Comments on: Cohen on Justice and Equality reading group (2)

By: quesaisje

quesaisje — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:22:38 +0000

Cohen also appears to be arguing against the incentives to compensate for the free choice of use of talent. If I have the talent to heal the sick, but decide not to exercise it because I prefer another profession, Cohen is seeming to say that there is no just unequal distribution of social goods that might make me decide differently. Clearly, society would be better off if I practiced my talent, but shifting the distribution to make me more likely to decide to use my talent is unjust in Cohen’s view. I was thrilled to see at the conclusion of this chapter that he will be addressing this ‘trillema’ in Chapter 5.

By: Yarrow

Yarrow — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:52:04 +0000

Surely the choices made by the talented as to whether or not they want to work extra hard for extra pay ... [should allow] them to take the resulting unequal reward with a clean conscience ...? Cohen would be fine with extra pay commensurate with the extra effort. He says, for instance, that when "the work of the talented ... is sufficiently more arduous than that of the untalented ... paying everybody [the same wage] would be unfair, from an egalitarian point of view: in [that] case the talented carry a special burden that any reasonable egalitarian must think should be compensated." (Pages 102-103 of Chapter 2) In fact all of sections 4, 5, and 6 (The Argument Rejected, Labor Burden in the Metric of Equality, and Inconsitent Metrics, pp 101-109) address this issue. What Cohen argues against is compensating the talented for their talents: for the fact that they are, say, capable of producing 10 times as many widgets per hour as the untalented.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:57:11 +0000

I’m not sure if Cohen treats the issue fully in the ‘Justice’ half of the book because I haven’t got that far yet, but I wonder how well his luck egalitarian views (where, roughly, inequalities are justified iff they are the result of choices individuals are responsible for) cohere with his official view of justice in RJAE (where, apparently, justice means that it is incumbent on everyone to promote and adhere to an ethos of equality). Surely the choices made by the talented as to whether or not they want to work extra hard for extra pay are paradigmatic examples of choices that they are responsible for; and as such, isn’t Cohen committed to saying that justice allows them to take the resulting unequal reward with a clean conscience (with respect to the justice of their actions, at any rate)?

One response, I suppose, would be to deny that people are truly responsible for any of their choices of this kind (along Rawlsian ‘moral arbitrariness’ lines) but this would seem to fatally undermine Cohen’s aim (stated elsewhere, I believe) of deploying the standardly ‘Right-wing’ concept of responsibility toward egalitarian ends.

Unless I’m missing something obvious, of course.