers of adherents in our world. (2) (Rawls uses the analogy of a "module" in order to describe the way that a properly political conception of justice "fits into and can be supported by various reasonable comprehensive doctrines that endure in the society regulated by it." (3) Political egalitarianism would be "modular" in this sense.)
Rather than getting embroiled in the controversies that have arisen over Rawls's formulation of this idea, I would like simply to accept the intuition, widespread among political philosophers, that equality is the sort of principle that--if given a proper formulation--could satisfy the requirements of a political conception of justice. After all, regardless of what people's projects, values, or conceptions of the good life may be, it should be possible to design a set of arrangements that would provide equal opportunity to pursue these goals, or that would treat each conception of the good with equal respect, and so on. From this perspective, the principle of equality resembles the principle of Pareto-efficiency, or certain formulations of the principle of liberty--it is one that everyone should be able to endorse, insofar as it does not privilege, or presuppose the correctness of, any particular set of projects, values, conceptions of the good, and so on. Yet despite this widespread intuition, and despite the role that Rawls played in provoking much of the contemporary discussion among egalitarians, very few egalitarians have paid much attention to the sort of constraints that a desire to keep things political would impose upon a conception of equality. Indeed, the version of egalitarianism that has attracted the most attention and debate among philosophers, so-called "luck egalitarianism," clearly violates several of the constraints that Rawls imposed upon freestanding conceptions of justice, and in several of its formulations is explicitly wedded to controversial metaphysical commitments. (4) This is quite perverse, since one of the central attractions of the principle of equality, as a component in a more general theory of justice, is that it seems like a good candidate for being given a freestanding formulation. (5) (Elizabeth Anderson has put the point more polemically, accusing proponents of luck egalitarianism of having become sidetracked by issues of "cosmic injustice," and thereby having "lost sight of the distinctively political aims of egalitarianism." (6))
In this paper, rather than attempting to specify a freestanding conception of equality, I will take on the somewhat more modest task of specifying some of the constraints that any form of egalitarianism should satisfy in order to qualify as such. Specifically, I will argue that political egalitarianism must be nonpaternalistic in its application, that the egalitarian calculus must be based upon a public metric of value, and that the principle must be limited in scope to the benefits of cooperation. Before going on to this, however, I would like to show why luck egalitarianism in its standard formulation fails to qualify as a political conception of equality. My goal in doing so is not to criticize luck egalitarianism, but rather to plead for a partitioning of the philosophical discussion, so that different flavors of egalitarianism can be discussed and debated without necessarily being seen as rivals. More specifically, I want to suggest that political conceptions of equality should be developed and debated without the requirement that they be responsive to all of the "egalitarian intuitions" that are routinely trotted out in the literature. A political conception of justice by its very nature will fail to speak to all of our moral concerns, and will rail to condemn all states of affairs that we regard as morally wrong. Yet this in itself is hot an objection to a political conception of equality, unless it can be shown that the principles upon which this moral judgment is based can be given a freestanding formulation.
1.
Everyone agrees that it is impossible to eliminate all inequality. Furthermore, even if it were possible to get a perfectly equal distribution (according to some conception of equality, with respect to some privileged equalisandum), things wouldn't stay equal for very long. The actions people take can be expected to disrupt any pattern of distribution that is established, and the intervention of unforeseen or uncertain events is likely to disrupt it even further. Some people will gain, others will lose. Thus a central problem for any egalitarian is to determine which of these deviations from the pattern of equal distribution represent an affront to the principle of equality, and which do not. A theory that permits too little in the way of deviation will quickly fall victim to the critique of "patterned" conceptions of justice advanced by Robert Nozick. (7) On the other hand, a theory that permits too much deviation starts to look less like a conception of equality, and more like a rhetorically misleading justification for inequality.
Against this background, we have available a common-sense distinction between deserved and undeserved gains and losses, along with the intuition that the former set should not be subject to egalitarian redistribution. Luck egalitarians argue that this distinction should be interpreted in terms of outcomes for which an individual is responsible and those for which she is not. In cases where the individual is not responsible--where the outcome is the product of "sheer luck" (8)--all gains or losses should be socialized, but not otherwise. Ronald Dworkin famously introduced the distinction between option luck and brute luck in order to provide an interpretation of this concept of responsibility. (9) If a particular loss is the product of a choice that an individual has made, then it is an instance of "option luck," the individual is responsible for it, and so the loss should lie where it falls. If, however, it is not a product of any choice that the person has made, but is rather a matter of circumstance, then it is an instance of "brute luck," and the individual who suffers the loss should be indemnified. Thus the goal of the luck egalitarian is to eliminate the influence of brute luck, both good and bad, in the determination of people's fortunes. (10)
This suggestion is not nearly as straightforward as it seems. Nevertheless, many philosophers have found the analysis compelling, based largely on the moral intuition that leaving losses to lie where they fall, in cases in which the individual has done nothing to bring them upon herself, is to hold that person responsible for an outcome even when she has committed no fault. There are of course many other ways of formulating the intuition. (11) Yet however one attempts to work it out, problems arise as soon as one tries to employ this framework for thinking about a political conception of equality. For example, one of the immediate consequences of luck egalitarianism is that it commits the egalitarian (pro tanto) to indemnification of the individual for any "accidents of birth or fortune," such as being born blind, or unable to conceive a child. Luck egalitarians consider such handicaps to be clear-cut instances of bad brute luck, for which the individual could hot possibly be held responsible. Indeed, in many of its formulations, luck egalitarianism is essentially equivalent to a "patterned" conception of justice based on the formula: "to each according to his or her level of responsibility." Yet intuitions about luck and responsibility are notoriously culture-specific, not to mention closely tied to broader metaphysical and cosmological views. The very concept of "brute luck"--as opposed to the will of heaven--is very much a product of a modern, secular, Enlightenment worldview. The doctrine of original sin in the Christian tradition, along with the various theodicies that have been developed over time, were intended precisely to dissolve the appearance of arbitrariness in the distribution of natural misfortune and suffering. Or consider the role that "fate" plays in traditional Chinese culture. As Lin Yutang observed,
Fatalism is hot only a Chinese mental habit, it is part of the conscious Confucian tradition. So closely is this belief in fate connected with the Doctrine of Social Status, that we have such current phrases as "keep your own status and resign yourself to Heaven's will," and "let heaven and fate have their way" ... This doctrine of fatalism is a great source of personal strength and contentment, and accounts for the placidity of Chinese souls. (12)
More dramatically, the luck egalitarian reason for believing that natural inequality is undeserved, and thus should be redressed by society, is rejected by most people who believe in reincarnation. This is not a marginal belief system, but rather a view associated with Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Taoism, not to mention a variety of less numerous groups. Not only do many adherents of these religious traditions hold the individual responsible for natural misfortunes such as congenital birth defects (or more specifically, hold the individual's soul responsible, for having committed some moral fault in a previous life), many also consider it essential that the individual bear the full weight of this burden, either as atonement for past faults, or as a way of securing a higher station in the next cycle of death and rebirth.
Those who reject this conception of responsibility typically do so because it relies upon a somewhat exotic metaphysics, which allows individuals (as defined by a problematic conception of personal identity) to "cause" (according to an equally problematic notion of causation) their own natural endowments. Yet while this worldview may not be scientific, it clearly belongs to a "reasonable" comprehensive doctrine in Rawls's sense of the term. (13) (Or to put the point more sharply, it belongs to a doctrine that is no more unreasonable than many of the Christian belief systems that political liberals are typically at pains to accommodate.) Furthermore, adherents of these various non-Western religious traditions constitute important minority groups within many Western democracies, and so the issue cannot be dismissed as simply a problem that arises at the international level.
Of course, it is not clear that luck egalitarians have a less controversial story to tell about either personal identity, causality, or the relationship between responsibility and causation. (14) But regardless of how good any of these stories is, the point is that a truly political conception of equality should not need to have any such story at all. The Chinese belief in fate cannot be appealed to, within the context of a liberal society, as a justification for social hierarchy, any more than the Hindu belief in karma can be appealed to as grounds for establishing a caste system. What the presence of these belief systems does, however, is block the luck egalitarian from appealing to his own metaphysical views of fate and fortune as the basis for imposing a particular pattern of distribution. What a liberal society requires is a conception of justice that is able to provide considerations that speak in favor of particular distributive arrangements regardless of what people's broader cosmological views happen to be. The problem with luck egalitarianism is that all of the specific judgments it renders about which inequalities are acceptable and unacceptable depend upon chains of reasoning that presuppose precisely the sort of metaphysical commitments that a political conception of justice needs to bracket, in order to secure agreement in a pluralistic society.
Many luck egalitarians have noticed that the central role assigned to responsibility in their doctrine creates difficulties, simply because responsibility is a notion that tends to be interpreted in the light of more comprehensive moral and metaphysical doctrines. (15) G.A. Cohen, for instance, has observed that the strategy of defining responsibility in terms of what an agent has chosen runs the risk of landing "political philosophy in the morass of the free will problem" and of subordinating "political philosophy to metaphysical questions that may be impossible to answer." He suggests, however, that this may be just "tough luck," and that there may be no alternative but to follow the argument "where it goes." (16) He is unperturbed by the Rawlsian thought that while luck egalitarians are busy convincing Christians that there is no such thing as original sin, and Hindus that there is no such thing as karma, members of society at large will still need a theory of justice to govern their institutions, a theory that must incorporate some conception of equality. Carl Knight, in his "metaphysical" defense of luck egalitarianism, suggests convening a "responsibility committee composed of some of the leading authorities on the relevant metaphysical issues" (17) to settle these questions. Although Knight presents this as a defense of luck egalitarianism, the thought that practical political questions--such as how progressive the income tax system should be cannot be settled until a committee of metaphysicians issues a report illustrates quite clearly the problem with the luck-egalitarian project. (18)
Again, the point is not to criticize luck egalitarianism, but simply to show that it is not a good candidate for adoption as a political conception of equality, because it relies upon moral notions that are too closely tied to a particular comprehensive doctrine. One might want to draw the conclusion, as Knight does, that the metaphysical embeddedness of luck egalitarianism shows that every egalitarian doctrine necessarily presupposes a broader metaphysical view. I think this would be premature, simply because egalitarians have not spent enough time thinking about what it would mean for a conception of equality to be political, and so have not taken great pains to formulate a conception of equality able to satisfy the relevant sort of constraints. Before deciding that equality cannot be political, it would be better to strive for greater clarity about what the need to keep things political would entail for egalitarian doctrine, and what specific constraints it would impose.
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