Week-3

Society as an ethical system†

John Crowley*

UNESCO Division of Social Transformations and Intercultural Dialogue, Paris, France

(Received 10 August 2016; final version received 10 August 2016)

The idea of society on which the social sciences are premised is one of a structured pattern of interdependence and interaction that drives participation in a shared communication space and, thereby, a degree of common consciousness. These are also the preconditions for ethics to operate as an internal mode of self-understanding rather than an external imposition. Societies, in other words, are ethical systems. In order to understand in what sense societies, in the context of contemporary transformations, can still be thought of and analysed as ethical systems, the article focuses on inequality as both a practically important and normatively complex challenge – one that the international community, through the 2030 Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development, has recognized to be one of its action priorities. These considerations further bear on the relation between the social sciences and the humanities, which is one important dimension of the future of the social sciences.

Keywords: social science; inequality; Sustainable Development Goals; ethics

Introduction

In its eighteenth-century origins and nineteenth-century early development, social science was closely connected with moral philosophy. Questions about the desirable organization of human affairs were based in part on observations or assumptions about human nature, and conversely considerations about how humans ought to behave were informed by an understanding of how societies function and evolve over time.

Since Durkheim and Weber, this connection has loosened. It would be an exaggeration to say that social science and moral philosophy have entirely parted company, as the work of Jürgen Habermas, to name but one, suffices to show. Nonetheless, it remains true as a generalization that the academic development of the social sciences has been broadly inim- ical to the kind of fusion of the analytical and the normative that would earlier have been as natural within “social philosophy”. On the one hand, the intellectual and institutional requirement to achieve emancipation from the dominion of philosophy has led to a distinc- tion between the social sciences and the humanities that would not previously have been judged meaningful. And on the other hand, the aspiration to constitute a science (or

© 2016 ICCR Foundation

†This article is largely based on an address entitled “Equality, Justice, Inclusion. Ethical Perspectives on Contemporary Social Dynamics”, originally delivered to a UNESCO conference on “Rethinking Development: Ethics and Social Inclusion” that took place in Mexico City on 17–18 August 2011.The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and, except where specifically stated otherwise, should not be regarded as official statements of a UNESCO position on the topics addressed. *Email: [email protected]

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 2017 Vol. 30, No. 1, 36–46, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2016.1224156

sciences) of society gave rise to an epistemology in which statements about what “ought” to be were in principle illegitimate.

It has long been recognized that, however historically and conceptually intelligible, such distinctions between the humanities and the social sciences, and between “facts” and “norms”, are at best practically convenient simplifications and at worst unhelpful lega- cies. Furthermore, it is widely acknowledged that the understanding of the physical sciences on which social science premised its foundational epistemology is, and even in the late nineteenth century already was, somewhat misleading. And indeed, there is exten- sive research in various disciplines that bears on the grey zone in which moral judgement may be understood as social fact, along with ambitious theoretical attempts to make sense of the post-positivistic nexus between facts and norms.

Among the issues that will shape the future of social science, the connection with the humanities, and its epistemological implications, are likely to be of considerable signifi- cance, especially as they bear on the social role of social science as it relates not just to understanding but to policies, to social mobilization and to the everyday fabric of social life. The purpose of this article is to consider one fairly circumscribed aspect of this general problem, which reflects in interesting ways some of its characteristic features: the status of ethics as a mode of inquiry into and language of justification within contem- porary societies. In order to understand in what sense societies can be thought of and ana- lysed as ethical systems, I will focus on inequality as both a practically important and normatively complex challenge – one that the international community, through the 2030 Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development, has recognized to be one of its action priorities.

The contemporary dynamics of inequality

Statistics show clearly that contemporary social dynamics have led, over the past 20 years, to growing social inequality within most societies. Income distributions have been stretched, with the incomes of the richest rising much faster than the average, while the poorest have been confronted by stagnant real wages and, in many cases, pressure on welfare systems where they exist. In some cases, the impact has been minor, although not trivial; in other cases, including the United States as well as some fast-growing devel- oping countries, the result has been levels of inequality unprecedented since 1945. Inequal- ities in terms of wealth have sharpened even more strikingly (Piketty 2014). Furthermore, such progress as can be observed in reducing aggregate global levels of inequality is almost entirely attributable to rapid economic growth in certain emerging countries: it is compa- tible with rising inequalities within nearly all societies (International Social Science Council 2016).

Nor is inequality simply a matter of income and assets. Studies in most countries point to increased inequalities of opportunities, especially with respect to education, and to strik- ing correlations between inequality and ill-health (Pickett and Wilkinson 2015), which are only partly explained by differential insurance or other institutional features. In principle, one could argue that such inequalities are inevitable in periods of rapid economic tran- sition, and will correct themselves over time. While this may turn out to be true, the evi- dence of the past two decades does not provide any reason to make such a prediction. On the contrary, some studies suggest that, in the most unequal countries, inequalities might be locked in by endogamy, residential and educational segregation, and more sophisticated asset-protection strategies, to the point that they may become, for all practical purposes, self-perpetuating. As readers of nineteenth-century literature know, one could then rely

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on the heirs to great fortunes to dilapidate them very quickly. Great fortunes today are much less likely to be gambled or drunk away, to the extent that philanthropy has, in the view of some, become the only mechanism of wealth redistribution over time.

Locked-in inequalities have sociological implications that are quite different from tran- sitory inequalities that affect positions open to all in fair conditions of equal opportunity – to paraphrase John Rawls, of whom more later. Once they reach a certain scale, such inequalities negate the very idea of social inclusion – which I understand here are as full participation by all in the characteristic processes of the societies to which they belong. This concern with the “price of inequality” (Stiglitz 2013) has both an objective and a subjective dimension.

In objective terms, a society that is profoundly segmented by entrenched inequalities may simply no longer be a “society”, in so far as its members may cease to share any “characteristic processes” at all. If people do not attend the same schools, do not live in the same neighbourhoods, do not consume the same kinds of goods and services, do not visit the same places, are not treated in the same hospitals, do not read the same books or watch the same films and so on, there comes a point when they become literally separate. “Separate development”, one might recall, was the polite official rationale for apartheid. Probably no current society quite matches this description. Indeed, one of the features of technological globalization has been to make material culture more uniform than it was traditionally, even though its enjoyment is highly diverse. Furthermore, many societies remain resistant to such centrifugal pressures – populism being perhaps one of the purely ideological ways of managing them. But the tendency is nonetheless very clear. In his classic 1949 essay “Citizenship and Social Class”, the British sociologist T.H. Marshall pointed out that the combination of common citizenship and class-based inequalities was a “stew of paradox”, but nonetheless a nourishing one provided that a certain uniform- ity of rights, institutions and material culture was maintained (1950). We are clearly no longer in the world of Marshall.

In subjective terms, even when objective structures of inequality stop well short of “separate development”, the idea of society as a common heritage of its members may come to ring very hollow to those who feel excluded from such “characteristic processes” as consumption, production, political participation and social respect. The way in which such perceived exclusion can explode has been seen graphically on the streets of Europe and North America on various occasions in the last 15 years, though the explosions are rare – not least for the good reasons Marx and Engels gave when snootily dismissing the Lumpenproletariat in the Communist Manifesto. But the seething resentment that makes the explosions possible is ever-present, and is unlikely to go away in current econ- omic and social circumstances. At the same time, the more privileged sections of society are equally – perhaps more – likely to regard themselves as “not belonging” and to seek ways to opt out from the “characteristic processes” by which most of the population defines itself.

Inequality as an ethical notion

Inequalities might in very general terms be compatible with a just society, as Rawls argued they could be, subject to certain demanding conditions, in A Theory of Justice (1971). However, the patterns of inequality characteristic of contemporary dynamics do not seem to have the requisite features. They are, prima facie, grossly unjust because they reflect not differential modes of social inclusion, but precisely the sharp end of social exclusion. However, this widely shared view, which is by no means radical, is only the

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starting point of serious ethical analysis. What is necessary is first to identify what is unethical about the kinds of inequality referred to earlier, and secondly to clarify what might constitute an ethical response.

The intrusion of ethics at this point raises a methodological question. While justice is, at some level, an ethical notion, a theory of justice is not necessarily cast in ethical terms. Indeed, the whole point of the Rawlsian approach, and the reason why it has proved so influential, is that it makes it possible to focus on aggregate social outcomes – or even more abstractly, as Rawls himself puts it, on the “basic structure” of society – without needing to identify who is to blame. Within a reasonably cohesive, historically constituted moral community, the question of blame does not arise. A particular basic structure, which produces certain kinds of outcomes, is our shared inheritance and can only be modified and improved by the participation of all – not just the beneficiaries of any particular reform.

On the other hand, the characteristic weakness of this approach is that, in the absence of a pre-existing moral community, its implications might look pretty indeterminate. As is well known, this was Rawls’ own view. It led him to the conclusion, in the late work The Law of Peoples (Rawls 2001), that it was pointless to seek a theory of justice at the global level. Admirers of Rawls such as Pogge (2008) and Barry (2005) broke sharply with him on this point, though their own arguments for global justice are stronger in estab- lishing what kinds of positions can seriously and cogently be defended than it showing how they might come to be accepted.

An ethical approach to social inequality, on the contrary, presumably needs to argue not simply that certain patterns of outcomes are unjust, but that responsibilities for addressing them can be allocated in some meaningful way. And this, notoriously, constitutes a trap. Critics of Rawls such as Nozick (1974) and Hayek (2012) argued strongly in the 1970s that responsibility can attach only to individual behaviour – to things done intentionally or done unintentionally without due regard to consequences. In other words, in the absence of legal liability or of something analogous to it in areas that the law does not touch, justice has nothing to say. To put it bluntly, an ethical approach to justice negates the very idea of social justice, showing it to be, as Hayek put it, a “mirage”.

There are two possible strategies to declare unethical contemporary patterns of inequal- ity. One would be to argue that responsibilities can be assigned for aggregate social out- comes, once the notion of responsibility is suitably reinterpreted. The second would be to claim that certain unjust circumstances are unethical, regardless of whether anyone is to blame for them. Their unethical character would, in this case, be a kind of supplement to their injustice, something that adds insult to injury.1 It should be emphasized that these two strategies, while conceptually distinct, do not necessarily clash. Indeed, they can be articulated quite neatly, as I hope to show in the rest of this section.

The second strategy is very familiar, if one reformulates it slightly. A situation can be regarded as unethical, for instance, if it offends against human dignity or constitutes a gross failure to realize universally recognized human rights. The first of the Sustainable Devel- opment Goals (SDGs) as adopted by the United Nations in 2015 – “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” – can, I think, be interpreted in this light. There may of course be specific injustices that contribute to extreme poverty, but even if they cannot be identified, the fact of extreme poverty is in itself an affront to human dignity that demands action, regardless of any kind of specific causal responsibility. The form of the first quantitative target (of seven corresponding to Goal 1) is indicative in this respect, calling as it does on the international community, by 2030, to “eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day”.2 At one level, this is a purely rhetorical strategy, but it can in certain circumstances motivate

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those who have the capacity to act to do so. In addition, other targets related to the same Goal either specify certain preconditions for the main target to be met (establishment of social protection systems, rights to economic resources and enhanced resilience in the face of environmental and other pressures) or point to the need for resources to be mobi- lized. Furthermore, the SDGs, unlike the MDGs, explicitly relate the eradication of extreme poverty to the reduction of poverty in general,3 thereby making a further connec- tion between poverty and inequality, which is explicitly addressed in SDG 10 to “reduce inequality within and among countries”.

However, making remedial action depend exclusively on the capacity to act is, when pushed to its logical conclusion, a purely charitable approach that actually risks undermin- ing the basis of human rights and human dignity from which the impulse to act proceed in the first place. If the key question is what is owed to the very poor, following the title of Pogge’s edited volume (2007), then ethics cannot remain divorced from justice without undermining itself. This suggests that, on issues such as extreme poverty, and possibly on all issues of social inequality, extending and reinterpreting the principle of responsibility is essential to the pursuit of social justice.

The nature of ethical responsibility

In order to take this discussion forward, it may be helpful to start from the legal framework that Hayek and Nozick used precisely to counter Rawls.

In civil law, one is liable for breach of duty (deontological malpractice) but also, even in the absence of any specific duty, for tort, meaning harm inflicted on someone else as the foreseeable (though not necessarily foreseen) result of one’s actions. Legal frameworks, although they differ widely with respect to the details, share one feature: they typically interpret very narrowly both “foreseeable” and “result” in this context. The self-appointed task of ethics has consistently been to push the legal boundaries by exploring to what extent particular agents should be held morally accountable (though not necessarily legally liable) for outcomes that connect to their actions in ways that are less direct and/ or less foreseeable than the law would allow. Clearly, if this cannot be achieved, the pursuit of social justice will be hampered. But this is mere wishful thinking if some cogent grounds for an extension of responsibility beyond the narrow legal framework cannot be established.

With respect to the aggregate outcomes of contemporary social transformations, there appear to be three main grounds of social responsibility, each of which has been exten- sively developed in the literature, particularly perhaps on environmental ethics, though it bears very directly on other areas as well.

First, there is a widely recognized generalized duty of care, which relates the moral agent directly to aggregate outcomes, whether or not there is a direct causal connection between such outcomes and the agent’s own actions. In the environmental area, this cor- responds to a principle of “awareness”, whereby what I should do depends on what others have done. In economic and financial matters, this implies that corporations, policy-makers, financial professionals and others may be reasonably held responsible for actions that contributed to the aggravation of patterns of injustice that had already been created by the reckless or indifferent actions of others. One cannot escape blame simply by pointing out, however correctly, that one is not solely to blame.

In the environmental case, awareness is primarily of complex systemic connections and of their implications, which drive aggregate phenomena such as climate change and bio- diversity loss. The same principle can be applied by analogy, say to the financial crisis

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as it unfolded starting in 2007. It is not unreasonable to argue, even within the fairly narrow terms of causal responsibility, that it was reckless on the part of various operators to ignore, and fail to seek adequate information about, the ways in which their actions related to those of others. It is no accident, in this regard, that the financial crisis was revealed, initially, in the form of a crisis of liquidity. Liquidity is what enables investors to ignore long-term con- sequences and systemic interactions, since it makes it possible to withdraw from the market at any time. Conversely, the liquidity crisis froze and brought into sharp focus the various forms of asset mispricing that were previously obscured. Metaphorically and systemically, liquidity is to the financial system what the absorption capacities of the atmosphere and the ocean are to the environment.

In a similar manner, it is not absurd to hold corporations morally accountable for the systemic outcomes of their deliberate actions (to depress wages, to relocate production, to avoid taxes, etc.) when the connections were, in principle, capable of being analysed – and indeed were extensively discussed in the public domain. The same reasoning applies to policy-makers, who can justly be held accountable not exactly for the circumstances they were confronted with, but for their failure to take adequate account of those circumstances in choosing their policies. As for demonstrably ungrounded policies that produce predic- tably disastrous outcomes that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, one hardly needs even an expanded notion of responsibility to hold their proponents individually accountable.

Secondly, regardless of causal responsibility, there is at least a generic duty to help those in need. In most legal systems, this is institutionalized to some extent, though not usually in a very demanding way. For instance, some criminal codes make it an offence not to help someone in danger, so long as one can do so without endangering oneself. This is obviously a duty that falls on the bystander – the fact that one did nothing to cause the danger to which someone else is exposed is irrelevant to the duty to provide assistance. Only the effective capacity to help matters from an ethical point of view. At one level, as noted earlier, this constitutes a duty of charity that may actually undermine rather than support social inclusion and justice. If, however, the duty to care is explicitly based on human dignity and human rights – which is a logical implication of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, based as it is on the internationally agreed human rights frame- work – its potentially inegalitarian implications can perhaps be neutralized.

The financial crisis offers a straightforward analogy in this regard. Institutions that have the capacity to provide emergency assistance have a prima facie duty to help to stabilize the system, whether or not they contributed to its destabilization in the first place, within the limits of their capacity to do so. Such institutions have, furthermore, a duty on the same grounds to provide relevant assistance to those hurt by the crisis, even apart from systemic instability. These duties need, of course, to be qualified by the moral hazard they imply. If the reckless can count on the help of the prudent, then why be prudent? This is why the legal form of the generic duty to provide assistance is usually quite complex. Nonetheless, the basic moral intuition remains valid.

Thirdly, and most generally, it could be argued, at least within the so-called “virtue ethics” paradigm (see Gardiner 2005, for an overview), that a basic value orientation towards the good of the whole is ethically desirable, and perhaps even mandatory. From this perspective, I should be concerned for the good of others – of my fellow creatures in an ecosystem, of my fellow humans in a shared society – regardless of whether I have played a role in a system that affects them, and regardless of whether they are in any strict sense “endangered”. It is rather the combination of their inherent dignity and my own moral identity that places duties upon me. Just as an argument can be made in

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environmental ethics that “sustainability” is fundamentally an issue of virtue, not prudence, so an ethical approach to development might require that agents judge their actions by their effect on the social system as a whole.

The main reason to be prudent in asserting such a duty is the burden of judgement it entails. Moral agents trying to make the “right” choice with imperfect information might do more harm than good. As the colloquial saying has it, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Adam Smith provided a systematic moral theory in this regard, with his idea that the “invisible hand” was more likely to be conducive to the common good than attempts to achieve it directly (Smith 2003). Friedrich Hayek, system- atizing the same intuition, went so far as to claim that any deliberate attempt to achieve any social outcome is necessarily doomed to failure by imperfect information (Hayek 2012). However, the call for prudence in acting on the duty to consider the good of the whole does not negate the duty itself – on the contrary, it precisely the ethical concern that dictates the prudence.

The obsolescence of society?

It is certainly not impossible, therefore, within the global framework as it is, to develop ethical reflections that, by reinterpreting the principle of responsibility, offer normative grounds – more cogent than mere denunciation – for criticism of certain patterns of behav- iour and institutional arrangements and for promotion of specific alternatives. The key to this approach, it will have been noted, is a certain kind of connectedness. What makes it possible to combine justice and ethics at the conceptual level – and thereby make applied ethics work for justice in practice – is the premise that inequalities occur within an inchoate moral community.

This premise is undoubtedly awkward, since, observably, social exclusion currently brings with it an erosion of shared recognition of a moral community. Nor, however, is it mere wishful thinking.

The key point is the central plank of sociology since its inception: the idea that a society is not just a grouping of people, but a structured pattern of interdependence and interaction that drives participation in a shared communication space and, thereby, a degree of common consciousness. The point is that the relation between these features is structural: the degree of interaction and interdependence that characterizes modern societies depends on a degree of mutual recognition – of trust, of shared institutions, of mutual understand- ing. In no way does such a hypothesis make consensus or uniformity criteria of social inclusion. On the contrary, complex societies are inherently pluralistic and can function only if they include conflict within themselves.

The central question, therefore, is whether this vision of society is obsolete, and can still offer a framework for ethical thinking about social justice and social inclusion, and more generally about development, which remains an essential reference point for the international community even though its precise implications are increasingly difficult to make sense of. And it will be appreciated, for the specific purposes of this thirtieth-anni- versary issue of Innovation, that if the idea of “society” is in some sense obsolete, the future of the “social” sciences is necessarily in some sense called into doubt. The stakes are there- fore high.

There are two reasons for taking seriously the possibility of obsolescence. The first is ideological: alienation, as analysed in the Marxian tradition, is precisely blindness to con- nectedness, particularly in the form of the belief that commodities are in themselves auton- omous bearers of value. In so far as globalization makes production and consumption even

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less connected than they were previously, it may indeed foster growing alienation. The second reason is structural. Interdependence relies ultimately on the necessity of employ- ing most people most of the time to ensure an adequate economic state. If a significant part of the population becomes (or is believed to be) durably “surplus to requirements”, then the underlying basis for common membership in society is undermined. Clearly this feature does, to some extent, apply in the contemporary world.

On the other hand, a (global) society characterized by large-scale, long-range interde- pendence risks being unsustainable if it is not normatively defensible, not just because those who are excluded may be tempted to revolt, but because those who benefit may end up lacking the will power as well the capacity to ignore the consequences of their actions. The wave of political instability that began in the Arab region in 2011, with its diverse and often bloody mid-range consequences, has reminded us of the truth of Aristotle’s dictum that “men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold”. Once one ceases to believe in one’s right to rule, the magic is gone and flight is the only option.

Therein lies the obvious difficulty for the international community in continuing to refer to its normative horizon as “development” at the same time as the conceptual and analytical framework within which the concept of development was elaborated has been profoundly called into question. To put it very simply, the notion of development is pre- mised upon the same idea of society as the social sciences in general: it sketches a series of possible paths that connect the objective conditions and outcomes of social change – in particular its technical manifestations – with its subjective manifestations – in particular the forms of consciousness characteristic of it and the cultural and political implications that flow from them. In addition, the developmental paradigm does this at two complementary levels: within each society, taking account of its starting point and dis- tinctive national features, and for the world as a whole within a setting of sustainable interdependence.

What, however, if the link between objective and subjective dynamics breaks down? What if the historically attested correlation between structural change, driven mainly by technology, and behavioural, attitudinal and ideational change – what Elias influentially termed the “civilizing process” (2000) – were accidental and reversible? In this case, we may continue to use the term “society” to refer to collections of people who share the same geographical space and are subject to the same structural processes – but this would no longer be the “society” on which the social sciences were originally premised, and it would be a setting within which solidaristic or redistributive approaches to inequality would be very difficult to formulate at all. It would thus also be a profoundly different setting in ethical terms.

Conclusion: reimagining society

The claim that inequality is an ethical notion may thus, on the basis of the arguments presented in previous sections, be understood in two rather different ways, one of which is internal to the idea of society that I have summarized, whereas the other is external to it. To defend the internal approach, as I have been doing and propose to do more assertively in this concluding section, it is necessary to be more explicit about what it is contrasted with.

The alternative social model of ethics, which is of course powerfully supported by many cultural frameworks, might for present purposes be called “preaching”. What I mean by this term, which has no specific religious connotation, is a certain kind of

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social relationship, in which ethical principles are produced by some process and then pro- pounded by a specialized group of people to a broader group of people who are assumed to be prepared to regulate their behaviour by reference to the principles. Two things are socially important here: first, the functional separation between the “preacher” and the “congregation”, regardless of the source of the preacher’s authority and of the content of what is preached; secondly, the fact that the principles are not a matter for discussion within the relationship itself (although their practical application may be).

There are both general objections to the “preaching” model of ethics and specific pro- blems with its applicability to issues such as inequality.

The most general objection is simply that, in the absence of strong, shared background moral consensus, the principles preached will simply reveal, or even sharpen, divisions within the “congregation”. Far from providing a basis for generally accepted ethical regu- lation of behaviour, preaching may therefore simply ensure fragmentation. Conversely, in a context of moral pluralism – which obtains certainly at the international level and typically also within most social and political settings –, principles are very unlikely to be accepted in practice if they have not actually been discussed.

These pragmatic limitations of the unilateral “preaching” model of ethical exchange deserve further to be supplemented by a more principled objection. Ethics depends on, although it is not reducible to, conscience. An ethical society is, prima facie, one each member of which has a conscience that can grasp and make sense of ethical principles and apply them to specific situations. The fostering of conscience is therefore one of the processes by which the ethical texture of a society can be enhanced. It follows that ethics cannot be reduced to preaching without undermining its own social basis.

The objections specific to issues such as inequalities are in many ways more important. The social relationship of preaching may be pragmatically fragile and morally awkward, but it is at least practically sustainable on condition the preacher is endowed with clear epistemic authority. When ethicists preach to ordinary people on matters that are directly and intimately connected to their life experiences, however, the balance of epistemic auth- ority is at the very least uncertain. Undoubtedly, the role of historically attested religions in successfully providing ideological warrant for highly unequal social orders shows that preaching can work. It is on the other hand a commonplace of the sociological tradition, explicit in both Durkheim and Weber, that the co-evolution in modernity of religions and societies makes traditional pulpits less accessible. In the age of what Weber famously referred to as “disenchantment” (Entzäuberung), the burden of social justification necessarily becomes immanent to the social order itself, leaving external ethics fragile, and unlikely to offer a basis for consensual regulation of conduct.

Overcoming the split enshrined in external models of ethics thus requires the develop- ment of an alternative structural model. Rather than separating the development of principles and their social dissemination, the issue is to combine both within a single, reflexive social process of ethical discussion and deliberation. This emphasis on reflexivity is, in social science terms, familiar to the point of cliché. Nonetheless, its implications for ethics are perhaps insufficiently appreciated.

Furthermore, such a model has a significant disciplinary implication. Ethics is often taken to be the distinctive preserve of philosophy. In fact, although philosophers have an important role to play in ethics, the arguments that have just been sketched show the need to connect ethics closely to social science, not to the exclusion of, but rather in close relation to, philosophy. In general terms, the form of this relation derives from the proposed reflexive structure of the ethical process. To say that ethical principles should derive from a social process of discussion and deliberation, involving those

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to whom the principles are to be applied, is to say, consistently with the traditional emphasis of sociology, that ethical reflection is part of the self-understanding of a society. It is thus a social process that can be studied with the tools of social science – even though the social sciences may have little to say directly about the substantive content of the ethical principles involved. In other words, an understanding of the ethical construction of inequality necessarily blurs the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities and requires a certain hybridization of concepts, methods and modes of discourse.

In this sense, an ethical approach to the development challenges the international com- munity has agreed to be judged by bears ultimately on the social as well as the environ- mental sustainability of any possible development project. In demanding that responsibility extend beyond the narrow boundaries of legalistic responsibility, an ethical approach to global justice recognizes and expresses the basic fact that global society is, increasingly, a society, in the strong sense given to the word by the sociological tradition. Furthermore, the more territorially restricted societies that make up the global whole have not ceased to be societies either. Within them, as well as between them, aggre- gate outcomes are subject to ethical criteria of justice that arise from the social process itself rather than being imposed on it from the outside. What makes inequality something to be cared about, mobilized around, fought against – and not simply measured or theorized – is precisely this imaginary construction of social facts.

To specify the actual content of the ethical principles that might apply to key develop- ment issues such as inequality, as well as the procedures by which they might be elaborated and justified, is therefore a work of imagination. However, the imaginative or fictional character of justice does not mean that it is imaginary or fictitious, subtle though those lexical differences may appear to be. In complex societies, solidarity is a (contentious) fact, embedded in but not reducible to structures of objective interdependency. It is not simply a state of mind or an aspiration or even, in the usual sense of the word, a discourse. It is one dimension of a process of making sense, and it expresses the powerful egalitarian current that Tocqueville pointed to as central to the very idea of democracy. Indeed, an indirect indication of the power of this current is the intensity of the ideological investment in damming it, by producing arguments – which are equally works of imagination – to justify inequalities as naturally or divinely ordained.

The ultimate question, therefore, which goes to the heart of how an egalitarian society can be imagined in contemporary circumstances, is how to understand the conditions in which competing discourses, competing social imaginaries, coexist and compete. An argu- ment could be made that discourses interact with reference to what they claim to account for, and that discourses become hegemonic because of their formal properties, or because of the resources that back them. If so, any social configuration is in principle compatible with any discursive configuration.

The whole point of this article is to suggest, without fully establishing, that this perspective is wrong in important respects. The conditions for discourses to flourish are connected to the objective conditions in which they circulate, as long argued by the proponents of ideology as a structural understanding of ideas. And conversely, structures are sensitive to the sense made of them. The question is, therefore, whether there is compatibility between the desire to reduce inequalities and the conditions within which the desire emerges. For society is not a competition run for the benefit of those who happen to win it. It is a structure of interdependence of which reciprocity is the very lifeblood. It is, in a word, an ethical system, but one the ethical features of which require considerable further exploration.

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Notes 1. I leave aside here the question whether certain situations might be unethical without being

unjust. It is clear enough that behaviour can in principle be unethical without being unjust, in particular when no one would possibly be harmed by it. Whether this can apply to social patterns is less clear. However, more importantly for present purposes, the debate is not really about the injustice of the patterns of inequality referred to, which is widely recognized. It is rather whether anything can be done about them and, in particular, whether anyone is to blame.

2. The target adopted in 2015 represents a significant change compared to the target connected to the first of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted in 2000, which committed the international community to halve by 2015 the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty. As is well known, this was criticized both as too modest, given what extreme poverty actually entails for the people who suffer it and in light of a goal, in principle, of eliminating extreme poverty, for which halving it would be a very poor substitute; and as nor- matively weak. The latter criticism would claim that extreme poverty is not merely an affront to human dignity but a violation of human rights, which demands therefore not just quantitative amelioration, but actionable justice, for the very poor. (For a detailed discussion of these ideas, see Pogge 2007.) These, however, were debates within an ethical approach, not alterna- tives to it, and the validity of the criticisms has been recognized, at least rhetorically, in the 2030 Agenda.

3. SDG target 1.2 reads: “By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and chil- dren of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.”

ORCiD

John Crowley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9676-9804

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