Comments on: Rawls against desert

By: Alec Rawls

Alec Rawls — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 12:54:18 +0000

Interesting to see a blog discussion circling around John Rawls’s great mistake: his claim that nobody deserves anything. Understanding this mistake is the key to understanding what Rawls got right. Since you all have hit on this important subject, I address it in a post of my own at errortheory.blogspot.com: “Time to perform reflective equilibrium on Rawls’ Theory of Justice”

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 06:11:15 +0000

I have a rather different problem with the concept of desert. Namely, it seems paralyzing when applied to the question of what I must do. Usually I act according to some combination of my perceived self-interest and my obligations toward others, society in general, some notion of what is right, etc. But if the right action is that which causes people to get what they deserve, then it seems to me that I shouldn’t do that; instead I have to start by figuring out whether I deserve anything good at all, and only then do I know whether I should consider my own self-interest in my actions. For all I know, once the true and proper accounting of desert is made, I might unexpectedly turn out to be so evil that any just person is required to do bad things to me, in which case I have to start punishing myself instead of acting in my own interest. But no thoughtful person could live that way for long. It subordinates the most basic practical aspects of my life—whether I should, say, hit myself on the head or eat breakfast—to an abstract moral calculation that requires some sort of axiomatic system. Why doesn’t this cause trouble in practice? It seems to me that we have a nebulous concept of desert but we also put limits on what people should do to bring it about. E.g. only the state (or, according to some, God) is supposed to bring down certain severe punishments; you shouldn’t go around doing it yourself even if the victim richly deserves it. And we don’t seem in practice to expect that people should punish themselves for their bad actions; in fact, this is usually regarded as pathological. So maybe the notion of desert coexists with the idea that the right action isn’t necessarily the one that realizes desert.

By: David Meyer

David Meyer — Sun, 15 Aug 2004 02:40:48 +0000

A useful concept: “Sociodicy” “Max Weber said that dominant groups always need a ‘theodicy of their own privilege,’ or more precisely, a sociodicy, in other words a theoretical justification of the fact that they are privileged. Competence is nowadays at the heart of that sociodicy, which is accepted, naturally, by the dominant – it is in their interest – but also by the others.” Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market 43.

By: Michael Otsuka

Michael Otsuka — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 16:52:36 +0000

…actually I’m not sure about the parenthetical “(but consistent with)” in my above post.

By: Michael Otsuka

Michael Otsuka — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 16:44:28 +0000

Chris, Sorry for the confusion. I should have said that I meant my last post neither as a defense of my earlier posts nor as a criticism of anything you’ve said. Rather I meant it as a self-contained statement of what I now take the relation of the p. 104 passage to the nutshell argument to be. It took me a while to get to this point because it took a while to get clear exactly what the nutshell argument was saying. For the reasons spelled out in my latest post, I’ve reached the same conclusion as you: namely, that p. 104 doesn’t support the nutshell argument, given your understanding of that argument. These reasons are, I think, different from (but consistent with) the reasons you offered in your original post.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 14:57:41 +0000

I’m finding your attributions confusing now, Mike. Are you saying: (1)According to Chris, Will reads Rawls as putting the strong version. (2)The textual evidence only supports the attribution of the weak version to Rawls. ??

By: Michael Otsuka

Michael Otsuka — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 13:50:59 +0000

I think it might be useful to distinguish between a weaker and a stronger reading of Chris’s nutshell version of the argument which he says Will misattributes to Rawls: Weaker reading: Considerations of desert don’t stand in the way of the claim that “those with more talent can be legitimately taxed, as necessary, to support those unfortunate enough to have less”. Stronger reading: Considerations of desert establish the claim that “those with more talent can be legitimately taxed, as necessary, to support those unfortunate enough to have less”. The language of Chris’s nutshell version is consistent with both the weaker and the stronger reading. (But when read in the context of Chris’s post as a whole, it becomes clear that he intended the stronger reading.) I think the passage from p. 104 of Rawls clearly makes the weaker version of the argument. This, more precisely, is what Rawls does on pp. 102-104. On pp. 102-3 he offers intuitive, reciprocity-based considerations in favour of the difference principle. Having made such a case for the difference principle, he considers and dismisses a desert-based objection to the difference principle on pp. 103-4. (For simplicity, here I elide the distinction between the difference principle and the claim that those with more talent can legitimately be taxed to support the unfortunate.) It’s much less clear whether Rawls anywhere makes the stronger version of the argument. But see, for example, pp. 73-74 of the original TJ, where he might be interpreted as doing so.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 10:42:26 +0000

Thanks Mike. I don’t have my copy of ToJ to hand at the moment, and I’m about to disappear for the w/e. So it may be that if I had the text available I’d see that what I’m about to say isn’t adequate. You focus on P: the fact that those with superior character or better endowments have no right to a scheme of co-operation in which they are permitted to acquire benefits in ways that don’t contribute to the welfare of others. But it doesn’t follow from P that the better-endowed (etc) will have no right to acquire benefits in ways that don’t contribute to the welfare of others under the co-operative scheme that will (eventually) be selected by the (still emergent) principles of justice. That’s still an open question. (And I seem to recall that under the lexical version of the DP, whereby the prospects of each group are maximised subject the the proviso that the prospect of less advantaged groups have been already maximized, the most advantaged would indeed have a right to a few such non-contributory benefits. But now we are getting arcane.)

By: Michael Otsuka

Michael Otsuka — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 09:44:42 +0000

I don’t think Chris’s reply shows that my point above is unsound. What it does show is that I’ve simplified Rawls. I think my point goes through even if one takes on board what he says. But I won’t go into the details here. Rather, I’d like to press a different but closely related point by zeroing in a bit more on Chris’s second paragraph in his original post where he makes his “context-for-the-argument point”. There Chris takes Will to task for quoting the following passage from Rawls out of context: “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society” (p. 104, original edition of TJ) Chris writes: In the passage in question Rawls is not addressing the question of whether those who are better-endowed with natural assets or who have “superior character” ought to get more within a co-operative scheme,… Fair enough. Chris completes his above sentence as follows: …he’s writing about whether their better endowment ought to be reflected in the choice of scheme under which they co-operate with others. And his answer is, that no, the more talented have no special right to have their interests given greater weight than those others. The above is true. But in the context of his complaint against Will it is not the whole truth. Chris fails to note the following: In so writing, Rawls is writing about whether someone who is better-endowed or who has a superior character “deserves and therefore has a right to a scheme of cooperation in which he is permitted to acquire benefits in ways that do not contribute to the welfare of others” (p. 104, two sentences below the above sentence from Rawls). So Will’s quotation from p. 104 is after all relevant to the question of whether “those with more talent can be legitimately taxed, as necessary, to support those unfortunate enough to have less”.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 08:45:52 +0000

Will has responded over at his blog, but I don’t really “get” his response. Let me focus on this thought that he articulates there: bq. principles of justice that run roughshod over our deep-seated intuitions of desert will therefore fail to gain our affirmation and compliance, and will thus fail to frame a stable social order. One reason why I framed things in terms of the political turn was that Will has endorsed that part of Rawls’s work. So I think it worth repeating that to the extent to which conceptions of desert are the object of reasonable disagreement, they can’t be incorporated into public standards of justice. Will ought to agree with that. There’s also the “tracking” point, which he doesn’t address in his response. I asserted, following Hayek and Rawls, that the free market doesn’t do anything like reward people according to desert. Does Will disagree? If he does, it would be nice to hear an argument. If he doesn’t then it would seem that he is hoist with his own petard, since libertarian principles will also fail to frame a stable social order, and for the same reasons. Of course we might ask which of two social orders, a Rawlsian one or a free-market one, would diverge most flagrantly from the desert criterion that Will endorses. Note that under both systems the hard-working talented will, as a matter of fact, often earn more than those of an average talent and an average disposition to work, just so long as their talents are actually valued by others at or around the time they’re deploying them. This despite the fact that neither system contains an intention to reward such deployment for desert-based reasons and that the “fit” will be extraordinarily loose. But which of the two “maps” better? My money would be on a Rawlsian “well-ordered society”. —————— I think that Mike O’s point is highly misleading (mischievous?). In the first place, the more talented are only taxed more when the successfully deploy their talent to earn income. So, anyway, the talented aren’t taxed as-such in a Rawlsian WOS. Second, taxation is only one, perhaps small, part of a whole co-operative scheme which might include more diversified capital ownership etc. The DP governs the selection of such a scheme rather than (directly) the rate of income tax. Of course Mike knows this. ———- On other points (including Joseph de Maistre’s) it is worth simply recalling that a Rawlsian society would have a fairly robust conception of entitlement which might well permit rights of inheritance etc (a topic on which libertarians have their own problems!). And that (see sec 49 of ToJ for details) once the principles of justice are in place and a system of entitlements are also in place, Rawls allows a place also for notions of desert and for the fact that judgements of desert may diverge from judgements of entitlement (his example of the sports team that deserved to win).

By: Joseph de Maistre

Joseph de Maistre — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 05:56:35 +0000

Left-leaning intellectuals, like Yglesias and the Center for American Progress’ Matthew Miller, regularly deny that one can deserve anything by virtue of noble birth. Inheritance gives you no special claim to what you’ve got. Your parents made you that way. You got lucky, and you don’t really deserve what you got by luck. And it goes on: we also do not deserve the rewards we deserve through our membership in the noblesse (which we do not deserve) that produced our cultivated and noble character (which we do not deserve). If these judgments—that no one deserves his noble status the he has received by right of birth, the refined noble character that is the result of them, or the fruits of the deference that the commons give to true nobility—are indeed fixed points of moral common sense, then any theory of justice that argues that people are morally entitled to what they’ve received in virtue of birth and inheritance must be wrong. At this point, the redistributionist tends to argue that since no one has legitimate moral title to his holdings, there can be no objection to taking from the wealthy and giving to the less fortunate in order to “correct” fortune’s caprices. Now, one must admit that this is a powerful argument. So powerful, in fact, that it’s rather like advocating the destruction of all life on earth in order to prevent another terrorist attack. The luck argument, if it’s any good, scorches the dialectical earth, undercutting the possibility of justifying political power, the right ordering of society, the right to command and the obligation to obey, or, well, anything….

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 04:55:35 +0000

My take is rather long, so here’s where to find it: http://libertycorner.blogspot.com/2004/08/who-decides-whos-deserving.html

By: Abiola Lapite

Abiola Lapite — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 02:52:33 +0000

“That is, you don’t “deserve” any more than you can earn by trading your own labor/goods with someone else for mutual benefit. “ That can’t be right – what you’ve just described is a free market!

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:35:28 +0000

I’ve posted a response here, since it’s too much to put here in the comments.

Great thread. I’m really enjoying it.

By: james

james — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 22:33:30 +0000

Playing devils advocate for a moment. Given the idea “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society”. The logic that allows for justifying the transfer of wealth from the fortunate to the unfortunate, also allows for completely ignoring the plight of the unfortunate. After all, if position in life is purely the result of a random series of occurrences, how does the act of assisting the unfortunate acquire morality. The initial idea seems baseless for establishing moral structure.