PLSC 118 - Lecture 17 - Distributive Justice and the Welfare State

Chapter 1. Principle of Justice I: Distribution of Liberties [00:00:00]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay, let’s get started. I want to pick up where I left off on Monday speaking about Rawls’s two principles of justice. And as you will recall, I mentioned that Rawls really changed the subject with respect to what the metric of justice is. That rather than focus on utility somehow measured, or welfare as it’s sometimes called, instead Rawls embraces the resourcist idea of focusing on certain basic resources. The assumption being that no matter what your particular goals in life turn out to be, no matter what your particular life plan turns out to be, and those are not things we know because we’re behind the veil of ignorance, you’re going to want more rather than less in the way of liberties, more rather than less in the way of opportunities, and more rather than less in the way of income and wealth.

Something I didn’t mention that’ll come into play in today’s lecture is that Rawls has to, of course, deal with the fact that the moment you have a theory that affirms more than one value you have to think about, well, what happens when the values conflict? What if maximizing liberties can only come at the expense of opportunities or, if you like, distributing income and wealth in a way that you regard as fair or just conflicts with what you say about the distribution of liberties. Any time you have more than one value you have to deal with the possibility of conflict among them.

And he does deal with that. He has an appeal to what he calls a lexical ranking which is short for the more cumbersome term lexicographical ranking. And what that means is that anytime you want more rather than fewer in the way of liberties, you want more than fewer in the way of opportunities, and you want more rather than less in the way of income and wealth, but in anytime there’s a conflict something higher in the lexical ranking trumps what’s lower. So that if the only way you could get more rather than less income and wealth was to compromise people’s liberties, you wouldn’t do it. So that’s the notion of a lexical ranking. You want to maximize each item in the lexical ranking subject to the constraint that it does not come at the expense of maximizing something that’s higher in that lexical ranking.

Okay, and then we talked about his first principle, and I gave you the illustration of religious freedom as the kind of thing he’s thinking about when he talks about distributing all liberties in a way that gives people the most extensive possible freedom compatible with the like freedom for all. And this is not to be confused with the idea of neutrality. We worked through that. And so we gave the example of whether to have if you were comparing, say, a fundamentalist regime with a regime that has a disestablished church, the reason for preferring the regime with the disestablished church is that the most disadvantaged person in that regime, namely say the fundamentalist, is less disadvantaged than the person who does not affirm the established fundamentalist beliefs of a fundamentalist regime.

So you always compare the least — and I know it’s a cumbersome way of putting it but there’s not an elegant way of putting it. What you want to do is compare the condition of the most adversely affected person in each situation and say, “Which would you rather be?” basically, and you’re going to always pick the one that minimizes the harm to the least advantaged person. So the standpoint of justice is the standpoint of the least advantaged person, but this isn’t a bleeding heart point, but rather a self-interested point because you don’t know who you are behind the veil of ignorance. Okay.

Chapter 2. Principle of Justice IIb: Fair Equality of Opportunity [00:04:46]

Now, let’s talk about his second principle which is, in fact, divided into two principles, so he really has three principles. The first part of it he says, “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.” That is, you’ll see 2b. That’s not a typo. I’ll come to 2a in a minute. For some reason, known only to John Rawls, he put 2a before 2b, but he meant to put 2b before 2a in the sense that 2b is lexically prior to 2a. So that’s why I’m doing 2b first. And that 2b is what governs the distribution of opportunities.

And he’s essentially saying “fair equality of opportunity.” What does that mean? It means no apartheid. It means, for instance, we still today have a system in America where occupation-by-occupation women earn about eighty-six percent of what men earn in exactly the same occupation. So there’s gender discrimination in remuneration for employment, so we would say, “Those systems are illegitimate.” Systems which reward women less than men on a systematic basis wouldn’t be chosen. You would never choose a system that privileges one gender because you don’t know whether you’re going to turn out to be the women or the men. You would never accept the system of job reservation such as apartheid because you don’t know whether you’re going to be black or white, and not knowing you always look from the standpoint of the most adversely affected person, and so you would say no to apartheid. You would say no to a system which privileges one gender over the other.

And then you can see, I think, how their lexical ranking would come into play because let’s suppose you have a status quo in which, as I said, women on average earn eighty-six percent of what men earn in the same professions, and somebody comes along and says, “Well, so we need an affirmative action program to remedy that.” Then the question would be, but does the affirmative action program conflict with anything protected by the first principle? And those opposed to it would say, “Yes,” and those in favor of it would say, “No,” and that’s what you would be arguing about. Because it might be the case that if the only way in which you could achieve affirmative action actually interfered with the liberties protected by the first principle then you would say, “Even though it’s necessary from the standpoint of the second principle, we won’t do it.”

And if we had more time we could have gone into the New Haven firefighter’s case, and maybe we can do some of this in section, that the Supreme Court dealt with last summer where essentially they said some version of the fact that the affirmative action program to achieve promotions in the New Haven Fire Department interfered with basic freedoms that Rawls would have put under the first principle. And of course the other side made the opposite claim. But that is essentially how it would be argued about.

So I think that the principal of fair equality of opportunity is relatively straightforward in its own terms. The animating thought is that not knowing who you’re going to be, you would never agree to a system that systematically disprivileges some group for fear that you’re going to turn out to be in that group, okay? So it’s relatively straightforward.

Chapter 3. Principle of Justice IIa: Incomes and Wealth [00:09:16]

But now I want to come to 2a, which is probably the argument in Rawls’s book that’s attracted the most attention, and that is that — it’s actually third in his lexical ranking, and that is the claim that income and wealth is to be distributed “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individual.”

To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individual. This is not a principle that Rawls invented. It’s an old principle of welfare economics which used to go under the label maximin, not maximum, maximin, m-a-x-i-m-i-n, short for maximize the minimum share, maximin, maximize the minimum share. Rawls calls it the difference principal, but it’s the same idea as maximizing the minimum share.

And the intuition behind the difference principle is exactly the same intuition that we’ve been talking about by reference to the general conception of distributive justice, which is, remember, distribute all goods equally unless an unequal distribution works to everybody’s advantage. And you get from everybody’s advantage to focusing on the condition of the worst off. Why? Because of this argument that, well, if you’re the worst-off person and you can affirm something then everybody else will affirm it as well. If you’ll choose it when you’re the most adversely affected you’ll also choose it if you’re the second, or third, or fourth, or fifth most adversely affected person.

Now, there’s actually a complexity when you start to think about the distribution of income and wealth that has not come up in the consideration of the other two principles, which I’ll just mention, and then say a couple of things about, and then move on and we’ll come back to it later. And that is, well, but what if there was a principle that gave a very small benefit to the person at the bottom, but at a huge cost to the middle class? Would you choose it, because what are the odds that you’re going to turn out to be the person at the very bottom? And we think about this for a variety of reasons. It might be a trickle down argument, or Bentham’s claim that the rich will burn their crops before giving them to the poor, or some other argument. But if you could achieve a very minor increment to the condition of the person at the bottom at a huge cost to the middle class, you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that.

And so Rawls has two points to make about that, neither of which is entirely satisfying. The one is his argument about grave risks, and it works like this. It’s the claim that, well, one of the things we know, and this is a perfectly uncontroversial claim, one of the things we know is that even when there’s moderate scarcity that doesn’t mean there won’t be some people who are in grave danger. That is to say there’s no necessary relationship between the level of economic development in a country and the distribution of income and wealth. So you can have a wealthy country, but there still can be extremely poor people in it.

That’s true. We can have bag ladies living out of lockers in Grand Central Station, at least when they used to have lockers in Grand Central Station, which they don’t anymore, but let’s not deal with that particular piece. So there’s no necessary relationship between the level of economic development and the distribution of income and wealth in a society. Therefore, you have to assume that even if there’s relative scarcity you might turn out to be the person who’s starving. You might turn out to be that bag lady. And even if the probability of being that person is low, the costs of being that person are high.

I don’t know if you remember the argument Rumsfeld made in his counterterrorism strategy, the so-called one percent solution, and this was that even if there’s a one percent probability that we’re going to be hit by a certain kind of terrorist attack we should treat it as a hundred percent probability because the costs of being hit are so high. So the probability of the event may be low, but if you turn out to be that person you’re going to starve to death, so this is Rawls’s assumption about grave risks.

So all of that’s plausible enough. The reason I say it’s not entirely satisfying is if you really took the grave risks idea seriously why in the world would you make this third in your lexical ranking, because after all what good is freedom of speech or freedom of religion to somebody who’s on the verge of starvation. So it’s not entirely satisfying in that sense that if it justifies saying, well, we will protect the person at the bottom even though the probability of that person turns out to be low because of the grave risks assumption, why then — this is very annoying — why then would we make it third? But it’s not really a deep criticism of Rawls in that you could just say, “Well, we should have reorder his lexical ranking and put this higher up in it.” But anyway, that’s not entirely satisfying.

And then the second thing he says that’s not entirely satisfying is he says he’s sort of sensitive to this problem that you might get absurdities out of this because if it’s very costly to help the person at the bottom in terms of what other people have to give up maybe people wouldn’t be that impressed by the grave risks assumption. So he throws in this idea of chain connection and he says, “Well, even though my argument doesn’t depend on this, I think it’s true.” When somebody does that you know there’s some slight-of-hand going on.

And he basically says, “Well, if you help the person at the bottom that will have some kind of chain reaction. It’ll help the person at the next level, and that’ll help the person at the next level, and that’ll help the person at the next level,” so it’s a kind of Keynesian idea that if you stimulate the man at the bottom there’ll be multiplier effects throughout the whole system that’ll make everybody else better off too. Well, that may or may not be true, and it also, by the way, I think makes the disagreement between Rawlsianism and utilitarianism much less interesting because then anything that Rawls would choose a utilitarian would choose as well. And we really want to look at when they pull in opposite directions if we want to see what’s at stake between them.

But so this chain connection idea I think is just sort of — he throws it in there to make his argument look more appealing on consequentialist grounds, but actually there’s (a) no reason to believe it’s true, and (b) if it were, then what’s really at stake between Rawls and utilitarianism becomes much less interesting because by satisfying Rawls we’re also going to be satisfying utilitarianism. So I think the best thing about chain connection is to ignore it, so I’m not going to say anything more.

But I will say this in Rawls’s defense on this point, which is, a lot of people who criticize Rawls create — and I even did some of this myself what I think is unfair in retrospect — people create examples where helping the person at the bottom comes at a huge cost to others and it looks rather implausible. But one thing we should say about Rawls is, he’s not trying to give policy advice for every marginal choice. At one point he says in the book, “I’m thinking about the basic structure of society, the basic institutions.”

So he’s not saying — I mean, the example people sometimes give is the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, or actually the Bush tax cut in the 2000s. But the Reagan one had this structure more explicitly where there was a very big tax cut for the wealthy, a tiny tax cut for the people at the very bottom, and a huge increase in middle class taxes. Basically that was the structure of it. And people said, “So Rawls would prefer this.”

And the answer is he’s not trying to make a recommendation at the level of the next incremental policy choice, he’s trying to say what the underlying institution should be structured as. And so he would resist saying, “Well, this shows my theory is silly, or my theory doesn’t generate conclusions that I want it to.” He’s not a policy wonk. He’s thinking about constitutional principles, basic principles; the basic structure of society.

And indeed, I’ll just make one footnote to that footnote which is if you start at the front of A Theory of Justice and you really plow through all of it, you get to about page 300 and something and he says words to the effect that his theory is agnostic between capitalism and socialism. And he took a lot of abuse for that in the 1970s and 1980s. People said, “Wow, you mean I plowed through 300 pages of a book about justice only to be told it’s agnostic between capitalism and socialism? Give me a break!”

But in defense of Rawls on that point he would say, “Look, what economic system actually operates in the interest of the least advantaged? That’s an empirical question of political economy, trial and error and so on. That is not a question for political philosophy to settle. I don’t know whether it’s capitalism, socialism, or some version of a mixed economy, that works to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged person. That’s for the policy makers and political economists to figure out. What I’m telling you is what the standard should be.” And that is a good argument on Rawls’s part. And he’s saying, “This is what the standard should be. The standard should be that whatever system you have works to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged player when compared with other systems.”

And, yes, before the experience of centrally planned economies people may have thought some version of state socialism would do that. After a half a century of experience with it, doesn’t look so good. So we’ll go back to some kind of market system, and after decades of experience with unregulated markets or minimally regulated markets, and we discover the cost of those for the people at the bottom maybe we’ll end up with something else. “So it’s not a failing of my, John Rawls’s, theory that I don’t tell you what kind of economic system to have. My aspiration is to tell you what the normative criterion is that it should meet.” So I think that’s the most important takeaway point. Now —

Chapter 4. Incomes and Wealth: The Difference Principle [00:23:21]

Let’s give you a picture for those who like pictures, and for those who don’t we will explain it in words. This is going back to our Pareto style of diagram. Let’s suppose that’s the status quo. And now we’ve got primary goods, in this case income and wealth for two people; A up here and B along here. And that is the status quo. So A has more than B. Rawls’s difference principle, or the so-called maximin principle of welfare economics, says, “Drop a line down to there, (that point is perfect equality, right) and then go east, and everything in this shaded area is what we might call Rawls superior to the status quo.” So it’s a kind of L-shaped indifference curve. It goes down though the status quo to equality and then it turns right.

Anyone want to take a stab at telling us why? Why would you have these L shaped indifference curves? Yeah? Why don’t you get the mic, or come to the mic?

Student: You can move right as far as possible and that will be increasing the goods for B, and then as you move down, you have to stop at the quantity…

Professor Ian Shapiro: Say A has this much when we start out. Why isn’t this point here that I’m lining up, say, Rawls preferred?

Student: Because then A becomes the least advantaged person and they have less than B had before.

Professor Ian Shapiro: Exactly right. You got it. So the reason we head east or turn right at the point of equality is what are we trying to do? We’re maximizing the minimum share. We’re saying the person — all we want to say is that whoever turns out to be at the bottom has the highest possible share, so if we went from X to down here then we would have changed who’s at the bottom, and that’s not important. What would be important is that this bottom share would be smaller and we wouldn’t want that. So we don’t care who gets it because we don’t know whether we’re A or B. That’s not material. We don’t know when the veil of ignorance turns out to be lifted, we don’t know whether we’re going to be A or B. So we’re just going to assume we’re going to be whoever turns out to be the worst off.

So this distance here represents the minimum and you wouldn’t want it to get smaller, basically. So if we moved anywhere in this area here the minimum share would get bigger. So if we went to Y then we could do a new L-shaped indifference curve — why is it doing this? Much later, why isn’t there a “restart much later” button?

Okay, so that’s the basic idea. You just get keep getting these L-shaped indifference curves. Now I want to say something about what a radical idea this is in a philosophical sense. It’s not necessarily that radical in a distributive sense for the reason I’ve already indicated to you. It could be compatible with trickle-down if we took the view that trickle-down works better than any other system from the point of view of the least advantaged. Let’s put this Rawls, Bentham and Pareto compared. This is a little taking something of a liberty because we’ve got different things on the axes, so it’s sort of a little ultimately not coherent, but I think you can still get an insight out of it.

If we start with that status quo we know what’s Pareto-preferred, so everything that’s Pareto-preferred is also Rawls-preferred. So if it turned out to be true that the best way to help the person at the bottom is to have only the market transactions then we would do it, but if it turned out that there were other ways that were Pareto-undecidable, like these, to help the person at the bottom we would do that.

So it’s not necessarily radical in a distributive sense. You could get very egalitarian radical redistribution, but you could also get — you could get no redistribution. You could get the Pareto system if that turned out to be the way in which the most disadvantaged person is helped the most.

But it is radical in a philosophical sense that I think is captured by the observation that we don’t care whether we turn out to be A or whether we turn out to be B, and that is the following. There’s been a huge debate in our lifetimes over whether the differences between us are the result of nature or nurture, an enormous debate. You read a book like Charles Murray, Losing Ground. How many people have heard of that book? Nobody? Wow, so how quickly things change. Well, it was a book that came out about probably twenty years ago, that’s probably why you haven’t read it, basically saying that the differences between us are genetically determined. There are genetic differences in IQ that show up in various ways including racially, and there was a huge storm of criticism. He was accused of being a racist, and there were charges and countercharges, and people said, “No, it’s not genetics, it’s environment,” and so on.

So one of the most important things — and I’m going to focus on this much more next Monday, I just want to mention it now so you can think about it — one of the points Rawls makes is, “Look, possibly the differences between us are genetic. If the differences between us are genetic it’s just moral luck because you didn’t choose to have the genes that you have, and not only didn’t you choose it, you didn’t do anything to get the genes that you’ve got. It’s moral luck. On the other hand, suppose differences between us are environmental? Well, it’s moral luck. You didn’t choose to be born in the country and the family you were born into. You didn’t make any choices in that regard. Furthermore, you didn’t do any work to be in the country or the family you happened to have been raised in. Again, it’s just luck. From your point of view it’s a completely random thing. You could have been born somewhere else to somebody else, or you could have been born to parents who didn’t have the resources that your parents have. So this whole debate about nature and nurture,” says John Rawls, “is beside the point. From the standpoint of justice we don’t care.” And that is his argument.

I think, for what it’s worth, the most important argument in Rawls’s book that the differences between us are morally arbitrary whether it’s nature or nurture. It doesn’t matter. They’re not the result of choice, and they’re not the result of work. They just fell out of the sky as far as we’re actually concerned. That being the case, and I’m going to go into the assumptions behind that in more detail on Monday, but from the point of view of this discussion so we don’t really care if A or B is the worse-off person. We’re just going to say from the standpoint of justice we want to improve the lot of the worst-off person, and even if the worst-off person changes. So we go from X to G. It’s morally irrelevant. All we want to do is maximize the share of the person at the bottom. So that’s the Rawlsian difference principle. And —

Chapter 5. Incomes and Wealth: Rawls, Bentham and Pareto Compared [00:33:59]

As I said, you can see it overlaps with and contains the Pareto Principle. And it has some overlap with Bentham in that it would sanction moving into the Pareto-undecidable zone here that would be Bentham preferred if it works for the greatest benefit of the least advantaged person. And Rawls’s claim to you, the reader, is that this is the principle you would choose. You would want the economic system that works to the benefit of the person at the bottom. What do you think? Who likes this idea? Who doesn’t like it? What don’t you like about it? Who was — it was here, yeah.

Student: It assumes that once you’re born you’re going to stay in that position for the rest of your life. There’s nothing you can do about it.

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay, well that’s a good observation. I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Just explain a little bit more and I’ll see if you’re saying what I think you’re saying.

Student: Well, what about effort that people in to changing their social position?

Professor Ian Shapiro: Ah, what about effort? Okay, what about effort? I thought you were making another point, so let me just respond to the point I thought you were making, which you weren’t making, but we should nonetheless address since people do sometimes make it. But then I’ll come to your point which is, anyway, much more interesting.

The point I thought you were making is this has no dynamic side to it. That is to say it’s static in exactly the way the Pareto Principle is static, but any economist would want a theory that has a dynamic dimension to it. You would want to know over time, what’s the effect of a certain redistributive change? So we would want to say, “Well, if benefiting the person at the bottom slightly improves their welfare in the next three months, but it comes at the cost of lower economic growth over time, would we want to do that?” And it’s fair to say Rawls doesn’t have an answer to that question. He doesn’t have a dynamic theory. On the other hand I think his defense, this is why it’s ultimately not a very interesting criticism, I think his defense would kick in, that, “Well, I’m telling you what the criterion should be, not how to run the economy.”

But let’s come to the point about effort. And this is going to, to some degree, get us into next Monday’s lecture, but it’s good to make a start at it because it’s a very deep point, actually. What about effort? So yes, the capacities we have might be distributed in morally arbitrary ways, but some people choose to work really hard and some people choose to sit on the couch and watch ESPN all day. And let’s suppose you have two people with exactly the same IQ, but one watches ESPN all day and one studies hard, so the one who studies hard gets the A, and the one who watches ESPN all day gets a C, and I take the import of what you’re saying, “Well, there’s some legitimate dessert there. The person who works should get the A, yeah?”

Now Rawls is sort of with you, but in a way that I don’t think works for him because if you read Rawls carefully what he says is exactly what you’ve said. He says, “Yes, the differences between us are morally arbitrary, but the use we choose to make of our capacities is not.” Why doesn’t it work for him? This is sort of like Bentham being scared of the egalitarian implications of his theory and so he wheels out the difference between absolute and practical equality, but it doesn’t really work for him either for reasons we saw. Why doesn’t this really work for Rawls? Yeah?

Student: Couldn’t you say that someone’s naturally, just by luck, given a capacity or a predilection to work hard?

Professor Ian Shapiro: So that’s exactly where I was hoping you would go. That, well, some people have a supercharged work ethic and some people don’t. And why do some people have a supercharged work ethic? Because of the way they were raised, perhaps? Maybe some of it’s genetic, perhaps?  But why isn’t that morally arbitrary as well, if the differences in IQ are morally arbitrary? So weakness of the will, you know, morally arbitrary too, or strength of the will is morally arbitrary. So the person who sits on the couch watching ESPN all day just doesn’t have the same — he doesn’t have the moral luck to have a lot of partisan work ethic, so he shouldn’t be penalized for that.

So now you can see why Rawls doesn’t want to go there because it has the effect of completely obliterating the concept of any personal responsibility, ultimately. Because once you make that move, why should you differentiate between the weakness of the will or the strength of the will and say, “That’s not morally arbitrary, but differences in IQ are morally arbitrary, or athletic ability are morally arbitrary”? It doesn’t seem to work. So it’s not a satisfying way out for Rawls, and he does it because he’s afraid of the radical implications of this view.

But what’s interesting about this, you know, Rawls’s fix doesn’t work, but his underlying arguments are very powerful arguments. I mean, isn’t it right? Isn’t it just true that the differences between us nature or nurture are morally arbitrary. It is moral luck whether it’s genetics or upbringing. Nothing you did, nothing you chose, nothing you have, therefore, any particular right to. So you guys think you all worked so hard to get into Yale and all this and you deserve to be here. It’s a load of bunk. None of you deserve to be here more than anybody else. That’s what he’s saying. It might be a nice fiction you tell yourself.

As this little exchange showed, his attempt to put some limits on this idea is just pathetic. It doesn’t work. But the basic argument about moral arbitrariness it’s totally compelling. Anyone here think it’s not compelling? And I don’t think it’s a good argument. I don’t think it’s compelling because it has implications I don’t want to live with. I mean, you have to have some other reason. Let me say this, I think it has implications that if you really drill down into them, probably nobody in this room wants to live with, just like John Rawls didn’t want to live with them. But what’s a good way out? Who thinks I’m wrong? Who thinks this is a bad argument? It’s just not a good argument. Nobody? Hmm. Yeah?

Student: Not that I disagree, but it seems to strip down human free will in that if the only condition which matters is the circumstances of your birth then you don’t really have any choice as to the course of your life. So it seems completely deterministic which might not be…

Professor Ian Shapiro: Well, yes and no. I think it’s agnostic on the question of free will. He’s not saying we don’t have free will. Maybe we do. Maybe we don’t. I think what he’s saying is, if some of us have a greater capacity, say, to work hard or to engage in delayed gratification than others, that is a difference between us. Just as an empirical matter, that is a difference between us. What he’s saying is that the person who has the greater capacity for deferred gratification or the greater capacity to work hard isn’t entitled to more benefits than the person who doesn’t have it, just in virtue of that strength of the will. I mean it might also be true that we don’t have free will, that’s another matter, but I think he’s just not taking a position on that question. You could do it two by two and fill in all the boxes. He’s not saying we don’t have will, we can’t make choices, he’s just saying the choices that we make don’t give us any particular rights.

Now, I mean, I think what is, and maybe what you’re getting at that does pin the tail on the donkey is, what he’s saying is ultimately subversive of the idea of individual responsibility, but that’s not the same thing as determinism. They come together in other settings, so if somebody says, “Well, I committed the murder, but I was in the grip of a schizophrenic disorder, and so I didn’t have free will, so I’m not responsible,” that’s when determinism and the issue of the will come together, but he’s not making that kind of argument. He’s conceding, I think, for the purposes of discussion, that there is free will. But I’m saying, when you take away his fix, which really I don’t think does work, you’re saying the differences that flow from our strengths of will shouldn’t entitle us to anything in particular.

So none of you deserve all the good things you’ve gotten in life just because you worked hard. So what if you worked hard? You had the capacity to work hard. Other people didn’t. So anyone think it’s just not a good argument? Anyone think it seems like a good argument but you really don’t like it, at least some? Who really likes it, the people who want to go and watch ESPN all day? There are philosophers who follow this intuition. There’s a guy called Philippe Van Parijs, a Belgian political thinker. Yeah, what were you going to say?

Student: Is this an argument in favor of complete equality, then, in terms of redistribution?

Profession Ian Shapiro: Okay, so that’s a good question. I’ll leave Philippe out of it because your question’s more important than what he has to say. Is this an argument for equality? Rawls’s answer is a qualified yes. He’s saying it’s not an argument for equality. It’s an argument for the difference principle. He’s saying it’s an argument for distributing things in such a way that they benefit the person at the bottom.

Now you have to have a whole theory of how the political economy works to say whether redistribution to absolute equality would do that because if redistribution to equality would destroy incentives, let’s say, and so that over time this would go this way, then it wouldn’t be. So he would say, “What it’s an argument for is detaching what we get from any theory that ours is some kind of moral right and connecting it to some theory, the best going theory of the day about how you organize an economy to benefit the person at the bottom. That’s what you should do. If equality does that you have equality. If the market does that you have the market, but it’s not anything else. It’s just this pure consequentialist claim. Do it in order to help the person at the bottom.”

So from Parijs’s point, Philippe Van Parijs’s point he says, “Well,” — he wrote a book called Real Freedom for All and he said, “Yes, everybody should get a minimum basic income, and it shouldn’t have anything to do with their work, their capacity to work.” So in the famous one-liner he says, “Even surfers should get pay.” Even surfers should get pay, as Van Parijs puts it. There should be the highest sustainable universal basic income, whatever that is, and it shouldn’t be connected to work because capacity to work is morally arbitrary.

So what I’m going to talk about on Monday is we’re going to really dig into this question because you can now see, I mean, one of the ironies I want you to mull over between now and then, one of the ironies is that this puts Rawls way to the left of Marx in a certain sense because as we saw Marx was a straight-up Enlightenment theorist wedded to the whole workmanship idea. Remember Locke, workmanship, labor theory of value; all that stuff? Marx’s critique of capitalism was the worker doesn’t get what he produces. Rawls is saying, “We don’t care in any moral sense. We don’t care who did the work because the capacity for work isn’t a capacity that brings with it any particular moral valence because of this moral arbitrariness argument.” Okay, we will pick up from there next week.

[end of transcript]

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