Rawls attempted to justify an obligation to be egalitarian (Cohen follows Rawls, with a few slight modifications (even more egalitarian)). Did Rawls succeed in proving that obligation, merely from the perspective of disinterested rational choice? Nyet. In a limited context, say Kropotkinville, many might have sound, personal reasons to be egalitarian, and respect the loom, so to speak (tho’ not everyone would). In terms of national or global politics, RawlsSpeak has little or no application, and far less effective than a Nimitz class supercarrier.

If so, then I think Cohen can quite reasonably respond that to establish that it is very unlikely that people can be brought to phi is different from the issue whether they can phi. The fact that I can predict that you (singly) or a group of people (collectively) are very unlikely to do something (or even that you aren’t going to do that thing) is quite different from whether you could do that thing. The recent Cohen conference had a paper by David Estlund around some of these issues, and I hope it sees the light of day soon.

Suppose, then, we organise things so that anyone willing to act in accordance with justice can do so (by working extra hours, giving away their excess income and so on), knowing that some will do so and some will not. Then, conditional on that knowledge, political justice requires that we organise institutions such as wage-setting to satisfy the Pareto (or utility-maximization) principle.

In this context, it seems to me that the Rawlsian or utilitarian response to Cohen is to cite Kant, as in our masthead, and to say that their theory does the best possible with the available materials.

Coercion was indeed discussed before. I brought it up again because Cohen addressed it pretty directly in a way I thought he hadn’t before. So, at least, I hope I’m not merely retreading covered ground.

I don’t think that “coercively enforceable/not” maps onto “right/good,” for exactly the sorts of reasons that you cite. In fact, the recognition that not all dictates of right ought to be coercively enforceable is another way of raising the question I see Rawls as trying to answer.

Rawls claims that the justice of the basic structure is the primary subject of social justice. Let me set aside this claim, and talk about a weaker one for a moment: a just basic structure is an important subject of social justice that is distinct from and not simply reducible to other questions of justice. The basic structure consists of the coercively enforceable rules that bind us as citizens, together with mechanisms for creating, enforcing, and adjudicating disputes about these coercive rules. (A quick aside – these rules are coercive even if actual force never needs to be applied to enforce them. They are coercive in the sense that they are bound up with an authorization to coerce, unlike many other moral rules, as you pointed out above.)

Cohen holds that justice requires equalizing… something…, but also holds that it is not always legitimate to use coercion to achieve this aim (however we might spell the aim out). This clearly leaves open a very important set of questions: when is coercion legitimate, and when not, and why? It’s obvious just from the set-up of the problem that it can’t be answered simply by reference to the state of affairs that Cohen thinks justice aims at. We need more than just to repeat the specification of the state of affairs that justice aims at. So, this is the sense in which it is a problem that is not simply reducible to Cohen’s distinct account of justice as aiming at this state of affairs.

Final point: coming up with principles governing such a structure as I’ve outlined above does not answer all questions of justice, nor does it exhaust all moral judgments we might make about a society. So, I might hold both that the basic structure of a society is just, and that a particular doctor-gardener is unjustly taking advantage in some way or other. I might be a good citizen but a bad husband or father, or just a bit of a jerk. These evaluations, even seen as all matters of right or justice, come apart.

Well, I’m afraid that I’ve still ended up saying some of the same things over again, and I apologize for that. I hope that some of the formulations are different enough to perhaps make my claims a bit more clear.

I mean something pretty straightforward: what standards can we legitimately be forced to uphold? I agree that social pressure and even our own consciences can feel coercive at times. But this is a different point. I can be literally compelled to compensate you when I damage your property: this is an authorization implicit in the idea of a property right. I cannot, on the other hand, be compelled to change my caddish behavior, though I may well find myself unwelcome in many social circles if I do not. There is no authorization, in the latter case, for me to be sent to prison or made by the coercive machinery of the state to compensate you for the effects of my insensitivity or rudeness.

But there’s coercion and coercion isn’t there? Look at our breastfeeding thread, for example. The requirements imposed on people by their own beliefs in what is ethically required can feel pretty coercive at times.

I do not question the right of the talented to decide (that is, their right not to be coerced with respect to) how much they will work at various rates of renumeration.

It looks like Cohen is just giving away the store here. Rawls’ question is just what, in a liberal democratic society, coercively enforceable rights we have. Note that the question of what rights are coercively enforceable depends not at all on any actual uses of coercion. This is a question about authorization.

This is a distinct question, a question of justice, that is separable from broader questions about what we morally ought to do. It is also a centrally important question, because it defines the background of (coercively enforceable) rights against which we pursue whatever else it is that we may think are morally obligated to do, or pursue what we simply desire.

Rawls does not rule out that we can make these broader moral judgments, but these judgments are not his project. His project is made all the more important if we think, with Rawls, that reasonable people can disagree about these broader moral standards. Cohen reveals in this chapter a sympathy with communism. What system of rights can he, Rawlsian liberals, Kantians, Christians, Jews, and so on all accept as reasonable even though they disagree about many other moral evaluations (such as whether our doctor-gardener has an obligation to be a doctor because, as in John Holbo’s case 2, this would bring more benefit to others, even though there is no severe shortage of doctors)? This question of authorization to coerce is an important question of justice no matter what your broader moral evaluation of such situations is.

So, first, can someone who has read the mentioned-in-passing Self-Ownership provide a quick precis of its argument? [Does it assert that it is possible to deny that principle without creating a state of universal slavery and, perhaps even more offensively, universal collective slave-ownership, or does it conclude that that state is, contra intuition, actually a good thing?]

Secondly, I have to say I find the argument that attempts to escape to equality-pareto-freedom trilemna unconvincing and a bit tautological. (I’m not sure if this chapter is slated for a second post or not, but it strikes me that in a lot of places where Cohen claims the arguer has demonstrated that he does not believe in egalitarianism it may be more proper to say that the arguer has, having assumed egalitarianism, reached an absurdity and thus formed a reducto proof against it. Or at least against his strong formulation which must be applied rigorously and at times torturously, like as Asimovian law of robotics, to any economic/moral question)

@23: I don’ t think you can take the pressure out of medicine; having other people’s lives depend on your job performance is inherently part of the job.

You probably could take the insanely grueling hours out of medicine, but only at the cost of having society train more doctors. Training a doctor requires an immense amount of other people’s effort and I think that has a lot to do with why doctors are worked so hard by the system – two doctors working 60 hours a week each are cheaper to train than three working 40. (This is true for any job, but the extreme cost of medical training makes it a sharper consideration for medicine.)

Note that the concept of inherent talent isn’t necessary to explain any of the phenomena surrounding the status, wealth, etc. of doctors – the massive educational investment is sufficient. (When you consider the effect of nutrition, books in the home, and educational level of parents, it starts to sound like the saying attributed to Edward III, “To train a longbowman, start with his grandfather.”) Therefore, by Occam’s razor, we should be dropping talent from the discussion… right?

And is one’s contribution to society dominated so thoroughly by job choice? One reason one might prefer gardening is that by having a more rewarding, lower pressure, lower time demanding occupation, it frees up time for community work, volunteering or even simply investing more heavily in raising happy children (or other contributions to the happiness of others).

My naive intuition (and I confess to not having read the original problem) is that a person who is likely to provide a lot of social value will do so regardless of their occupation. If so, then we can avoid spending a lot of time infringing on liberty on what they ‘ought’ to do and instead consider if the social structures we can influence provide the proper incentives for people. If being a doctor is an objectively worse profession to many so that we run a deficit of doctors in favor of gardeners, I think we should consider why we have made doctoring unpleasant rather than worrying about morally shaming gardeners into becoming unhappy, resentful doctors.

I personally think we may be stuck with greater status for the talented, but I’ve never seen why such status and material wealth should have much to do with each other. I also see an argument against the actual existence of broad innate differences in talent (among otherwise normal individuals) in Flynn’s explaination of the Flynn effect, that very small differences in talent and interest can be highly magnified by the environment. The Polgar sisters’ chess talent is an example of what can happen when we decide to create talent rather than believing we have found it.