How can justice be causal?

Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability?

Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean by the term. And we would need to be able to "operationalize" this complex concept in order to be able to apply it to different social arrangements. But neither of these tasks is insurmountable; certainly not more so than defining and applying the ideas of fascism, liberal democracy, or welfare state to specific societies.

So let's begin with a simple, applicable definition of justice. Let's focus on just three dimensions of a society's functioning: distribution of access to society's wealth; the degree of abuse of power and its contrary, reliable legal protections of the person; and the extent of individual freedoms. Injustice involves --

• exploitation and inequality
• unwarranted coercion by the state or private organizations
• the abuse of people's freedoms.

A society is more just when it involves less of any of these features. And each of these dimensions seems measurable.

But immediately a problem arises. Each of these features requires a key normative judgement. Exploitation is the unfair division of the fruits of productive activity among the participants. The qualifier "unwarranted" requires that we supply a normative theory of the state. And "abuse" of freedom isn't simply restriction on freedom; it is the unjustified or unequal restriction on freedom. So in order to measure any of these characteristics in a particular social context it isn't enough to know who gets what or who does what to whom; we need a background set of normative ideas that allow us to judge which kinds of treatment and inequality count as exploitation, coercion, or the abuse of freedom.

This is where Amartya Sen's ideas about capabilities, realizations, and freedoms are practical and useful. We might substitute "capabilities realization deficit" for exploitation. Here we might argue that a society that leaves a significant portion of its population in material conditions where they cannot fulfill most of their basic human capabilities is for that reason unjust. We might measure the gap in human development between the top quintile and the bottom quintile as an estimate of the degree of exploitation that is prevalent in a given society. We may not know in detail how the system of distribution works, but the severity of the gap gives reason to believe that a portion of the society is being treated unfairly.  The Human Development Index provides a basis for beginning to assess different countries along these lines (link).

Second, we might measure coercion and legality by the estimating the degree to which a society has effectively implemented a working system of law that is applied equally. The World Bank has made some efforts in this direction through its Worldwide Governance Indicators (link; working paper here).  This gives us an empirical measure of the degree of lawlessness and unchecked state power that exists in various societies.

We might measure freedoms by aggregating observable features of democratic participation in various societies.  The Economist has constructed a Democracy Index that was first implemented in 2006 (link). This gives us an empirical way of assessing the rough degree of involvement citizens can have in public decision-making; or in other words, it is a measure of the degree to which it is possible for citizens to exercise their freedoms in a public space.

So we might imagine a "justice index" for a society that aggregates measures like these into an overall assessment of the degree of justice the society currently demonstrates.  It would then be interesting to see how societies differ in this measure, and how other important social characteristics may be correlated with this measure.  I haven't done this experiment, but here's what we might expect: higher injustice ratings correspond to greater likelihood of social conflict, lower productivity, and lower community and civic engagement.

What mechanisms might be hypothesized that would originate in these core aspects of a society's justice profile and its various outcomes?  Here we can identify a couple of factors that would support a causal interpretation.  For example, absolute or relative deprivation can cause people to rebel as they struggle to create social changes that protect their interests.  Further, as Barrington Moore demonstrated in Injustice, the conviction that basic social arrangements are unfair can also move people to activism and resistance -- as we seem to be seeing in the Occupy Wall Street movement.  These factors derive from the distributive arrangements of a society: injustice can provoke resistance.  Similar statements can be made about state violence and lawlessness. We have seen in Libya, Syria, and Morocco that state violence against protesters can actually have the effect of strengthening and broadening resistance.

So these aspects of injustice can have effects on mobilization and resistance by a population. Are there other effects that injustice can have?  As noted earlier (link), Pickett and Wilkinson argue in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger that inequalities of income have surprisingly strong associations with a variety of social ills.  This could be developed into an argument that social justice and injustice lead to behaviors that either promote or undermine social welfare.

Finally, it seems plausible to imagine that the intangibles that accompany a harmonious society -- a population of people who generally feel that they are fairly treated by their basic institutions and their fellow citizens -- will lead to a variety of other social goods, including cooperation, civic engagement, and economic productivity.  Conversely, it is plausible to suppose that a dis-harmonious society would give rise to the negatives of these qualities: less cooperation, less civic involvement, and less economic productivity.

So two things seem true.  First, it does seem possible to "measure" injustice (supported, of course, by a normative theory of why various kinds of inequality are illegitimate).  And second, it does seem plausible that the features of a society that constitute its injustice may also have causal consequences for social unrest, social wellbeing, and social cooperation.  And these are certainly significant social consequences.

(Perhaps there is an analogous set of questions at the individual level: Is "virtue" a specific empirical characteristic of a person's character? And can virtue be a causal factor in the individual's life outcomes and level of happiness?)

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,inequality,justice

Rawls's framework for global justice

Rawls's A Theory of Justice was immediately received as a major and progressive contribution to the theory of justice within existing societies. His Law of Peoples (1999) was intended to carry his basic ideas about justice to the international realm.  (Here is a PDF of a preliminary version of the title essay of the book as published in Critical Inquiry in 1993.) Here is how he defined the goal of a law of peoples in 1993:

The law of peoples ... is a family of political concepts along with principles of right justice, and the common good that specify the content of a liberal conception of justice worked up to extend to and apply to international law. It provides the concepts and principles by reference to which that law is to be judged. (43)

In contrast to the reception A Theory of Justice received, his work on the international part of the theory has not had much influence, and was roundly criticized for being too accepting of international inequalities.   Philip Pettit put the point this way in his contribution to Rex Martin and David Reidy's Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia:

John Rawls's work on the law of peoples is notorious for its anti-cosmopolitan stance: roughly, its insistence that those of us in well-ordered societies do not owe to the members of other societies the sort of justice we owe to one another. (38)

This is exactly the critique that Philippe van Parijs offered to Rawls prior to publication of the book (link).

Given that Rawls's intuitions seem to have been solidly progressive in other spheres, it is worth considering why he took this very limited view of the obligations of justice in the global context. Why did he begin with the perspective of peoples rather than persons?  (Here I'll make use of the 1993 statements of the view.)

A number of the critics put their cases in terms of Rawls's anti-cosmopolitanism.  "Cosmopolitanism" is the view that we are all citizens of the world, and we have positive moral relationships with each other no matter what nation issues our passports.  No one would deny that everyone has some kinds of moral relationships to everyone else -- for example, the obligation not to impose harm on innocent people.  But cosmopolitanism extends to the idea of positive obligations -- the obligation to render assistance as well as the obligation to refrain from gratuitous harm.  The contrary to cosmopolitanism might be called "nationalism", but this implies assumptions that Rawls would presumably not have accepted.  So let's call it "bounded people-ism": the claims of justice that a person has against other persons extend only to other members of his/her people and government.

One deep reason for the direction that Rawls took was the assumption he made about how to make use of the original position and the veil of ignorance in arriving at principles of international justice.  If this framework involved all human beings, then the results would have been very similar to the argument made in the case of a well-ordered society: inequalities need to be the least system possible consistent with maximizing the position of the least-well-off stratum of society.  However, Rawls chose instead to include "peoples" rather than "persons" in the argument from the original position in the case of international justice. What is a people?

By peoples I mean persons and their dependents seen as a corporate body and as organized by their political institutions, which establish the powers of government. In democratic societies persons will be citizens; in hierarchical and other societies they will be members. (41)

And he directly addresses the question of why it should be peoples rather than persons whose perspectives are represented in the original position for international justice:

Wouldn't it be better to start with the world as a whole, with a global original position, so to speak, and discuss the question whether, and in what form, there should be states, or peoples, at all? ... I think there is no clear initial answer to this question. We should try various alternatives and weigh their pluses and minuses. Since in working out justice as fairness I begin with domestic society, I shall continue from there as if what has been done so far is more or less sound. So I simply build on the steps taken until now, as this seems to provide a suitable starting point for the extension to the law of peoples. A further reason for proceeding thus is that peoples as corporate bodies organized by their governments now exist in some form all over the world. (42-43)

So his reasons for beginning with this premise are, first, we have to start somewhere and there isn't a philosophically compelling reason to favor persons over peoples in this setting; and second, peoples (and states) exist as actors in the world, so it is feasible to begin the analysis at this level. This way of formulating the original position is designed to establish fair terms of interaction between societies -- or in other words,

... fair conditions under which the parties, this time as representatives of societies well ordered by liberal conceptions of justice, are to specify the laws of peoples and the fair terms of their cooperation. (45)

This formulation, of course, immediately precludes certain questions, including all questions of difference in outcomes for the least-well-off in the various societies.  The fact that the LWO in country X are worse off than the LWO in country Y cannot be a factor in this deliberation, and therefore there cannot emerge a positive obligation to transfer resources from society Y to X to ameliorate this difference.

Here are the principles that Rawls arrives at through this construction:

1. Peoples (as organized by their governments) are free and independent, and their freedom and independence is to be respected by other peoples.
2. Peoples are equal and parties to their own agreements.
3. Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to war.
4. Peoples are to observe a duty of nonintervention.
5. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
6. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions on the conduct of war (assumed to be in self-defense).
7. Peoples are to honor human rights. (46)

In the final version of the argument in 1997 he adds a final principle:

8. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.

Later in 1993 he comments on the idea of a human right:

Human rights have, then, these three roles:
1. Their being fulfilled is a necessary condition of a regime's legitimacy and of the decency of its legal order.
2. Their fulfillment is also sufficient to exclude justified and forceful intervention by other peoples, say by economic sanctions or, in grave cases, by military force.
3. "They set a moral limit to pluralism" among peoples. (59)

Several things are evident from these lists.  First, the obligations represented here are indeed minimalist; basically, they are limitations on the use of coercive means by peoples (states) to achieve their ends.  Even the 8th principle added in the 1997 version creates an obligation only to assist other peoples in achieving a just political regime.  Second, there are no requirements of distributive justice in this list of principles.  Each society has internal requirements of distributive justice; but there is no inter-society requirement of distributive justice.  The fact that there are large inequalities of resources between countries is not a basis for a claim of injustice, according to these principles.

This framework has been strongly criticized by philosophers and others who found that it was far too accepting of global inequalities.  Alan Buchanan focuses on the global inequality part of the story in his 2000 contribution in Ethics. Buchanan holds that even representatives of peoples would not have overlooked the significant inequalities imposed on peoples by the global economic system.  He maintains that the original position concerned with international justice would have to take into account two important facts:

There is a global basic structure, which, like the domestic basic structure, is an important subject of justice because it has profound and enduring effects on the prospects of individuals and groups, including peoples in Rawls's sense.

The populations of states are not "peoples" in Rawls's sense and are not likely to become so without massive, unjustifiable coercion, but rather are often conflicting collections of "peoples" and other groups. (700-1) 

The first fact, if recognized, would ensure that the international original position would necessarily take into account the inequalities created by this system for different peoples.  He also believes that the second fact raises salient issues for the international original position.  Essentially the issue here is this: what happens when the multiple peoples of a single state come into conflict? By making the assumptions that "peoples within unified states" are the agents within the international original position, Rawls makes it impossible to arrive at principles of international justice that would specify just behavior in the face of civil war or secessionist movements. This approach makes it impossible to address intrastate conflict.

Tom Pogge extends his own critique of Rawls's position on international distributive justice in a Fordham Law Review article (link) (also included in Martin and Reidy's Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia).  Fundamentally, Pogge is highly critical of Rawls's failure to arrive at an international theory of justice that provides a basis for critique of global inequalities. In this piece he argues that Rawls's two theories are in fact inconsistent with each other.

As indicated above, much of this body of criticism has to do with the view that Rawls's Law of Peoples creates only the most limited obligations across peoples.  His view is not "cosmopolitan".  But a more fundamental criticism, which Buchanan hints at, is that there is a major strand of injustice embedded within the world system that is wholly invisible within Rawls's formulation of the law of peoples.  This is the fact that global institutions may create systematically imbalanced economic relations among states, with the result that some states are in a position to take unfair advantage of other states. This is a form of injustice that would not be accepted within the terms of a domestic society. But there is no basis within the framework of the law of peoples to identify and criticize these types of injustices.

These criticisms are surely correct.  As a theory of global justice, the Law of Peoples doesn't begin to provide enough of a normative basis to arrive at sound judgments about international arrangements.  I began by asking how it came to pass that Rawls presented such a limited theory of international justice. The best answer I can offer is that he was focusing on the wrong issues.  He focused on issues of war and interstate violence, and he did not sufficiently bring into his view the empirical realities associated with a highly unequal world economic structure.  And this is puzzling, since questions of global inequalities -- of resources, of power, and of self-determination -- were certainly widely debated at Harvard in the 1970s and 1980s while Rawls's thinking on this subject was developing.

(In addition to critics, Rawls has some defenders in this area.  Samuel Freeman provides an extensive and reasoned response to many of these criticisms of Rawls's theory of international justice here (link).)

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,globalization,justice,Rawls

Rawls on the EU

During the final preparation of The Law of Peoples: with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" John Rawls had extensive interaction with Philippe van Parijs. Van Parijs was particularly interested in the political and legal circumstances surrounding the establishment of the legal structure of the European Union and the obligations states and their citizens would have to each other within the EU. A key question is whether a political body -- a state or confederation -- needs to encompass a single unified "people" (whether by language, traditions, or culture); or if, on the contrary, such a body can consist of multiple peoples who nonetheless have duties of justice to each other.

What turns on this from a moral point of view is the level of moral concern that members of this kind of union owe each other. Are their obligations limited to the domain of "concern" that gives rise to some obligations of charity? Or are they closely enough interconnected that they are subject to the demands of justice towards each other? If the latter then the difference principle applies to them when inequalities of life circumstances are apparent. If the former then only weaker principles of assistance apply.

For van Parijs this question is particularly acute in the case of Belgium, which was even then subject to fissional pressures along linguistic-cultural lines between Flemings and Walloons.

Van Parijs and Rawls exchanged several careful and thoughtful letters on these issues in 1998, and these letters were published in their entirety in Revue de philosophie économique in 2003 (link).

The disagreements between van Parijs and Rawls are very interesting to follow in detail. There is one aspect of the exchange that is particularly intriguing on the subject of Rawls's own assessment of modern capitalism. The passage is worth quoting. Here is an excerpt from Rawls's letter:

One question the Europeans should ask themselves, if I may hazard a suggestion, is how far–reaching they want their union to be. It seems to me that much would be lost if the European union became a federal union like the United States. Here there is a common language of political discourse and a ready willingness to move from one state to another. Isn't there a conflict between a large free and open market comprising all of Europe and the individual nation-states, each with its separate political and social institutions, historical memories, and forms and traditions of social policy. Surely these are great value to the citizens of these countries and give meaning to their life. The large open market including all of Europe is aim of the large banks and the capitalist business class whose main goal is simply larger profit. The idea of economic growth, onwards and upwards, with no specific end in sight, fits this class perfectly. If they speak about distribution, it is [al]most always in terms of trickle down. The long–term result of this — which we already have in the United States — is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind. I can't believe that that is what you want.

So you see that I am not happy about globalization as the banks and business class are pushing it. I accept Mill's idea of the stationary state as described by him in Bk. IV, Ch. 6 of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). (I am adding a footnote in §15 to say this, in case the reader hadn't noticed it). I am under no illusion that its time will ever come – certainly not soon – but it is possible, and hence it has a place in what I call the idea of realistic utopia.

Several aspects of this passage are noteworthy. The first is a tentative skepticism about the goal of creating a European community in a strong sense -- a polity in which individuals have strong obligations to all other citizens within the full scope of the expanded boundaries. Rawls seems to equate this goal with the idea of creating a somewhat homogeneous and pervasive European culture, replacing German, French, or Italian national cultures. And he offers the idea that the traditions, affinities, and loyalties associated with national identities are important aspects of an individual's pride and satisfaction with his/her life.

What is surprising about these views is that Rawls seems to overlook the polyglot, poly-cultural character of the United States and Canada themselves. Both North American countries seem to have created some remarkable solutions to the problem of "unity with difference." It is possible to be a committed United States citizen but also a Chicago Polish patriot, a Los Angeles Muslim, or a Mississippi African American. Each of these is a separate community with its own traditions and values. But each can also embody an overlay of civic culture that makes them all Americans. It certainly doesn't seem impossible to imagine that Spaniards will develop a more complex identity, as both Spaniard and European. So Rawls's apparent concerns about homogenization and loss of collective meaning seem ill founded.

Even more interesting, though, are his several comments about globalization and capitalism. As we observed in a post about the property-owning democracy (link), Rawls has already expressed the idea that capitalism has a hard time living up to the principles of justice. Here he goes a step further and reveals a significant mistrust of the value system created by capitalism. He refers to the world the "bankers and capitalists" want to create -- one based on acquisitiveness and the pursuit of profit -- and he clearly expresses his opinion that this is incompatible with a truly human life.

The goal of perpetual growth expresses this ideology, and Rawls reveals his skepticism about this idea as well. He offers the opinion that the pursuit of growth by this class is no more than the pursuit of greater wealth and more meaningless consumption. And he clearly believes this is a dead-end. Instead, he endorses J. S. Mill's idea of a steady-state (link). (Interestingly, this position lines up well with current thinking of environmentalists; for example, James Gustave Speth and The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (link).)

Here Rawls seems to express a cultural critique of capitalism: the idea that the driving values of a market society induce a social psychology of consumerism that overrides the individual's ability to construct a thoughtful life plan of his/her own.

Finally, Rawls criticizes the neo-liberal dogmas about distribution of income that had dominated public discourse in the U.S. almost since the publication of A Theory of Justice: the theory of trickle-down economics. That theory holds that everyone will gain when businesses make more profits. And, of course, the data on income distribution in the U.S. since 1980 has flatly refuted that theory (link).

(Van Parijs' most recent book, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford Political Theory), will be published in October. It is highly relevant to this debate with Rawls.)

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice,Rawls

Possessive individualism

C. B. Macpherson was a political philosopher who placed a genuinely novel interpretation on the history of political thought in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke when the book appeared in 1962. Macpherson was a Canadian philosopher who influenced quite a few young scholars in the 1970s in North America and Great Britain. Macpherson offered the basis of a strong critique of a certain kind of liberalism -- the liberalism that places essentially the whole normative weight on the value of the individual and his/her liberties, and essentially no emphasis on the social obligations we all have towards each other. A first wave of criticism of narrow liberalism took this form:

The repair that was needed [to liberal theory] was one that would bring back a sense of the moral worth of the individual, and combine it again with a sense of the moral value of community, which had been present in some measure in the Puritan and Lockean theory. (2)

But Macpherson feels the need to go further:

The present study … suggests that the difficulties of modern liberal-democratic theory lie deeper than had been thought, that the original seventeenth-century individualism contained the central difficulty, which lay in its possessive quality. Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual. the individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of exchange between proprietors. (3)

The individualism that Macpherson identifies is of a specific sort; it is "possessive" individualism. What does Macpherson mean by this? Here we have the heart of the theory of possessive individualism: the individual as solely an owner of himself. Here is his formulation late in the book:

1. What makes a man human is freedom from dependence on the wills of others.
2. Freedom from dependence on others means freedom from any relations with others except those relations which the individual enters voluntarily with a view to his own interest.
3. The individual is essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities, for which he owes nothing to society.
4. Although the individual cannot alienate the whole o fhis property in his own person, he may alienate his capacity to labour.
5. Human society consists of a series of market relations.
6. Since freedom from the wills of others is what makes a man human, each individual's freedom can rightfully be limited only by such obligations and rules as are necessary to secure the same freedoms for others.
7. Political society is a human contrivance for the protection of the individual's property in his person and goods, and (therefore) for the maintenance of orderly relations of exchange between individuals regarded as proprietors of themselves. (263-4)

The core of the book is a set of interpretive chapters on Hobbes, Locke, the Levellers, and Harrington. These chapters are careful, detailed, and closely textual and contextual. The book puts forward a fairly simple theory: the British tradition of political philosophy expresses a rather particular ideology that is pre-philosophical. The ideology (possessive individualism) is a very specific conception of the individual and his/her roles in the social world. The philosophical theories that are built on that ideology give shape to that set of assumptions, but they are ill suited to recognizing or critiquing those assumptions. Macpherson highlights the interpretive challenge of discovering these underlying assumptions: "Where a writer can take it for granted that his readers will share some of his assumptions, he will see no need to set these out at the points in his argument where we, who do not share those assumptions automatically, think they should have been stated to make the argument complete" (5).

What is the social context of this ideology? It is the reality of market society:

These assumptions do correspond substantially to the actual relations of a market society. (4)

One of Macpherson's more indirect goals in his philosophy is to provide an intellectually sound foundation for the liberal democratic state -- a state that recognizes the worth of the individual while also recognizing the social obligations that we all have towards each other and that need to be expressed through the social programs of the state. Fundamentally, Macpherson is interested in helping formulate a political theory that lays a powerful normative base for social democracy.

Macpherson's interpretation of Hobbes's philosophy provides an interesting discussion of "models of society" that is worth drawing attention to. He suggests that Hobbes formulates three models of society: customary or status society; simple market society; and possessive market society (47-48).

The concept of possessive market society is neither a novel nor an arbitrary construction. It is clearly similar to the concepts of bourgeois or capitalist society used by Marx, Weber, Sombart, and others, who have made the existence of a market in labour a criterion of capitalism, and like their concepts it is intended to be a model or ideal type to which modern (i.e. post-feudal) European societies have approximated. (48)

What Macpherson means by a model here needs some careful interpretation. He refers to it as an "ideal type" in this passage. More specifically, a model is a specification of several key structural features of a social order. Here is the model of a customary or status society:

1. The productive and regulative work of the society is authoritatively allocated to groups, ranks, classes, or persons.
2. Each group, rank, class, or person is confined to a way of working, and is given and permitted only to have a scale of reward...
3. There is no unconditional individual property in land.
4. The whole labour force is tied to the land, or to the performance of allotted functions, or (in the case of slaves) to masters. (49)

Macpherson thinks that these four characteristics create a specific form of system behavior for societies that embody them: "From these properties of a status society certain characteristics follow" (49).

The most complex model is the possessive market society, with postulates defining allocation of work, rewards for work, enforcement of contract, individual rational maximizing, individual's property in his labour, individual ownership of land, individuals want more utility or power, individuals have differential energy, skill, or possessions. With these postulates (including institutions and actors), we get a certain kind of social functioning. This is an "aggregation dynamics" argument. In other terms, it is a micro-to-macro argument up the struts of Coleman's boat.

It is worthwhile drawing out the connections between possessive individualism and conservative libertarian political groups in the present. The Tea Party seems to be a contemporary descendant of this ideology. Taxation is theft; the state has no legitimate role beyond protecting individual security and property; government regulation of private business activity is an immoral intrusion on liberty and property; individuals possess liberties and property that the state cannot limit; individuals deserve what they own and owe nothing to society or other citizens. Justice is served by simply protecting the possessions of individual citizens. Robert Nozick seems to have represented many of these values in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Those who favor a more expansive vision of a democratic society have several core values that conflict with these: Individuals have obligations to other members of society; government has the responsibility of protecting the wellbeing of the least advantaged in society; government has the responsibility of protecting the public good against harmful effects of private activities; decisions about public policies can and should be made through effective institutions of democratic self-determination; inequalities of wealth and power need to be restrained to ensure the political voice of the whole of society. Taxation is legitimate for at least three different reasons: it is a legitimate policy tool for limiting wealth inequalities to levels consistent with democratic equality; it is a legitimate vehicle for redistributing income to satisfy the requirement of providing a social minimum; and it is legitimate as a source of revenue needed to accomplish the public functions of the state, including provision of public goods and regulation of environment, labor, air safety, food safety, and the like. Justice is served by creating a system of legislation and policy that ensures the dignity and democratic rights of all members of society. John Rawls expresses most of these value in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.

Our political sphere could still use a powerful and unifying theory providing a justification for these social democratic ideas. So Macpherson's voice is still relevant, almost fifty years later.

Here is a review of the book by the great English Marxist historian, Christopher Hill.

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice

Economic thinking in Rawls's thought

John Rawls's (1971) A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (TJ) had a sizable impact on a number of disciplines, including economics and economic policy thought. (His ideas in this original version of the theory are clarified and further developed in his 2005 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JF).)  Rawls's influence on economics largely derived from one aspect of his theory of justice, the theory of justice in distribution, which has implications for economic inequalities, taxation, and social welfare benefits.  Did Rawls actually think about these issues in the ways that an economist would have done?

One of the primary goals of Rawls's theory of justice is directly relevant to economic policy. He specifically wanted to work out the implications of the theory of justice for the justice of fundamental economic institutions:

My aim in this chapter is to see how the two principles work out as a conception of political economy, that is, as standards by which to assess economic arrangements and policies, and their background institutions. (Welfare economics is often defined in the same way. I do not use this name because the term "welfare" suggests that the implicit moral conception is utilitarian; the phrase "social choice" is far better although I believe its connotations are still too narrow.) (TJ, 259)

What is the purpose of this aspect of the theory of justice?

A doctrine of political economy must include an interpretation of the public good which is based on a conception of justice. It is to guide the reflections of the citizen when he considers questions of economic and social policy. (259)

Rawls is explicit in addressing the issue of the relationship between his own theorizing and the theories of the economists:

It is essential to keep in mind that our topic is the theory of justice and not economics, however elementary. We are only concerned with some moral problems of political economy. For example, I shall ask: what is the proper rate of saving over time, how should the background institutions of taxation and property be arranged, or at what level is the social minimum to be set? In asking these questions my intention is not to explain, much less to add anything to, what economic theory says about the working of these institutions. ... Certain elementary parts of economic theory are brought in solely to illustrate the content of the principles of justice. (265)

So what use does Rawls in fact make of current economic theories? Does he think like an economist? Key to thinking like an economist is thinking in terms of incentives, markets, and institutions. Let's start with incentives. Rawls pays attention to the incentives that citizens have within various sets of institutions:

Moreover, the theory of justice assumes a definite limit on the strength of social and altruistic motivation. It supposes that individuals and groups put forward competing claims, and while they are willing to act justly, they are not prepared to abandon their interests. (281)

He also does a good job of articulating and motivating the central insights of public choice theory -- essentially, reasoning about public goods within a democratic public (TJ, 265 ff.). He analyzes the two key features of a public good -- indivisibility and non-excludability. He explains the free rider problem and the prisoners' dilemma clearly and accurately, and reproduces the conclusion that a public of independent citizens will not achieve public goods at an appropriate level without legislation. The discussion is compact, but it is solidly linked to the best available literature on public goods (Baumol, Sen, Buchanan, Olson). Rawls thinks this is a good place to start, because the institutions of the state have a very substantial role to play in establishing conditions in which public goods are achieved. He also addresses a series of reasons for favoring, and limiting, the institutions of the market as determinants of investments and incomes. He refers to allocative efficiency and personal liberty as positive features, while noting the possibility or likelihood that markets by themselves will create economic inequalities in excess of the requirements of the difference principle. "There is with reason strong objection to the competitive determination of total income, since this ignores the claims of need and an appropriate standard of life" (277).

When discussing the role of government in economic activity Rawls refers to four "branches" of fiscal and resource management activity (TJ 275 ff.). The allocation branch keeps the price system competitive and "prevents the formation of unreasonable market power" (276), and actively monitors market imperfections and externalities. The stabilization branch "strives to bring about reasonably full employment". The transfer branch is responsible for managing the transfer of incomes necessary to establish the social minimum. And the distribution branch "is to preserve an approximate justice in distributive shares by means of taxation and the necessary adjustments in the rights of property" (277).

The primary implications of the theory of justice for economics cross several topics: distribution, taxation, and the idea of a social minimum. Rawls thinks about taxation in several places. The topic arises in TJ under "Institutions for Distributive Justice" (277-280):

The taxes and enactments of the distribution branch are to prevent this limit [in the range of wealth inequalities] from being exceeded. (278)

The second part of the distribution branch is a scheme of taxation to raise the revenues that justice requires. Social resources must be released to the government so that it can provide for the public goods and make the transfer payments necessary to satisfy the difference principle. (278)

A parallel discussion of taxation occurs under the topic of "Economic Institutions" in JF (160-162). There Rawls makes several comments on wealth and inheritance taxes:

First, consider bequest and inheritance: we borrow from Mill (and others) the idea of regulating bequest and restricting inheritance. ... The principle of progressive taxation is applied at the receiver's end. Those inheriting and receiving gifts and endowments pay a tax according to the value received and the nature of the receiver.... The aim is to encourage a wide and far more equal dispersion of real property and productive assets.

Second, the progressive principle of taxation might not be applied to wealth and income for the purposes of raising funds (releasing resources to government), but solely to prevent accumulations of wealth that are judged to be inimical to background justice....

Third, income taxation might be avoided altogether and a proportional expenditure tax adopted instead, that is, a tax on consumption at a constant marginal rate. People would be taxed according to how much they use of the goods and services produced and not according to how much they contribute. (JF, 161)

Another important economic idea that emerges from Rawls's theory is the notion of a social minimum -- essentially an income guarantee for low-income people, established through an income supplement system if needed. This principle derives from the difference principle, Rawls's view that inequalities need to be the least system of inequalities consistent with the maximum result for the least-well-off segment of society.

Once the difference principle is accepted, however, it follows that the minimum is to be set at that point which, taking wages into account, maximizes the expectations of the least advantaged group. By adjusting the amount of transfers (for example, the size of supplementary income payments), it is possible to increase or decrease the prospects of the more disadvantaged, their index of primary goods (as measured by wages plus transfers), so as to achieve the desired result. (285)

Here is what seems to come out of Rawls's discussion of economic institutions and justice. It is a theory of political economy that holds that government has substantial obligations based on distributive justice. It has the obligation of maintaining and correcting the system of economic institutions so as to prevent "unacceptable" levels of inequalities of income and wealth. It has the obligation of providing the resources for securing public goods at an appropriate level. and it has an obligation of collecting taxes sufficient to fund the social minimum for all citizens. It is an account that is well informed about then-current thinking about institutions and public choice. It rests on realistic assumptions about motivation and incentives. And it appears to set the stage for a set of institutions that appear to be economically feasible, along the lines of Scandinavian forms of social democracy.

(Some readers may wonder, as I do, whether the concept of a "proportional expenditure tax" has been seriously explored by economic experts. Here is a review by Michael Graetz in the Harvard Law Review in 1979, arguing that the system is politically infeasible.)

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice,Rawls

Social media and social cohesion

The current topic on the UnderstandingSociety blog poll is a proposition about social cohesion:

THE INTERNET IS HELPING TO CREATE NEW PATHWAYS OF SOCIAL COHESION IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY.

The poll is still open, but as of today 70% of respondents somewhat or strongly agree that the Internet creates a basis for new forms of social cohesion, while only 16% somewhat or strongly disagree. On its face, a large majority of readers are optimistic about the ability of the Internet to contribute to a stronger national community. What the poll question doesn't reveal is the respondents' underlying thinking as the basis of their judgment. So let's see what some of the considerations might be.

First, what do we mean by "social cohesion"? Along with Durkheim, we can approach the concept by relating it to the bonds of morality and loyalty that lead members of a society to adapt their behavior to the perceived needs of society. A willingness to sacrifice in times of crisis, a willingness to defer to the common good, a willingness to conform to widespread social norms -- these are the sorts of things that go into the concept of social cohesion. A society that lacks all bonds of social cohesion is one in which individuals care only about their own interests; who pay attention only to their own individual ideas about morality; and who find the idea of sacrifice for the greater good to be for the gullible. (Interestingly, this is a state of affairs that Durkheim describes as "anomie", and it is the factor that he believes conduces to a heightened rate of suicide in a population; Suicide.) (Here is a nice contemporary survey of the sociological literature on social cohesion by Noah Friedkin; link.)

Where would the social basis of this kind of cohesion come from? Ferdinand Tönnies characterizes a traditional society with a strong basis for social cohesion in terms of the idea of "gemeinschaft"; whereas he describes a modern liberal-market society in terms of the idea of gesellschaft (Community and Society: (GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT)). According to Tönnies, traditional societies maintain social cohesion through traditional social mechanisms: face-to-face relations in a village, common religious institutions, and other institutions representing and inculcating collective values. And as these traditional mechanisms have lost traction in modern civil society, the intuitive idea is that modern societies are generally declining in the level of social cohesion that they reflect.

So how might the mechanisms of social connection provided by the Internet potentially influence the facts about social cohesion in a twenty-first century society? How might Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and webpages have effects that are either favorable or unfavorable for social cohesion? It seems that these capabilities of the Internet have the potential for working in both directions -- both undermining cohesion and enhancing cohesion. So overall, it is very difficult to assess the net impact of these capabilities.

First, consider a few tendencies in the negative direction. Much as Internet-based news sources have fragmented the audience for the network news -- and thereby have reduced the degree of commonality citizens have through their regular interactions with Walter Cronkite -- we might speculate that the Internet facilitates a fragmentation of social groups into smaller and smaller segments. So instead of a set of attitudes that bind citizens together as part of American society, we get micro-sets of attitudes that bind individuals together into micro-constituencies. This would seem to be a force working against social cohesion at the level of the population as a whole.

A related point stems from the evident ability of Internet tools to create ever-more strident groups of people around very specific issues and concerns. If each issue has its own website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, social media management strategies, and the like, individuals are drawn into greater engagement with ever-smaller groups of like-minded individuals. So it is increasingly difficult for politicians to create mass-based constituencies around a core set of values; there is a declining basis for a social consensus in a world in which individuals gravitate towards divisive social and political advocates.

These points suggest that the Internet has effects that are corrosive of social cohesion. What are the tendencies of the Internet that point in the other direction? The example of the use of Facebook during the democracy demonstrations in Egypt provides one positive indication. It would appear that activists were able to gain strong support from thousands of interested Egyptians through the real-time communication and social expression that Facebook pages enabled. This was a process of agglomeration rather than fragmentation for some period of time -- a process through which a broader and broader group of individuals became actively engaged with the values and current happenings associated with the pro-democracy movement.

Second, a little more generally, it is possible that social media like Facebook or YouTube may facilitate the development of more other-oriented interest on the part of the people who use them. If the United Way of Chicago or San Francisco can begin to attract tens of thousands of followers to a Facebook page with powerful, current information about the social needs of other Chicagoans or San Franciscans, we can imagine that there might be a rising level of willingness to get engaged in United Way fundraising and community efforts throughout the community. So YouTube and Facebook can become a contemporary alternative to the face-to-face relationships that Durkheim and Tönnies highlighted.

Third, several recent national elections have demonstrated that millions of people are willing to get involved in presidential and congressional campaigns through social media -- including the act of making online political contributions. The success of these efforts since 2006 suggests the faint possibility that online communities may begin to regain some of the pervasiveness that a fragmented television audience has lost. Perhaps this capability for aggregating large numbers of citizens around online communities of political interests suggests that the Internet can begin to help citizens build a broader consensus.

These considerations suggest that social media and the Internet have tendencies in both directions -- fragmentation and agglomeration -- with the result that its overall influence on cohesion may be neutral. In fact, we might speculate that social media enhance small group cohesion while undermining national cohesion.

In short, I'm inclined now to change my vote in the poll. I had supported the idea that the Internet is mildly favorable to increasing social cohesion. I now think that it's a wash, with negative as well as positive tendencies at work at the same time.

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,democracy,networks

Rawls on political liberalism

Long after the transformative impact Rawls brought to social and political philosophy with A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (1971), Rawls continued to wrestle with the question of how a just society ought to work.  One major part of this question is how a just society ought to encompass major disagreements among its citizens about values and "conceptions of the good;" and much of his thinking is reflected in his 1993 collection of essays, Political Liberalism.  Here is how he formulates the central problem:

A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines.  No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally.  Nor should one expect that in the foreseeable future one of them, or some other reasonable doctrine, will ever be affirmed by all, or nearly all, citizens.  Political liberalism assumes that, for political purposes, a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime.  Political liberalism also supposes that a reasonable comprehensive doctrine does not reject the essentials of a democratic regime. (xvi)

So, to start, Rawls recognizes that modern society is not based on consensus around the major values or issues; rather, individuals differ in their commitments about rights, justice, and the good human life.  How in the context of this pluralism of important value systems, is it possible for a modern society to nonetheless possess the features of civility and stability that we would desire?

Here, then, is what Rawls calls the problem of political liberalism:

How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines? Put another way: How is it possible that deeply opposed though reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live together and all affirm the political conception of a constitutional regime?  What is the structure and content of a political conception that can gain the support of such an overlapping consensus? (xviii)

One prior thought we may have had about a liberal society is that the state establishes no more than a neutral system of law, within the context of which individuals can pursue their own separate and incompatible conceptions of the right and the good.  So the liberal state is a neutral state -- one that gives no privilege to one conception of the good over another.

Neutrality is certainly part of the ideal of a liberal state; but it isn't quite enough.  The reason is that some conceptions of the good and the right require the intervention of the state for enforcement.  If the Alpha group believe that fetal stem cells are nascent human beings and therefore should never be used for the purpose of scientific research, while the Beta group believe that fetal stem cells are no more than useful compounds of organic molecules that can relieve human misery; then both sides of the debate want to prevail through legislation -- either to prohibit stem cell research or to permit stem cell research.  Each side sees its position as being driven by a moral imperative -- and therefore not to be compromised without an unacceptable loss of moral integrity on the part of the losing group.

To overcome this contradiction, neutrality is not enough.  We need to add a commitment to democratic, constitutional procedures as being the moral trump card when it comes to legislation about areas of conflict based on fundamental disagreements about the right and the good.  Essentially this comes down to a second-order commitment that every citizen needs to share:  When policy issues arise that lead to profound disagreement among blocs of citizens, the right solution is the procedurally correct solution arrived at through legitimate democratic processes.  In other words, all citizens need to put their commitment to legitimate democratic procedures ahead of their commitment to a particular conception of the good and the right. Democratic values supersede religious, political, and moral convictions when there is no choice but to legislate an issue.  Citizens are entitled to argue their case for or against proposed legislation; but they are then morally obligated to accept the democratically chosen outcome as a legitimate resolution of the issue.

Rawls captures this conundrum with the idea of toleration: the idea that citizens must tolerate and respect the strongly-held convictions of their fellow citizens, even while participating in a political process that leads to legislation that is inconsistent with those convictions.  This means that if the Alphas prevail through the political process, the Betas need to accept the outcome as morally legitimate -- even though it contradicts their own firmly held moral convictions.  But why would one accept the moral necessity of toleration?  Doesn't this mean sacrificing one's own moral convictions to the will of a contrary majority?  And doesn't this imply that one's own convictions are tentative and conditional?

The answer seems to go along something like these lines.  When one is a member of a society, one recognizes the inevitable fact of the kind of fundamental pluralism Rawls has described here.  This means that society will sometimes legislate about issues concerning which reasonable citizens disagree, based on fundamental moral convictions on both sides.  So the citizen is asked to bracket his/her particular moral convictions when considering outcomes, even as he/she is free to vigorously argue on the basis of those convictions during the process leading up to legislation.  The citizen is asked to take a double perspective on his/her own moral convictions: first-person, that these are my convictions and they seem binding and justified from my point of view; and third-person, that there is disagreement about these matters, and the only defensible process for resolving the issue is the democratic process in which each person's reasons count as much as every other person's.  This is something like Thomas Nagel's understanding of altruism in The Possibility of Altruism; the individual is asked to recognize the moral reality of other persons and not to assign a privileged role to his/her own perspective.

A key part of Rawls's own solution to this problem of democratic pluralism is the idea of an "overlapping consensus" among citizens.  Here is how he defines that idea:

Such a consensus consists of all the reasonable opposing religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines likely to persist over generations and to gain a sizable body of adherents in a more or less just constitutional regime, a regime in which the criterion of justice is that political conception itself. (15)

In such a consensus, the reasonable doctrines endorse the political conception, each from its own point of view.  Social unity is based on a consensus on the political conception; and stability is possible when the doctrines making up the consensus are affirmed by society's politically active citizens and the requirements of justice are not too much in conflict with citizens' essential interests as formed and encouraged by their social arrangements. (134)

So the ideal here is the notion that some set of constitutional arrangements may be acceptable from all points of view -- from Christian to libertarian to Muslim to socialist.  This hope seems to rest on the idea that a neutral, democratic set of political institutions give the best opportunity for the adherents of any particular theory of the good to pursue their interests; so each of the "reasonable opposing religious doctrines" may have good reason to endorse the neutral democratic constitution.  (This is a kind of "original position" argument, applied to opposing comprehensive doctrines.)

What makes this a consensus of any kind is not the notion that there is an overlapping set of values that persist across all the comprehensive doctrines; rather, it is the hope that there will be at least one political arrangement that can serve as the consensus choice of all the incompatible comprehensive doctrines.

The preceding account says that the consensus goes down to the fundamental ideas within which justice as fairness is worked out.  It supposes agreement deep enough to reach such ideas as those of society as a fair system of cooperation and of citizens as reasonable and rational, and free and equal.  As for its breadth, it covers the principles and values of a political conception ... and it applies to the basic structure as a whole. (149)

So -- what is a political liberal, according to Rawls?  It seems to boil down to this.  It is a moral individual who has his/her own conception of the good and set of fundamental doctrines; who recognizes nonetheless that he/she is a member of a polity that is fundamentally plural when it comes to conceptions of the good; who recognizes that there is no basis for insisting on privilege for one's own conception of the good; and who recognizes the moral legitimacy of constitutional democratic procedures when it is necessary to decide among policies that involve conflicting conceptions of the good.  It is a person who puts civic commitment to constitutional democratic processes ahead of one's one fundamental convictions when necessary.  And it is a person who is fully committed to ensuring the neutrality of the state across fundamental convictions.  Neutrality of law across persons and conceptions of the good, full recognition of fundamental pluralism within a modern society, respect for the equal worth of all other citizens, and a recognition that one's own beliefs have no basis for being privileged over those of other citizens -- these are the fundamental commitments of a political liberal.

We can now give a fairly simple explication of illiberal thinking as well.  It is moral, religious, or political fundamentalism -- the idea that one's own moral convictions are so compelling that no democratic process could legitimately override them.  It is the idea that the individual has a persistent right to oppose the state when the state's actions are inconsistent with one's own moral convictions.  It is authoritarian -- it endorses the idea that one's own group or party has the right to override the majority's will when the state contradicts one's fundamental convictions.  And it is, of course, a position that is fundamentally disrespectful of democracy and of the equal dignity and worth of one's fellow citizens.

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice,Rawls

Hobbes in context

We often think of Hobbes as being an originator in English philosophy, a strikingly innovative thinker who burst on the scene with the first formulation of a social contract theory of government. And we sometimes think of his justification of absolute sovereignty as a fairly direct reaction to the disorders Britain experienced during its Civil War and Glorious Revolution.  Richard Tuck's Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction puts Hobbes into a much more nuanced position.

Fundamental to Tuck's approach as a historian of philosophy is to problematize the idea of "philosophy".  Rather than assuming that the subject matter and methodology of philosophy were fixed once and for all by some traditional authority -- perhaps Aristotle and Plato -- Tuck takes the position that thinkers have defined themselves in ways that have eventually come to be described as "philosophy," but that nonetheless cover a very wide range of intellectual approaches and concerns.  Here is a particularly striking set of ideas from Tuck's contextualization of Hobbes:

It is sometimes tempting to think that the heroes of the various histories of philosophy or ethics -- men as different as St Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Luther, Hobbes, Kant, or Hegel -- were all in some sense engaged in a common enterprise, and would have recognized one another as fellow workers. But a moment's reflection reminds us that it is we who have made a unity of their task: from their own point of view, they belonged to very different ways of living and had very different tasks to perform. They would have seen themselves as intellectually kin to men who do not figure in these lists -- priests or scholars who had on the face of it no great philosophical interest. (1)

I think his point here is an important and insightful one: philosophy was reinvented in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, and swerved dramatically away from ancient and medieval philosophy. It was a new project, motivated by different problems, assumptions, and goals.

Tuck gives a good deal of attention to Hobbes's biography, with the implication that these historical, social, and familial circumstances contributed to shaping the philosophical imagination of the maturing thinker.  The situation of service as tutor and secretary to the household of William Lord Cavendish that occupied Hobbes for most of his life plays an important role in his intellectual development.  It also provided him with direct access to some of the great intellectuals and scientists of France and Venice, including eventually Mersenne, Descartes, and Galileo.  

A central intellectual theme in the air during Hobbes's early development was that of humanist skepticism about empirical and ethical knowledge. 

The central feature of this literature was a pervasive scepticism about the validity of the moral principles by which an earlier generation had lived. (7)

The response of many of Lipsius's generation (he was born in 1547) was to give up strongly held and publicly defended beliefs of all kinds, and to retreat to a dispassionate and skeptical stance. (9) 

Tuck argues that Hobbes defined his thought in terms of an effort to create a new, though more modest, basis for knowledge in both empirical and ethical matters. In fact, Tuck leaves the impression that the philosophy of science is as important in Hobbes's work as the philosophy of politics. He was greatly influenced by the example and thinking of Galileo.  Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World appeared in 1632, and during 1634 Hobbes purchased a copy of the book for Newcastle.  One of the key issues in the philosophical world was whether the senses deceive us; and Hobbes followed Descartes in holding that the observable features of the world (color, smell) should not be understood to directly correspond to real characteristics of the invisible reality of the object.  Hobbes was interested in optics and mathematics -- the areas of science that appeared to be most relevant to the question of the real features of the world.  And he sought to articulate a conception of knowledge according to which real properties in the world create phenomenal properties in the observer through "motions" (or causal processes).  

Another core theme in Hobbes's itinerary is a visceral opposition to government religion -- religious requirements embodied in the state.  Tuck shows with repeated examples why this issue was so important during the Civil War; the struggle between contending sides had very much to do with the scope of religious discipline to be imposed by the state.  Hobbes was opposed to religious law and mandates of belief, and therefore found himself in roughly the camp of the Tolerationists.

The ecclesiastical regime put into place by the new republic after 1649 was very close to what Hobbes seems to have wanted on general grounds, and which he may well have enthusiastically preferred to traditional episcopacy.  This is because, like almost all the most interesting 17th-century political theorists (including Grotius and Locke), he seems to have feared the moral and intellectual disciplines of Presbyterian Calvinism far more than anything else. (39)

Hobbes's primary object in arguing like this was to elevate the power of the sovereign over the churches -- bands of fanatics (in his eyes) who wished to enforce absurd opinions upon their fellow citizens, and whose activities were primarily responsible for the civil wars of Europe.  They could only be controlled if the soverign was empowered to determine public doctrine and silence disputes. (85)

Tuck argues that Hobbes's earliest and most important influence on Hobbes in the area of moral and political philosophy was Hugo Grotius and his book, The Laws of War and Peace.  Tuck describes this influence in these terms:

[Grotius] could play the same role for him as Galileo's Dialogues did for all members of the Mersenne circle, as a represntation for them of the kind of science which was to be put on their new, post-sceptical foundations. (25)

Tuck summarizes Grotius's core theory in two fundamental principles: "All men would agree that everyone has a fundamental right to preserve themselves, and wanton or unnecessary injury to another person is unjustifiable" (26).  Tuck finds that these principles have counterparts in Hobbes's arguments in Leviathan.

So Tuck seems to be putting forward several important strands of interpretation that run against the grain of the customary telling of Hobbes's philosophy: first, that his philosophy of science and sensation plays a larger role than we might have thought; and second, that his most famous theory, the theory of unlimited sovereignty, has rather specific roots in Hobbes's immediate intellectual context (Grotius) and political environment (struggles over the extent of religious legislation).  It is not the result of a purely abstract reflection on the situation of rational persons in a state of nature, but rather a complex argument that intertwines with England's own political tensions in mid-seventeenth century.

Steven Pincus's 1688: The First Modern Revolution is a nice complement to this line of thought, in that it offers a fundamentally new reading of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89.  Here is how Pincus describes his project:

England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 holds a special place in our understanding of the modern world and the revolutions that had a hand in shaping it. For the better part of three centuries scholars and public intellectuals identified England's Revolution of 1688-89 as a defining moment in England's exceptional history. Political philosophers have associated it with the origins of liberalism. Sociologists have contrasted it with the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.  Historians have pointed to the Revolution as confirming the unusual nature of the English state. Scholars of literature and culture highlight the Revolution of 1688-89 as an important moment in defining English common sense and moderation.  All of these interpretations derive their power from a deeply held and widely repeated narrative of England's Revolution of 1688-89.  Unfortunately, that narrative is wrong. (Introduction)

(Two articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Hobbes's philosophy are worth reading (link, link).)

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Posted in: biography,CAT_moraltheory,philosophy

Rawls and the history of economics

What did John Rawls know about the history of political economy? In particular, how much did he know about classical political economy, including especially the theories of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, or Mill?

It appears from his writings and lectures that he was generally familiar with the most basic theoretical positions and debates in classical political economy -- the labor theory of value, the invisible hand, the theory of land rent, and the simple theory of a competitive market. And beginning with the marginal revolution (Jevons, Pareto, and Marshall), he seems to have studied economic theory more carefully. But I don't find any evidence in his corpus of a careful reading of Smith, Ricardo, or Malthus. So what was the source of his knowledge of classical political economy?

One source of exposure to the history of economics occurred during his first two years of teaching as a lecturer at Princeton.  Tom Pogge indicates in John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice that Rawls did significant reading and study of political economy during 1950-52:

In the fall of 1950, he attended a seminar of the economist William Baumol, which focused mainly on J. R. Hicks's Value and Capital and Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis.  These discussions were continued in the following spring in an unofficial study group.  Rawls also studied Leon Walras's Elements of Pure Economics and John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (16)

So there is some direct evidence of Rawls's reading in economics.  Another way in which he might have gained a speaking acquaintance of the history of economics is through secondary surveys of the field.  Were there standard histories of political economy in Rawls's formative years from 1950 to 1965?

One of the great historians of economic thought during those years was Joseph Schumpeter.   Schumpeter's Ten Great Economists appeared in 1952. This book focuses largely on post-classical political economy; after a long chapter on Marx, Schumpeter provides short discussions of Walras, Menger, Marshall, Pareto, von Bohm-Bawerk, Taussig, Fisher, Mitchell, and Keynes.  More important than TGE is Schumpeter's major contribution to the history of economic thought, History of Economic Analysis, which appeared posthumously in 1954.  It is possible that Rawls used these books as a sort of intellectual guide to his understanding of the history of economic thought. The only reference to Schumpeter in Rawls's corpus is a single citation of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in A Theory of Justice.  This doesn't preclude the possibility that he read Schumpeter's histories of economics.  But is there any basis for supposing that Rawls was in fact acquainted with Schumpeter's work?

Here is a clue worth pursuing.  Pogge notes that Rawls spent a final year of fellowship at Princeton in 1949-50, and that he spent part of this time in an economics seminar with Jacob Viner, a distinguished Princeton economics professor. (The other main area of study during that year was in the history of U.S. political thought with Alpheus Mason.) And this establishes a tenuous connection to Schumpeter and the history of economic thought.  Viner was a significant contributor to economic theory and policy in the 1930s and 40s at the University of Chicago and Princeton, and he also had a sustained interest in the history of economic thought.  In 1954 he wrote one of the first (and most prominent) reviews of History of Economic Analysis in American Economic Review (link).

So here is a hypothesis: it seems likely enough that part of the work that Rawls did in 1949-50 with Viner was concerned with the history of economic thought, and it seems likely as well that he would have learned of Schumpeter's ambitious research on the history of economics from Viner. Schumpeter's book existed only in extensive notes and drafts at the time of his death in 1950 and was edited for publication by his wife, Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, following his death. Exposure to Schumpeter through Viner would have given Rawls the motivation to study History of Economic Analysis carefully when it appeared in 1954. Rawls was an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell by that time, and Pogge emphasizes his discipline when it came to reading and reflecting on the materials that he found relevant to his philosophical work.

Two other books on the history of economic thought that appeared during the approximate time period are Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962) and George Stigler's Essays in the History of Economics (1965).  There are two references to Blaug in A Theory of Justice, so Rawls was certainly familiar with this book.  Maurice Dobb's Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (1973) appeared a few years later.

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,Rawls

Rawls and economics

A topic of continuing interest to me is the role that serious engagement with economic theory played in the formation and development of John Rawls's thought (link).  To what extent were important aspects of the theory of "Justice as Fairness" influenced by elements of economic theory?

I'm inclined to think that we can look at Rawls's major papers between 1955 and 1971 as a fairly reasonable sample of the intellectual influences that affected the development of his thought.  His first major paper, "Two Concepts of Rules," appeared in 1955, and A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971.  All of his major papers are included in Collected Papers, so this is a fairly convenient way of surveying his thought during this first portion of his career.

So what can we learn from these papers when it comes to the influence of the economists on Rawls?

Here is an inventory of Rawls's references to economists from 1955 to 1971, from the essays included in Collected Papers.

Two Concepts of Rules (1955)

• Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Political Economy (1952)

Justice as Fairness (1958)

• John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1947); R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions (1957) (56)
• IMD Little, A Critique of Welfare Economics (1957); KJ Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951); JR Hicks, Value and Capital (1946); Tibor Scitovsky, Welfare and Competition (1952) [66]
• Jerome Rothenberg, The Measurement of Social Welfare; JC Harsanyi, "Cardinal Utility" (1953) and "Cardinal Welfare" (1955) [85]

The Sense of Justice (1963)

• WJ Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State; RD Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions [104]

Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play (1964)

• KJ Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951)

Distributive Justice (1967)

• RD Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions (1957) [133]
• Wilfredo Pareto, Manuel d'economie politique (1909) [135, 160]
• Nicholas Kaldor, An Expenditure Tax (1955) [143]

Distributive Justice: Some Addenda (1968)

• JC Harsanyi, "Cardinal Utility" (1953), "Cardinal Welfare" (1955) [173]

Justice as Reciprocity (1971)

• FY Edgeworth, "The Pure Theory of Taxation" (1958) [203]
• John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1947); Luce and Raiffa, Games and Decisions (1957) [205]
• RB Braithwaite, Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher (1955)
• IMD Little, Critique; KJ Arrow, Social Choice; JR Hicks, Value; JC Harsanyi, "Cardinal Welfare", Tibor Scitovsky, Welfare and Competition (1963) [217]

A couple of things are noteworthy in this inventory.  First, Rawls's references are highly contemporary to the 1950s.  He appears to have a reasonable level of acquaintance with what was happening in economics in that decade. And there are virtually no references to earlier figures in the history of economics; Pareto is virtually the only repeat entry in the index (Pareto principle).

Second, there is a decided focus on several areas: welfare economics, social choice theory, and game theory.  Von Neumann and Morgenstern are cited several times, as are Luce and Raiffa; and Kenneth Arrow and John Harsanyi are repeat visitors as well. (Amartya Sen is cited in later essays, but not prior to 1971.)  Keynes is not mentioned in these early articles, and only tangentially in TJ.  And there is no mention of general equilibrium theory.

Third, none of these citations corresponds to a significant or substantive discussion of the economist's views.  Rather, Rawls tends to illustrate a philosophical point by finding a relevant theoretical claim in one economist or another.  This indicates a degree of familiarity with the contemporary literature, but a fairly low level of intellectual engagement with the debates and analytical approaches.  In contrast to his treatment of utilitarianism, Kant, or Rousseau, Rawls's treatment of economic theory is brief and non-substantive.

Significantly absent from this inventory of references is any mention of the classical political economists. The index of Collected Papers contains no references to Ricardo, Quesnay, or Malthus, and only one reference to Adam Smith (ideal spectator theory; 201).  John Stuart Mill is discussed in some detail, but always as a utilitarian philosopher, not an economist.  Marx is mentioned briefly (Critique of the Gotha Programme; 252). The labor theory of value -- the central construct of classical political economy -- is not mentioned once.

There are a few references to Smith in A Theory of Justice, but they are superficial and incidental: Smith as a utilitarian, the concept of the invisible hand (57), the moral sentiments (184, 479), and impartial spectator theory (263).  There is nothing to suggest a careful or extensive reading of Smith, Ricardo, or Malthus in A Theory of Justice.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the history of economic thought played a limited role in Rawls's thought.  Rawls was reasonably well acquainted with contemporary economics as of the 1950s and plainly found some aspects relevant to his philosophical agenda (Arrow, Harsanyi, von Neumann).  But I don't find much reason to believe that Rawls's important philosophical insights on justice were very much shaped by a reading of the history of economics.  Contemporary economists appear to have had greater influence -- decision theory, game theory, and social choice theory in particular.

(See an earlier entry on "Rawls and decision theory" for more on this; link.)

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