Political

Reading: Social Justice

Social Justice

Social justice is just the idea of goodness as applied to social groups. When asked what it means for a society to be just, most of us will think of things like freedom and equality. But things haven’t always been thus. Valuing liberty and freedom is a pretty recent innovation. We have already noted John Locke as an early advocate of liberal political thinking in the 17th century. Older conceptions of justice were neither egalitarian nor freedom loving. Here we’ll consider Plato’s.

Plato develops his conception of justice in the Republic (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Here Plato develops a view of the ideal state as modeled on that of the ideal person. The state is understood as the person writ large. The idea of justice, for Plato, was as much a virtue of the individual person as of the state. Justice was seen as a kind of meta-virtue. The just person is the person who has all the other virtues and has them in the appropriate integrated balance. People have various capacities and abilities and we have various virtues that correspond to those abilities. We can be courageous in facing threats, temperate in managing our appetites, diligent in carrying out our projects, and wise in deliberating about what to do and how. To be a just person is for the various abilities relevant to the various virtues to be playing their proper role. When we turn to the justice of communities, we find different individuals playing the various roles. We want the virtue of wisdom in the ruling class, the virtue of courage in the military class, and the virtues of temperance and diligence in the business class. The just community, in Plato’s view, is the community where the various elements stick to their proper roles and cultivate the virtues appropriate to those roles.

Though Athens was a democracy, Plato was no fan of democracy. In his dialogues he has Socrates repeatedly lampooning democracy as rule by the least qualified. This is because the leaders in a democracy are not chosen by the wise, but by the majority, and the majority is often easily manipulated by bad actors. As a result, Plato endorsed a kind of elitism, the rule by experts or “philosopher kings.” His idea of justice is one where the various functions of society are carried out by those who have the wisdom, expertise and excellence appropriate to the specific role. While Plato places no particular value on equality or freedom for individuals, his ideal state is a meritocracy where everyone has equal opportunity to find his or her appropriate place through a vigorous system of public education. The point of equal opportunity in this meritocratic system was not to be fair to individuals, though. The goal was to identify and cultivate talent wherever it is to be found.

However we might feel about the inegalitarian view of justice Plato develops in the Republic, he raises an important problem that every political system faces. Specifically, how do we reliably fill positions of power with people who are competent and will conduct themselves in the interest of the public. Plato’s answer to the competence issue was to select leaders through a rigorous meritocratic education system. To discourage leaders from abusing their power to serve personal ends rather than the good of the state, Plato also would have his philosopher kings be wards of the state for life, owning no personal property and even severing all family ties to avoid the corrupting tendencies of self-interest. We should not here that the inegalitarian aspects of Plato’s system don’t address the problems of incompetence and corruption, though. The inegalitarian aspects of Plato’s political thought helped to legitimize a long tradition of top-down governance by kings, religious authority, and military might in the Europe and this history includes ample and often colorful stories of incompetence and corruption. It’s only in the last few centuries that ideals of equal individual rights and freedoms begin to gain traction. We’ll turn to these now.

Freedom and Equality

We should note at the outset that freedom and equality are both highly ambiguous notions. We can be equal or unequal in a wide variety of different ways. Socialism, traditionally understood as public ownership of the means of production, emphasizes equality of wealth and resources in ways that are liable to frustrate some kinds of freedom. In more liberal traditions, those that emphasize liberty, equality is incorporated in terms of equal liberties, equal treatment before the law, equal opportunity, equal access to public goods, and so forth. Talk of freedom can also refer to assorted different things. Freedom can be thought of in negative terms as in being free from the dominance of others or in positive terms as in being free to do what we like with things that are ours. And there are many kinds of freedom. Economic freedom is one thing, freedom of conscience is another. Then there is freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and so forth. So clarifying our political philosophy in liberal traditions requires being fairly specific about what we mean by talk of freedom and equality. Not everyone who claims to love freedom and equality loves the same thing.

Here we will focus on two giants of liberal political philosophy, John Locke and John Rawls. What makes a political philosophy a liberal political philosophy is just that it takes individual liberty, in one form or another, to be a fundamental virtue of the just state or society. So liberal political thought stands in contrast to both communism on the left and fascism or nationalism on the right. Liberalism rejects aristocracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, oligarchy, and plutocracy (I’ll leave those fancy words for you to look up). Liberal political philosophy, understood literally as political philosophy that places a high priority on liberty, is a broad tradition that includes both mainstream “liberal” and “conservative” political thinking according to more familiar labels in American politics. You will find John Locke’s thinking to be more in line with contemporary conservativism and John Rawls thought to be more reflective of contemporary political liberals. We’ll begin with John Locke

John Locke

John Locke’s First Treatise on Government was an extended argument against the European system of aristocracy and the alleged divine birth right of rulers. Of course, in a society that had only known government by the rule of kings, this raises an obvious question. If human society is not legitimately organized by the authority of a ruling class, then how is it to be organized? Locke addresses this issue in his Second Treatise on Government which can be found here: http://jim.com/2ndtreat.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Locke’s positive political theory starts with thinking about what morality demands in the absence of government. According to Locke, in the state of nature (or in the absence of government) people exist in a state of perfect freedom. This partly means that people are free to pursue their own happiness and well being. But this perfect freedom is not a license to do whatever one likes or to treat others as one likes. Rather, Locke would understand the liberty we have a natural right to as freedom from domination and coercion.

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life (The Second Treatise of Government, Chpt. 2 Sect. 6)

By the moral law of nature, one is not justified in assaulting others except as retribution for an injustice. Likewise, one is not justified in taking another’s property except as redress for that person taking or destroying one’s own property. But this state of nature inevitably leads to a state of chaos because people are not very good arbiters of justice in their own case. They are prone to inflate the wrongs committed against themselves and seek too much in the way of redress or retribution.

Government is justified as the most effective way of securing the natural rights of individuals. In joining civil society, we voluntarily turn our right to protect and enforce our individual rights over to the state. The legitimate function of the state is to secure the equality liberty that people have a natural right to. This view places rather strict limits on the legitimate functions of government. The point of government is just to secure our liberty and its function should therefore be limited to that. Where a government goes beyond this liberty securing role, Locke says people are justified in rebelling against the government.

Just what are the rights and liberties government serves to protect? Self ownership is central to the natural rights equally enjoyed by all. In fact, the idea of self-ownership captures much of how Locke understand individual liberty. This clearly speaks against slavery and other forms of domination or oppression. If a person own’s herself by natural law, then clearly she can’t also be owned by another. Property rights are then justified as an extension of self ownership. Locke sees all of nature as initially held in common. When a person “mixes her labor with the stuff of the earth,” say, by planting a tree or fashioning a tool from a branch, she acquires a right to the fruits of her labor as an extension of her right of self ownership. Here Locke offers a compelling philosophical justification for property rights.

Locke also recognizes limits to the extent of property rights. Specifically, A person does not have a right to more property than they can make use of. So, if the apple trees I plant produce more apples than I can harvest and preserve, I have no grounds for complaint when a passerby picks a few for himself. Above and beyond what one can make use of, the fruits of one’s labor return to the commons and are to be freely available to others. This limitation on property rights is harder to understand once we introduce a money economy where there are no limits to how much wealth I can set aside for future use and many more ways in which I might put that wealth to use. All the same, it would be hard to argue that anyone can make practical use of say, more than 50 million dollars.

The notion that there is an injustice in funding a social safety net for the less well off with taxes on the more affluent has its roots in a Lockean conception of property rights as natural rights that are closely tied to human liberty. On Locke’s view, when we mix our labor with the stuff of the earth, the fruit of our labor is ours by natural right. It is an extension of our natural right to our own selves. Thus, property rights, on Locke’s view, are closely tied to human liberty. The contemporary philosopher Robert Nozick extends Locke’s line of thought concerning property rights in his entitlement conception of social justice. On Nozick’s view, any distribution of property and wealth, no matter how unequal, is socially just so long as it was arrived at by just means. Acquiring wealth by one’s labor and then building on that through fair trades (those not involving coercion or deception) will be fair. Taxation beyond what is necessary to keep property rights (and hence human liberty) secure will be an injustice. In fact, it will be a variety of theft. Something along the lines of the views of Locke and Nozick has inspired a good deal of the anti-tax, small government sentiment that has been so influential in U.S. politics for the past 30 years or so. Liberty is seen as closely tied to property rights. To the degree that the government taxes citizens, it takes their property and thereby limits their freedom. It is worth noting that Nozick’s view goes well beyond Locke in stripping limits from property rights. Nozick is most closely associated with libertarian political thought. While libertarian thought offers principled grounds for accepting extreme inequality, it offers very little in the way of addressing the social instability that can result from this.

A further limitation on property rights according to Locke holds that the accumulation of private property constitutes no injustice to others “at least where there is enough and as good, left in the commons for others.” Locke takes the natural world and all the resources in it to be a commonwealth. That is, the earth, the waters, skies, and the various systems they contain are taken to be commonly owned by all. I draw from the resources of nature for raw materials when I create something I can then claim as property. As long as there is “as enough and as good” left for others, my accumulation of private property doesn’t limit the liberty of anyone else.

Locke lived in a time when natural resources appeared to be endlessly bountiful and any motivated person who wasn’t happy with the available distribution of property could hop a ship to the new world and homestead a piece of land (albeit one that was likely formerly occupied by Native Americans). Where natural resources can be regarded as practically unlimited, my neighbor’s great wealth doesn’t place any restriction on me investing my energy in creating wealth of my own. But if natural resources are limited and my neighbor has claimed much of what is available in the creation of his private property, then my opportunities are limited to that degree. We can no longer sustain the illusion that natural resources are unlimited. And as we bump up against those limits, Locke’s “enough and as good” proviso becomes much more significant and a problem known as the tragedy of the commons deserves some careful attention.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Garritt Hardin is well known for his clear articulation of the Tragedy of the Commons in the late sixties. Hardin was mainly concerned about human population, but this is just one instance of a much broader kind of problem. A tragedy of the commons is any case where some commonly held resource gets exhausted to the point where it has little value left to offer. Such a tragedy is bound to occur eventually whenever a commonly held resource is finite and freely utilized by self-interested agents.

Hardin introduces the notion of the tragedy of the commons with a tale about the fate of shepherd who share a pasture in common. Each shepherd notes that if he runs one more animal on the commonly held pasture, he will get the full benefit of that animal’s value when he takes it to market, but since the pasture is held in common, he will bear only a fraction of the cost of raising the animal. As a result, each shepherd finds it in his or her self-interest to run an additional animal on the pasture, and then another and another until the commonly held pasture is depleted to the point where it of no use to anyone. This dynamic is at work in a broad range of issues including fisheries, fresh water supplies, air pollution, and climate change.

Once we have a clear understanding of the logic of the commons, it is equally clear that there are only a limited number of ways to avoid a tragedy of the commons. Again, a tragedy of the commons is the inevitable result whenever we have a finite commons that is freely utilized by self-interested agents. The only way to avoid a tragedy of the commons is to prevent one or another of the three conditions that give rise to one. Perhaps we cannot expect individuals to consistently refrain from acting on their own interests. But there remain the possibilities of regulating access to the commons or expanding the commons in some way. In the case of climate change, some mitigation strategies like carbon sequestration can be seen as ways of expanding the commons. The commons in this case is the atmosphere which we use as a sink for carbon when we burn fossil fuels. The CO2 released by even quite a few cars and furnaces poses no serious problem. But beyond a certain point, carbon emissions become a serious problem. The atmosphere can’t soak up more without disrupting systems we all rely on in many ways. Attempts to capture carbon and sequester it reduce the load on the atmosphere as a carbon sink. One way to think of this is as a strategy for expanding our overall carbon sink by supplementing the atmosphere with underground carbon storage facilities (or, perhaps more realistically, trees and soil that sequester carbon, too). Another example of expanding the commons would be state-run fish hatcheries to rebuild fish populations depleted through fishing.

But in many cases, notably including climate change, strategies for expanding the commons aren’t sufficient for avoiding a tragedy of the commons. Given this, only one possible means of avoiding a tragedy of the commons remains, and that is regulating the use of the commons. We routinely accept of restrictions on our liberty as a means of avoiding a tragedy of the commons. In the early 70s the air in Southern California was barely breathable do the pollution from cars. So, California imposed stiff regulations on vehicle emissions. Southern California is still often smoggy, generally not as bad as it once was. Since it did not significantly impact people’s freedom to drive, requiring pollution controls on cars was a pretty unobtrusive kind of regulation. Sometimes we regulate the use of a commonly held resource by charging people to use it and this can take many forms from campground fees to special taxes based on use like car tabs that fund public transportation (the roadways are a commons that become much less valuable when too many people drive and too few use transit). Sometimes we do this with added limits on the use of a commonly held resource as in the case of fishing licenses with catch limits. Proposals to put a price on carbon in the form of energy taxes or cap and trade systems for carbon emissions are relatively unobtrusive attempts to regulate the use of the atmosphere as a carbon sink. Energy taxes would regulate use of the atmosphere by charging a fee. Cap and trade systems are a bit more complex and involve limits on emissions together with a market mechanism for rewarding innovative ways of cutting emissions. It’s worth noting that climate change is a much more difficult problem than your typical tragedy of the commons due to some challenging asymmetries. For instance, since climate change is a global and international problem, those who must regulate their use of the atmosphere to avoid a tragedy of the commons are a different group of people from those who will suffer the consequences. We might hope that the current generation will care enough about its descendants to take action. But after failing to act for a couple of decades, we are already entering the stage of lasting consequences and so far, a generation (mine) has passed the mounting problem on to the next generation (likely yours).

Once we have a clear understanding of the logic of the commons, it seems pretty obvious that regulating the use of commonly held resources is often called for. We are very prone to think of government regulation as an imposition on our liberty. But the destruction of commonly held resources poses a much greater imposition on our liberty. So, regulation to avoid a tragedy of the commons is quite in line with Locke’s view that the legitimate role of government is to secure out liberty. This should help us understand why conservatives as well as liberals were proponents of environmental regulation through the 60s and the 70s.

Here is a link to Garritt Hardin’s article, “The Tragedy of the Commons” http://dieoff.org/page95.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

The System

Now we will consider an objection to Locke’s political philosophy, one that will set the stage for our discussion of John Rawls. The political thought of Locke is highly individualist. One aspect of this is that Locke takes the rights and liberties of individuals to be the only thing that matters in political philosophy. Beyond this, Locke would limit the legitimate role of government to securing those individual rights and liberties. Is this enough to secure justice?

Even when our rights and liberties are secured, our lives are significantly affected for better or worse by what I’ll refer as “the system.” So, what is this system? The system we have in a society is constituted by various subsystems like the market economy, our tax system, our education, health care and environmental management systems. As Rawls sees it, government has important work to do in establishing and upholding systems that are fair. Here Rawls goes beyond Locke. Rawls political philosophy still prioritizes individual rights and liberties. But Rawls sees something more at play. Justice in a society also depends on having a fair system. Now what is it for a system to be fair? This is the question Rawls sets out to answer. But before we get to that, let’s explore the system some and consider a few of the ways we rely on government to sustain the system.

We don’t create wealth from our own labor and ingenuity in a social vacuum. With the possible exception of the vegetables I grow in my garden, none of my wealth is entirely the product of mixing my labor with the stuff of the earth. Rather, nearly all of our productive activity is carried out in the context of a complex fabric of social structures and interrelations buoyed by a substantial technological infrastructure. Enjoying the fruits of my labor nearly always requires doing business with someone else and what I get out of this depends as much on the favorable social environment and technological infrastructure that makes doing business possible as it does on the efforts I bring to the deal. In light of this, the view of property rights offered by Locke is unrealistically individualistic in that falsely assumes property and wealth is the product of individual effort alone.

Having a functioning well-ordered community is a necessary condition for succeeding in every line of business (even gangsters depend on the system they exploit). The businessman who has profited from a fair exchange with his customers depends on the underlying system that makes it possible for him to do his business in the first place. His success may require a healthy and well-educated workforce, stability in the economic system, a citizenry that is well informed enough to politically sustain just social institutions, a citizenry that respects the law, a customer base that is doing well enough themselves to afford his product and so forth. It will also depend on physical infrastructure we rely on the government to provide or at least regulate. Roads and bridges to sewer systems are a few examples. Utility companies are often private businesses, but these require government oversight and regulation since they constitute natural monopolies. All of these things and others are hidden ingredients in the wealth created through the businessman’s activities. Given this insight into the kind of sophisticated market economy we have, taxation for the maintenance and upkeep of our various social and infrastructure systems is not theft, but fair compensation for the benefits we derive from participating in the system we are productive members of. Limiting the role of government to the protection of rights and liberties turns a blind eye to need for government involvement in the upkeep of the various systems we all depend on.

The Locke/Nozick approach to social justice where the legitimate activity of government is limited to securing our natural rights and liberties is roughly analogous to field biologists aiming to secure the well-being of squirrels without giving any regard to the health of the ecosystem that sustains them.

Given some sense of the importance of the various systems we rely on government to uphold and maintain we can turn our attention to Rawls and the concept of fairness.

Justice as Fairness

Where all other things are equal, we are liable to think of fairness in terms of equal treatment. The fair way to divide a cookie between three equally hungry boys is into three equal sized parts. Now what if one of the boys had a piece of chocolate cake an hour ago. What is fair isn’t completely obvious in this case. And in the real world, things are seldom equal.

Now consider the case of Jones and his three sons. Jone’s has done well in life and build up a modest fortune of 1.5 million dollars. But now his life is coming to and end as he enters the late stages of terminal cancer. So, he now faces with the question of how to divide his modest fortune among his three sons. Again, all other things being equal, the fair thing to do would be to give each a half million. But things aren’t equal. Jones’ eldest son, John, is a brilliant young man. He is near the end of a PhD. In computer science at Stanford and he is being aggressively recruited for a high paying Silicon Valley job with Google. Jones second son, James, is a star athlete on a full scholarship at UCLA where he is majoring in business. In addition to being talented on the basketball court, James is highly popular, well regarded for his forthright and easygoing manner, trusted and liked by peers and superiors alike. The third son, Joe, well, he’s a nice guy. He has no particular talents. He has tried hard in school, but hasn’t done especially well. He’s a bit awkward socially, the sort of guy that just isn’t going to find a date for the prom. In addition, he has a fairly expensive lifetime medical condition, he’s type 1 diabetic. What would be the fair way to divvy up his modest fortune among his three sons?

Jones can’t just pull a clear answer out of thin air, but he is clever and has a friend who does research in neuroscience that can help. His friend has developed a drug for highly selective memory loss that temporarily mutes a person’s sense of personal identity. Jones administers the drug to one of his sons (it doesn’t really matter which one) and instructs that son to decide how his fortune is to be divided among the three. He offers the following instructions: “you are one of my three sons and you are fully informed about the life circumstances of all three. Now, with just your own self interest in mind, you are to decide how my estate is to be divided between you and your brothers.” The son who decides how the fortune is divided must do so without knowing which of the brothers he is. The effects of the drug render the son who decide incapable of favoring the interests of one son over another, and this gives us some grounds for thinking his decision will be reasonably fair. Let me know how you think the drugged son will decide.

What we’ve described here is similar to the method Rawls recommends for selecting fair principles of social justice. Rawls is aiming at a conception of justice as fairness in the sense that social systems won’t advantage any particular kind of person at the expense of others. Rawls’ proposes that we can get onto the ideal of justice as fairness in this sense by means of a thought experiment that involves reasoning from what he calls "the original position." In the original position, we imagine that we are perfectly rational agents with full information about the consequences of the various possible social arrangements. We are then given the task of designing the principles of justice that will structure our society and we are expected to do so with an eye to what will be in our own best interest. But then there’s a catch. In reasoning from the original, we operate behind a veil of ignorance about our own personal circumstances and characteristics. So in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, I must think about what set of social institutions will work out best for me without knowing whether I will be weak or strong, healthy or diseased, clever or dull, beautiful or ugly, black or white, born to a wealthy family or a poor one and so forth. If I am rational and self interested, I will want to set things up so that I can substantially enjoy the benefits if I have characteristics that are highly valued in my society and I put them to good use. But at the same time, I will want to hedge my bets to assure that I still have a decent life in case I am not so lucky or my best efforts fail.

Of course, the original position thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment. No one could actually place themselves behind the veil of ignorance, nor reason perfectly rationally about all the possible social arrangements that might result from her choice of principles. Still Rawls has devised a way to think about what is fair when things all other things aren’t equal, and we can apply this to approximate relatively impartial judgments about what a fair society would look like.

On the basis of the original position thought experiment, Rawls argues for two principles of justice as fairness:

The Equal Liberty Principle: Each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for everyone.

The Difference Principle: Social practices that produce inequalities among individuals are just only if they work out to everyone’s advantage and the positions that come with greater reward are open to all.

The Equal Liberty Principle has a longer history. The idea that everyone should be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for others is defended at length in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. In fact we could take some variation on this principle as the core tenet of Liberalism as a political theory. This principle doesn’t tell us that people should be free to do as they please no matter what. At some points, my being free to do something is liable to interfere with your being free to do something. For instance, my being free to host parties with live bands into the early hours of the morning might interfere with my neighbor’s being free to get a decent night’s sleep. In the interest of maximizing equal liberty for all, we would be justified in restricting people from activities that would interfere with the liberty of others. This has many familiar applications. Neighborhood zoning regulations are one example. A good deal environmental regulation illustrates this idea. Maximizing liberty for all equally requires that we restrict businesses from being free to pollute where doing so would adversely affect the health of others.

Rawls thinks the equal liberty principle will be selected by rational agents reasoning from the original position because no rational agent in this position would choose to be less free than necessary nor grant some (possibly someone else) greater liberty than others (possibly herself).

The Equal Liberty Principle is only concerned with equality of liberty. But we can be equal or unequal in many other ways. In fact, being equally free is liable to lead to other sorts of inequalities. If we are all free to plant apple trees as we see fit, we will probably wind up with an unequal distribution of apples simply because some of us will plant more trees and do a better job of tending them. So long as this is merely the result of people exercising their equal liberties, there is nothing unfair about this. If I’d wanted more apples, I could have spent more time growing apple trees and less time playing chess.

Given equality of opportunity, the Difference Principle holds that a system that produce inequalities is fair so long as it works out to the benefit of all. This will strike some as puzzling. How could we have inequalities that benefit all? It might seem that liberty and the fact that we want different things can account for some of this. I can’t claim unfairness when my neighbor has more apples because I’d rather play chess than harvest apples. The inequality here is one that serves the interests of both of us, my neighbor’s interest in having lots of apples and mine in playing chess. But the difference here isn’t the result of any system, fair or unfair. It’s just the result of our individual choices. What we are concerned with in connection with the difference principle are inequalities that result from the system, not just the free choices of individuals.

So, we want some clarity on how there could be inequalities resulting from a system that work out to the benefit of all. Here it will help to get familiar with the idea of a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game, as the term suggest, is a game where the sum of the winnings of the winners and the losses of the losers add up to zero. So, a friendly neighborhood poker game is a zero-sum game. The combined winnings of the winners will be exactly equal to the combined losses of the losers. Likewise, slicing a pie is a zero-sum game. Ordinarily, the only way I get a bigger piece is if other get smaller pieces where the difference between how much bigger my piece is and how much smaller other pieces are is zero. But not every game is a zero-sum game. To take a fanciful example, suppose the pies I bake are magic pies that are favorable to me in a specific way. When I cut myself a bigger piece, the size of the whole pie doubles. Now, when I cut myself a bigger piece, I get more than other people who want some pie, and the others get more than they would have if I’d taken a smaller slice. So, this is a positive non-zero sum game, but we can easily describe a negative non-zero sum game. Suppose my method for dividing a cookie between three hungry boys is to just toss it on the table and have them grab at it. They will probably wind up with unequal size chunks of cookie, but the sum of the winnings of the winners and the losses of the losers will add up to less than zero because a good part of the cookie will wind up as crumbs on the floor. So, a social system that operates as a positive non-zero sum game can, under the right circumstances, both systematically produce inequalities and yet leave the less advantaged better off than the less advantaged would be under a different system. Such a system will satisfy the difference principle.

A market economy can provide a good example of a positive zero-sum game that would satisfy Rawls difference principle. This will depend on how the market economy functions in the context of the broader system of social policies and institutions. But let’s first consider Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand. Adam Smith is well known as the founder of economics, but he was also a notable moral philosopher who did important work on the emotions. We’ll be concerned, though, with one of his key economic insights, one that is often touted as making the case for free markets. First, we need to describe a scenario. Let’s imagine that we are all part of a small low-tech economy where one of our technologies is making matches. The standard method for making matches to light fires is to sliver off individual sticks with a knife and dip them one by one in the solutions that make them ignite easily when struck. In this economy we have a free market, meaning that we have property rights and the freedom to set out own prices and negotiate our own deals with customers. I, being clever and self-interested, devise a way to dramatically reduce the amount of labor I have to invest in each match by building a small jig that allows me to split a small log into a hundred little sticks at once and then hold all hundred as I dip them together in the various solutions. Because I have dramatically lowered my labor cost, I can take my matches to market, charge less for them than my competitors and dramatically increase my market share while still making a tidy profit. I get rich as a result, probably driving several of my competitors out of the match making business. But my competitors, also being clever and self-interested, will find other ways to contribute to the village economy. Perhaps one starts growing flowers and becomes the first florist and another discovers yeast and invents bread. And folks in the village can afford to pay for flowers and bread now that they are paying so much less for matches. In this happy little story, competition in a market system generated an inequality when I got rich thanks to my clever innovation in match making. And the community as a whole benefits because now we are investing much less of our collective energy into making matches. Instead, we have cheaper matches plus bread and flowers. We are all better off as a result. In this story, the private vice of greed leads me, as if by an invisible hand, act in a way that benefits the community.

We should note that contrary to myth, Adam Smith notion of the invisible hand was not intended as an endorsement of greed or laissez faire capitalism. In a poorly regulated market economy, greed is just as liable to lead to predatory behavior as productivity boosting innovations. But all the same, under the right conditions, the profit motive can bring out the best in people and result in wealth creation that benefits all. We can look to the historical example of East and West Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist East Germany had a Soviet style command economy that dictated a high degree of equality and sharply restricted property rights. West Germany had a mixed economy with a healthy market based private sector. The result was less equality in West Germany. But still, the least well off were substantially better off than the least well off (pretty much everybody) in East Germany. What this indicates is that while, on the one hand, the market economy with its institutions of private property inevitably generates inequalities, it is so much more effective at generating wealth that the least well off can be better off in spite of the inequalities. But this is likely to happen only under the right conditions. West Germany had then, as Germany has now, a mixed economy where a vibrant private sector market economy is supplemented with a substantial system of social benefits. The profit motive is harnessed and the well to do are quite well off, but taxes are higher and those who don’t fair well in the market economy still get decent health care, modest but safe and comfortable places to live, access to education etc. Compare this America where the private sector market economy dominates and the least well off are much worse off than the least well off in communist East Germany. Again, it is ultimately the system as a whole that gets evaluated according to the difference principle.

Hopefully it is clear now how Rawls’ view of justice as fairness would endorse taxing the well off in order to provide for things like education, health care and a social safety net. His is a more expansive view of the role of government than Locke or Nozick would support. But to what degree will taxing the rich be justified on Rawls’ view? Clearly taxing the successful members of society to the point where they are no better off than those who are largely unproductive will not meet the Rawlsian ideal under the difference principle. If people are not rewarded for hard work and innovation, then it’s liable not to happen and everyone suffers as a result. Too much taxation of the well off will be unjust on Rawl’s view precisely because it doesn’t work out to benefit of least well off (or anyone else). Rawls would deem communism and socialism as unjust under the difference principle for just this reason (not to mention the ways these systems undermine equal liberty) Rather, Rawls would aim for that sweet spot where the hard work and innovative are well rewarded, so everyone has a reason to do their best, and yet those who fail for whatever reason are not left by the wayside, but still have opportunity and enjoy some modest quality of life.

Rawls represents the “liberal” side of liberal political philosophy. In some corners of popular political discourse, the term “liberal” has been reduced to a term of derision and its meaning has been so badly distorted as to make it unrecognizable. Liberals are routinely described as socialists or communists by a fair number of political pundits. Hopefully some acquaintance with Rawls will help you can recognize the lie in this rhetoric. Liberals, as the name should suggest, support liberty. Communists do not. Socialism traditionally refers to public ownership of the means of production, as opposed to having a market economy with property rights. Mainstream liberalism as represented by Rawls political philosophy, endorses a market economy, just one with guard rails and safety nets to correct for some of the excesses of laissez faire capitalism.

An excerpt from John Rawls, Justice as Fairness, can be found here: http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/readings/rawl_justice.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Illiberal Political Philosophy

When I initially wrote this text just a few years ago, my aim in this chapter was to explain the philosophical underpinnings of the two dominant mainstream traditions in American politics. As we’ve discussed, both what we popularly know as "liberalism" and "conservativism" are positions within a broader tradition of liberal political thought. We can understand a political philosophy as laying within that broader liberal tradition when it gives priority to the liberty of individuals as a political value. Illiberal political philosophies will just be those that reject the rights and liberties of individuals as being of paramount importance. I originally prefaced this chapter with a discussion of Plato to provide some historical perspective, some appreciation for how recent an ethical innovation it is to treat individual rights and liberties as important in political thought. Over the past few years, though, the broad tradition of liberal political thought that has guided this country since its inception, in both its “liberal” and “conservative” variants, has come under threat. So, a few cautionary words about illiberal ways of thought are in order.

Political observers have recently heard lots of talk about authoritarianism, populism, nationalism and other assorted “isms.” I’m not going to take up a detailed analysis of these here, but I do want to address an underlying current common among them. Authoritarianism, as the term suggests, prioritizes the will of an authority figure. But for an authority figure to gain and sustain power, he must have the support of a sizable chunk of the population. So, would-be authoritarians will need to appeal to the concerns of ordinary people and make themselves popular (and this is what populism is). So, populism can lead to authoritarianism, though that depends on the concerns of the people appealed to. If ordinary people to care most about individual rights and liberties and have some ability to defend themselves against the rhetorical trickery of a demagogue (a leader who appeals to people through emotion and prejudice rather than rational argument), then populism won’t provoke a turn away from individual rights and liberties. But people have concerns beyond individual rights and liberties and these can eclipse the tenets of liberalism.

We’d be hard pressed to explain how popular opinion could turn against the broad tradition of liberalism if varieties of illiberalism had nothing to offer people. Mass movements in support of nationalism (which prioritizes national interest over individual rights and liberties), offer the powerful appeal of a shared identity and the social cohesion of a common cause. Indeed, one of the classic criticisms of liberal political thought is that it fails to provide shared ideals that can be the basis of a sense of shared identity, purpose and community. Liberty alone is thin gruel for those seeking a sense of meaning and purpose in life. And prioritizing liberty as a political value requires taking a fairly neutral political stand on a broad range of other values and conceptions of the good life. Pushing a specific further set of values in the realm of politics as the basis of community and shared identity is bound to marginalize and threaten adherents of other value systems, But the whole point of liberal values like freedom of conscience is to avoid this.

Conservative political thinkers like Edmund Burke and the contemporary writer David Brooks have sought some middle ground, like upholding liberty as a primary political value while supporting the development of community built around shared values beyond the realm of politics.

Communism also held the appeal of a shared identity based on commonly held values to its adherents in its heyday. In direct opposition to liberal traditions, both communism and nationalism prioritize the good of a collective over concern for citizens as individuals. Fairly recent history is rife with examples of how collectivist thinking, both on the left in the form of communism and on the right in the form of nationalism, have licensed extreme brutality. I won’t pursue historical examples or details here. But it should come as no surprise that prioritizing collectives over individuals is liable to be pretty hard on individuals.

What I do want to say in the way of caution concerning collectivist ideologies of all stripes is mainly that collectives don’t suffer. The very idea of a collective is an abstraction. Collectives have no existence beyond the individual members that make it up. And so, it is hard to see how a collective can have any value of its own. My intuition is roughly Kantian here. People have intrinsic moral worth. Not nations. Advancing the interests of people has nothing to do with pitting the interests of one nation against those of other nations. America is not a human being. But we might consider making America humane again.