Later Jerry influenced me enormously. I bought Karl Marx’s Theory of History A Defence
as a celebration of getting my degree and read it first on a trip after graduating; I studied it about half-way through graduate school (along with these papers by Levine and Wright, and Levine and Sober), and more than anything else was responsible for my shift away from philosophy of language to political philosophy; because, like most readers of KMTH, I became convinced that the version of Marx’s theory of history that had seemed to me to make political philosophy irrelevant was false. I then read what is still my favourite Jerry paper, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”, and subsequently saw him lecture at UCLA; from then on I guess I read nearly everything he published, as soon as I could get my hands on it.

So now, what I presume is his final book, Why Not Socialism? (UK) (I hope there’ll be other publications – presumably someone, probably one of our readers, is taking responsibility for seeing some of the work that Jerry left unpublished into print) is in my hands. Princeton have deliberately created it to be like On Bullshit – very short, beautifully made, small enough to fit in a smallish pocket. People have been calling it the “camping trip” book; he uses the conceit of a camping trip to demonstrate that organizing social life around the two principles that, for him, define socialism – a very stringent version of equality of opportunity, and a very demanding principle of community – is very appealing to most people in some circumstances. He goes on to demonstrate that the appeal of these principles is not superficial, or restricted to unusual circumstances such as a camping trip, but are appealing at a society-wide level too:

It does seem to me that all people of goodwill would welcome the news that it had become possible to proceed otherwise [i.e. in ways that tapped into our nobler, rather than our more selfish, motives] perhaps, for example, because some economists had invented clever ways of harnessing and organizing our capacity for generosity toward others.

The problem, for Cohen, is that we lack such technology. We should not pretend that we have such a technology, but nor should we pretend that the search for it is futile, or that the lack of it means that the organizing principles of our own society are more appealing than they, in fact, are. (For a fuller description and a critique, of which I’d appreciate some discussion, see Herb Gintis’s review,, already on the amazon page!)

It’s wonderful – if you knew Jerry you can hear him speaking every word. If you didn’t know him, you get a sense of just how serious he was, but also just how funny (after describing the camping trip, he reveals, in an unusually understated way, that he, himself, wouldn’t dream of going camping – “I’m not outdoorsy, or, at any rate, I’m not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-mattress-wise” – but specifies that his question is “ isn’t this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?”. [1] I’ve bought 10 copies to give to various recalcitrant friends and in-laws.

But the book reminds me why I’ve never regretted my stupid decision to miss his lectures. They would have been brilliant, and would almost certainly have redirected me away from my interests prematurely. There’s a small professional reason for being glad that didn’t happen; I appreciate the investment I made in learning how to do core philosophy. But mainly it is personal. Redirected then, I’d have made different choices about, for example, whether or where to go to graduate school. The things that are of real value in my life all turn on that decision – had I not gone to LA when I did, and developed the way I did, I’d not have met my wife and had my kids. Beside them everything else pales, and I still feel a shiver of horror at the thought that I might not have made the choices I did. I know Jerry would understand my lack of regret.

[1] I’m in Jerry’s camp on this, unlike our great mutual friend Erik.

I got a call this morning to tell me that Jerry (G.A.) Cohen has died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive stroke. I want to write an appreciation of him as a friend, mentor and philosopher in due course, but I’m too numb to do it at the moment. I know that his other friends, colleagues and fellow students of his feel the same acute sense of loss.

The key shock of this chapter is Cohen’s rejection of the difference principle itself as a basic principle of justice. In the earlier chapters, Cohen focused on the fact that the inequalities supposedly justified by the difference principle might often be the result of more talented people holding out for higher pay, despite the fact that they could perfectly well supply their labour for less. To act thus, is, according to Cohen inconsistent in people who affirm a commitment to the difference principle (as ex hypothesesi all citizens of the well-ordered society do). Contra Rawls and most Rawlsians then, Cohen there argued that the difference principle ought to mandate a more equal society than is commonly supposed, because most applications of the standard incentives argument ought to fail. It isn’t that we must pay the talented more because otherwise they won’t be able to supply the labour that benefits the least advantaged; it is that they choose not to supply it unless they are bribed. But a person sincerely committed to maximizing the expectations of the least advantaged wouldn’t need to be bribed.

In the present chapter, Cohen radicalizes this critique. Suppose now that the talented really do need the extra cash to get them to perform, that they literally couldn’t do their valuable stuff without a supplement. Surely this inequality would be in accordance with justice? Well not exactly, for the following reason: if we compare distribution A where the talented strictly need extra cash to supply their labour to the requisite degree with (more equal) distribution B where (perhaps because of some magical transformation in their dispositions) they do not. Ex hypothesi (sorry that’s the second time I’ve said that!), both distributions satisfy the difference principle, so, if the difference principle were entirely sufficient as a principle of distributive justice, we would be indifferent between A and B. But if we think that B is superior, from the point of view of distributive justice, then the difference principle cannot be the whole story. Rather, an unqualified egalitarianism is our real underlying principle. In fact, that’s Cohen’s view: that distributive justice really requires the eradication of non-arbitrary differences in condition. An arbitrary difference is a difference that is caused by something that is morally arbritrary, such as the fact that some people are born with a better genetic endowment than another. A non-arbitrary difference is a difference that results from the free choice of individuals. The whole luck-egalitarian package, in other words.

That, I think, expresses the nub of the position he articulates in this chapter. Much of the rest of it consists in a more or less forensic examination of Rawls’s writings on the matter, and, in particular, of the tensions that exist between two different formulations of the difference principle. There’s the official version which directs that the expectations of the least advantaged be maximized (but which allows the expectations of others to be maximized subject to that constraint) and the version that is often expressed by Rawls that says that that inequalities are only justified if they are required to improve the absolute position of the least advantaged. Clearly the two are inconsistent, with the first (official, definitive) version permitting more inequality than the second formulation does. Cohen supposes that Rawls’s attachment to the inequality-constraining formulation is best explained by a baseline commitment to the idea that it is wrong for distributive shares to be determined by morally arbitrary factors. In Cohen’s view, Rawls should have stuck to that commitment whilst regretfully conceding that imperfections in human will or constitution make it prudent to adopt rules of regulation that make society more unjust than it (hypothetically) could be.

Finally, a brief comment on some of the stuff that’s come up in earlier comment threads. Some people (yes, you Matt Lister) seem very attached to the idea that principles of justice have to be “action guiding”, whatever that means, exactly. There’s a sense in which it seems obvious to me that Cohen’s view about what justice consists in is indeed action-guiding: it gives agents pro tanto reasons which enter into their practical deliberation. There’s a lot more we can then say about whether agents who fail to act on such reasons act unjustly, how far they can be blamed, etc. (And Cohen has some discussion of this.) But the focus on justice as action guiding seems to me to neglect another interest we have: namely, in evaluation. If I judge a society in the past to be unjust, or to be less unjust that another society and more than a third (or if I’m evaluating the society I live in compared to another one overseas) then I need criteria to do so. One question I can ask is how far distributive shares are or were determined by morally arbitrary factors. Very much so in medieval Europe, maybe less so in the modern United States, probably even less in Sweden circa 1970. Principles of justice have more than one job to do.

[Remember the rules: If you haven’t read the chapter, resist the temptation to comment anyway.]

From the point of view of Cohen’s engagement with Rawls, it is hard (for me) to see that this chapter adds much to the previous one. Cohen invites us to imagine an initially equal distribution D1 and a Pareto superior distribution D2. It looks as if we should prefer D2 to D1, because some people do better and no-one does worse. But, he says, let’s imagine another equal distribution, D3 which is Pareto superior to D1. Why couldn’t we move from D1 to D3 (rather than D2)? He canvasses various explanations, but the central point, as before is that the naturally-talented are only willing to put the additional (worst-off improving) effort in under conditions of inequality (D2) rather than under the equal net reward available under D3. There isn’t, therefore, an objective barrier to the feasibility of equality at the D3 level, just a justice-denying choice on the part of the already talented.

The real interest of the chapter lies, I think, elsewhere and is hinted at by Cohen in his reference to Nozick at p.90 fn. 11. It is the assumption, which Barry clearly shares, that the removal of the morally arbitrary causes of the holdings that people have ought to privilege equality as the just initial distribution. Why isn’t equality just as morally arbitrary as an initial starting-point as inequality? This, of course, is the point pressed by my late colleague Susan Hurley in her Justice, Luck and Knowledge (esp. ch. 6). The right response to that worry is to provide a positive argument for equality as a morally privileged starting-point rather than relying on it being some default position after the removal of morally unequalizing arbitrary factors.

[Remember the rules: no commenting unless you’ve read the book.]

Again: I’m not sure I quite get it. But I like it. It looks pretty simple. The basic claim, although Cohen doesn’t put it in one sentence, like this, is that Rawls’ famous difference principle is an example of Moore’s Paradox.

OK, let stop right there and back up. For those of you who aren’t academic philosophers: Rawls has two basic principles of justice, and the difference principle is one half of the second. It says that social and economic inequalities are permissible only to the extent that they benefit the least well off, relative to a situation in which the inequalities would be eliminated. If I have $10 and you only have $1, this is ‘just’ if any attempt to eliminate the inequality would leave you holding less than $1. Maybe we shift to a position in which I have only 99 cents, and you have 99 cents, and the rest of it goes wherever money goes when it dies. We are equal, but you are actually worse off, absolutely. Rawls says it isn’t necessary to get all drastically Harrison Bergeron, like that. Justice doesn’t demand it. Turning the point around: I can’t permissibly (justly) move from $10 to $11, widening the gap, unless the effect of this trickles down to you to the tune of $1.01 or more. But if you get that extra penny, my extra dollar is acquired consistent with the difference principle.

Now you are going to object: pull the other one. I am supposed to believe that there might be no way to move from Johnny having $10 and Suzy having $1 to a more equal situation in which Suzy has more than 1$? You just can’t get there from here without blowing up all the money? (Really? There might just be no way? Really? When did the treasury start minting the currency out of unstable TNT so that you just … can’t …. move it around safely?)

Well, yes. And no.

In part the strength of Cohen’s argument really is that he is just pointing out that this obviously makes no sense. But it’s a bit more complicated. The complication has to do with Rawls’ view that the difference principle isn’t something that it is Johnny’s job to apply to his own wallet. It is society’s job—government’s job—to apply it to Johnny’s wallet, via some tax scheme or whatever policy measure. And obviously government isn’t going to have a Johnny-centric or even Johnny-specific justice/tax code. So the general procedure/principle isn’t going to anything like: ‘look here, Johnny. Suzy would have more money if you gave her some. So justice requires it.’ And, after all, maybe Fred is standing next to both Johnny and Suzy, with $1000 dollars. So it really truly isn’t obvious that justice requires, narrowly, that Johnny – and no one else – is required to fork over in this case.

Rawls’ way of putting this is: justice applies to ‘the basic structure’ of society. Johnny and Fred and Suzy are all standing at the bus stop. Johnny isn’t responsible for knowing how much money his neighbors have—the economic ‘basic structure’ of this group. He isn’t peeking in all their wallets every minute of every day. Nor can he. Nor should be held responsible for knowing what the ‘basic structure’ is. The idea is that we can have a division of labor. He can go on living his life. He has a family, job, interests, projects. And the government will tax him and regulate his activities. And those taxes and regulations will, in as liberty-preserving a manner as possible, look to economic relations between Johnny, Fred and Suzy. Maybe the bus driver will charge them different rates as they get on. And so forth.
At this level of analysis there is at least some plausibility to the notion that you can’t get there from here, regarding Johnny’s $10 and Suzy’s $1. Because taxing the wealthy might, conceivably, cause them to work less hard, causing the economy to contract, causing all the Suzies to lose the money that was transferred to them from the Johnnies of the world, plus their initial single dollar stakes, making them worse off overall. (Never mind whether this incentive argument is valid or sound. It is, at least, not absurd: whereas the ‘this rich Johnny might be obscurely debarred from just transferring money directly to that poor Suzy, standing right next to him, even if he wanted to’ is patently absurd.)

Now, Moore’s paradox (G.E. Moore, that is). ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’. For any given individual – let’s call him Johnny, at a rainy bus stop – it can be true both that it is raining, and that he doesn’t believe it’s raining. (More denialism about various possibilities of direct trickle-down, I suppose.) But Johnny cannot sincerely (sanely), first-personally avow this potentially true statement. Mild logical curiosity, then. There are possibly true statements that one cannot sincerely (sanely) assert.

Now justice. Cohen is saying that, oddly, lots of individuals won’t be able to avow the difference principle. Not that it is false. It might be true, but they can’t coherently, sincerely avow its truth. Why not? Because they are like Johnny at the bus stop with $10 in pocket, next to someone with only $1. That’s all it takes.

Cohen’s way of explaining this is in terms of kidnapping cases. ‘Your money or her life’ cases. I take it the threat structure is plain enough. In ‘your money or her life’ cases, it is often prudent to fork over. Indeed, it may be prudent to formulate a general policy of forking over. (Maybe it isn’t prudent to publicize such policies, lest you incentivize aspirant criminals. But we won’t worry about that.) But it’s obviously not the case that we have to say that paying off blackmail/ransom/threats is just. The kidnapper can’t say: look, the difference principle says you should pay me. (Because there’s no way that I can keep my money without making someone seriously worse off.) Indeed, I, the kidnapper, am just encouraging you to be a good Rawlsian.

Obviously the problem here is that presumably no one was holding a gun to the kidnapper’s head, forcing him to hold a gun to someone else’s head. So treating the kidnap set-up as though it were just a thing that happened—a kind of ‘given’ background condition—is obviously insane.

But now it become clear that the difference principle is just a device for negotiating kidnap cases left and right. That is, it may be prudent policy, but it can’t be a statement of what justice requires. The hostage holders are now all those who, if their taxes were raised, would work so much less that the Suzies of the world would be worse off.

Now a libertarian will object: are you saying that a person’s potential labor is like a hostage they are holding? Not only do we not own the fruits of our labor, but someone else owns them, so that if we fail to work, we are guilty of kidnapping our own labor? (‘Don’t move, or I’ll smear my own labor’s brains across my own brains!’ A bit like that scene in Blazing Saddles, only even weirder.) What a bizarre thought.

No, no. That’s not it. The idea is, rather, that if I object to raising taxes on the ground that I – talented, well-paid person that I am – would work less, and therefore the poor would end up worse off overall, and we can’t have that, I can’t expect you to believe I am sincere. Because obviously what I do is not some background condition that I have no role in deciding. I cannot seriously justify my own selfishness with reference to the difference principle, because my threat (statement, prediction promise, call it what you will) shows that I can’t really believe the difference principle expresses what justice demands. That, or I just don’t care about justice.

Maybe you think you are entirely justified in working less, if taxes go up, because you think all this Rawls stuff is collectivist nonsense. You believe in Ayn Rand. You are John Galt. Now maybe there’s a real problem just with this, in that even John Galt isn’t justified in working less, just out of petty ressentiment at the grasping poor (and that would indeed seem the most psychologically plausible motivation for planning work-stoppage, just because your tax rate notches up.) Notes From An Overman Underground is a pretty weird ethical production. But maybe there are non-ressentiment-based reasons why the talented might stop doing what they were good at, if they weren’t paid a truly sweet premium for doing so. This much is for sure: if you think Rawls’ difference principle is ethical nonsense, you cannot sincerely justify your own actions with reference to Rawls difference principle. No more so than you can sincerely avow ‘it’s raining’ if you don’t believe it’s raining.

There’s a slight twist here, in that kidnappers can avow a prudential version of the difference principle: ‘since they don’t want to be fishing pieces of the kid out of the harbor for the next six months, the best thing for them to do is pay up real quiet-like.’ But if the ability to use the word ‘best’ here gives the kidnappers a warm feeling of having helped to ensure that justice is done, the kidnappers are crazy.

Getting back to Johnny. If he is standing at the bus stop and doesn’t know that Suzy is so poor, he has no reason to reach into his pocket and fork over a couple bucks. But if he somehow comes to know, he can’t say that he is still justified in not forking over because he pays his taxes, and that is supposed to be enough – basic structure and all. He knows that his taxes are just an indirect, highly imperfect way of seeking a result that he could now achieve directly. But he is refusing to. So he can hardly think it’s important to seek this result indirectly. So he can hardly believe in the difference principle. (But shouldn’t Fred pay? Yes, but if he doesn’t, that’s not an excuse for Johnny not to. A world in which Fred has $1000 and Johnny has $5 and Suzy has $5 is less unjust than one in which Fred has $1000 and Johnny has $10 and Suzy has $1. The perfect isn’t the enemy of the good—or the right, in the case of justice.)

Now: can’t Rawls just say, ‘OK, fine, the difference principle isn’t a pure expression of the content of justice. It’s a proposed policy for dealing with the fact that, even though rich people ought to be more generous with poor people, they won’t be. They are stubborn that way. They are moral failures, or they don’t believe in Rawlsian justice.’ Cohen points out that Rawls is committed to a bit more than this: the difference principle is supposed to be something that everyone signs on to, even if only ‘society’ – the state, which doesn’t have its own life to lead – has to worry about it all day long. There is supposed to be richer moral community.

Cohen agrees. We need something richer than we will have if Rawls scales back in this way:

It is often said that it is unrealistic to expect a modern society to be a community, and it is no doubt inconceivable that there should be a standing disposition of warm mutual identification between any pair of citizens in a large and heterogeneous polity. But community here is not some soggy mega-Gemeinschaftlichkeit. Instead, my claim about the incentive justification is that, to appropriate a phrase of Rawls, it does not supply “a public basis in the light of which citizens can justify to one another their common institutions” and that the justification is therefore incompatible with Rawls calls “ties of civic friendship”. (45)

In short, Johnny explaining to Suzy about how the wonders of the difference principle mean he doesn’t have to give her a couple bucks doesn’t cut it. If he really believed this stuff, he would give her a couple bucks. Ergo, he doesn’t believe this stuff.

My real concern, which I will voice, without elaborating: Cohen wants more. What more? This ain’t your great-great-grandfather’s soggy mega-Gemeinshaftlichkeit. Fair enough. But isn’t it sure to be just some newer, slightly less soggy, mega-Gemeinshaftlichkeit? Rawls falls foul of the fact that it is very unlikely that everyone will agree to Rawlsianism. The difference principle is like a quiet stick, there to deal with a problem Rawls is pretending won’t arise. (Not to put too fine a point on it.) But I feel sure whatever Cohen puts in place of Rawlsianism will also fall short of these very high standards of common justification. Because absolutely everyone isn’t going to sign on to Cohenism. Somehow that bar is always placed too high, to meet seminar-room standards that are not appropriate to the more rough-and-tumble arena of society at large. So to object to Rawls on the ground that he can’t provide enough community, while not mistaken—I think Cohen’s right about the Moore’s Paradox point—risks just boxing Cohen in to some analogous awkward corner. I dunno. what do you think

Cohen’s first chapter, “The Incentives Argument” has strong autobiographical echoes for me, in two respects. The first is, that he starts with a historical event that I remember well, the Lawson tax cut of 1988. I was so angered by the Thatcher government’s tax give-away to the very rich at a time when so many had been thrown into unemployment and poverty by her policies, that the following morning I walked past my bus stop in Stoke Newington and, thinking that brisk walking would cause my emotional state to pass carried on at a fast pace. I didn’t get the bus at the next stop either, or the one after that, and ended up walking all the way to the LSE, a distance, I see now thanks to Google Maps, of just under five miles. The second is that I remember going to see Jerry, at about the same time, and telling him that I had come to the conclusion that Rawls’s difference principle is not a principle of justice, properly speaking, but merely a compromise with injustice that we sometimes have to make. He replied, “that’s what I think too” and told me about the work that he was undertaking and which first issued in the Tanner Lecture that is (essentially) reprinted in the present book. (My own, different and somewhat inferior argument is contained in my “Principles of Distributive Justice, Counterfactuals and History”, Journal of Political Philosophy, 1:3 (1995)—sorry to blow my own trumpet, but as Jerry quotes Hillel as saying – at p.11 of RJ&E – “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?)”

OK, so on to the work at hand. “The Incentives Argument” addresses the idea that inequalities that benefit the more advantaged are justified because the incentives they give advantaged people to work harder, longer, or better, end up making the least advantaged better-off than they otherwise would be. That is what our focus should be here. There are many other justifications for inequality, of course. One other species of argument is based on desert, another on entitlement. They are not relevant here. Also outside our scope should be the general principle that inequalities are justified when they improve the position of the worst-off or least advantaged. For there may be ways in which such inequalities help the least advantaged that are not objectionable in the way that matters here (I don’t say that there are any unobjectionable ways). Rather, Cohen’s attention is on one particular way in which it gets to be the case that inequalities achieve that beneficial effect. That way is when the already advantaged choose to put in the efforts necessary to benefit the worst off only if they are paid at a higher rather than a lower level. In Cohen’s example, they will work harder, thereby benefiting the least advantaged, at 40 per cent marginal tax rates than they would at 60 per cent marginal tax rates.

If this fact is presented as a merely neutral finding of social science, as an objective or quasi-objective fact about the world, then, Cohen concedes the least advantaged have good reason to accept such inequalities. Similarly, someone whose answer to William Graham Sumner’s question about what social classes owe to each other is, “bugger all”, will think that the poor would do well to knuckle-down and be grateful (forgive me my careless formulations here). But in a liberal egalitarian society, he thinks, where citizens owe one another a certain obligation of interpersonal justification, things are different. Where people are in a relationship of “community” with one another (where they, to quote Rawls, enjoy “ties of civic friendship” [see RJ&E 45]) then there is an incoherence in the advantaged saying to the least advantaged, something like what Cohen has highly-paid managers saying to the less well-off at p.59 of RJ&E, namely

Public policy should make the worst off people (in this case, as it happens, you) better off.

If the top tax goes up to 60 per cent, we shall work less hard, and, as a result, the position of the poor (your position) will be worse.

So the top tax on our income should not be raised to 60 per cent.

Such an argument, according to Cohen, essentially amounts to a piece of blackmail and cannot be uttered in good faith by those who maintain that they are in community with others. To use his expression, such arguments fail the test of “comprehensive justification”.

A couple of qualifications and caveats need to be mentioned. First, not all apparently unequalizing payments are genuinely unequalizing. This is because some of them may be necessary to compensate high earners for costs and risks associated with their jobs. A highly paid diver on a North Sea oil rig may get more money that his cousin ashore, but that is not necessarily something that an egalitarian need worry about given the unpleasantness of the work. By contrast, of course, those who are rewarded with high incentive-justified differentials often already enjoy a quality of life far better than that of the least advantaged. Second, Cohen does not deny an agent-centred prerogative allowing people to advantage themselves to a certain degree, he merely says that whatever that degree is, it is vastly exceeded by the inequalities that typically exist in capitalist societies.

Since there’s a whole book ahead, much of which will be concerned with Rawls and Rawlsiana, I don’t want to dwell too much on the Rawls-specific aspects of this chapter. But I anticipate that one reaction that many Rawlsians will have will be to say that the relationship in which people stand to one another in a well-ordered society, isn’t one in which the test of comprehensive justification, in Rawls’s sense, applies. Cohen is going to say, in response, that (among other things) that is in tension (and maybe in contradiction) with many things that Rawls has to say about the commitments of citizens to the principles of justice.

Many people will also have a worry about the way in which Cohen thinks about the attitude of the wealthy advantaged towards their poorer co-citizens. He represents them as having a kind of schizophrenic attitude to their own motivations: on the one hand there’s a first person perspective in which I am justifying a certain kind of behaviour and conditional attitude to others, on the other there’s a representation of the facts in an impersonal detached way. But where we are dealing not with a small face-to-face community but with a large and complex society, comprising many millions of people, it doesn’t seem obviously wrong to for individuals to present social scientific findings about effort, reward, incentives etc as external facts that escape their own control. Of course, no-one is forcing them to benefit from that external structure (they could, as individuals just choose to work as hard for less) but in a society where others similarly placed to themselves were earning high rewards it might be too much to ask that talented individuals make large sacrifices. The trouble, in turn, with that thought (Cohen might respond) is that it starts by taking the attitudes and motivations of others as a given, but, if we are doing ideal theory here, it isn’t clear that those attitudes can be taken to include the kind of maximizing that the incentives argument presupposes.

Sort of relatedly, Cohen raises questions about the scope of principles of distributive justice. If the demand for comprehensive justification arises among people who are in “community” with one another, then the breadth of that community is important. There’s also the troubling case of people who might belong, or have the choice to belong to more than one such group. He discusses academics who might be tempted to leave an egalitarian society to earn higher wages in, say, the North American system. Assuming it to be true that the loss of their contribution would have a damaging effect on the least advantaged such that it would make prudential sense for the poor to bribe them to stay, is it wrong of the academics to demand the higher wages? The question of why I have an obligation to stay here and work for a lower wage than I could get is going to be pressing. Suppose the other society where I could earn the higher wages is (internally) governed by the difference principle, do I do wrong to confront my fellow citizens with the fact of what I could earn there? I’m not entirely sure what I think.

OK, so those are intended as ruminations to get us going. I had intended to limit the lead post in these discussions to 1000 words max and I’m over 1500, so time to stop. Remember the rules: comments are limited to people who have read the text – others please keep out!

The second concerns Freeman’s concession (though “concession” is unfair of me) that what is key to the notion of social-cooperation is not coercive enforcement, but rather the inescapability, for individuals, of compliance with social rules. This seems to me to open up two difficulties for Freeman. The first, which I won’t develop here, is the blurring of the distinction between a society’s “basic structure” and its “ethos”, a distinction that Freeman needs be sharper for another dispute (that with G.A. Cohen). The second is brought out by the following statement:

compliance with the rules of basic social institutions, even if generally voluntary, is unavoidable for the members of a society, since these rules are inescapable and structure their daily lives in innumerable ways (unlike members of other societies, whose lives are structured by their own system of basic institutions).

Perhaps something special is meant here by “structured”, since if it means that people’s lives are shaped in systematic ways that open some opportunites and deny others, then it can hardly be denied that, for example, Malian cotton producers are subject to a good deal of structuring by the US government. And, of course, one can make a similar point with respect to the lives of would-be economic migrants from poor countries to rich ones. Systematic structuring, then, doesn’t do the job of dividing insiders from outsiders in the way Freeman needs it to.

But Greenspan is the more interesting case. In a speech at Georgetown Law School on October 2, against a background of boilerplate about the wonders of the free market, he argued [pdf]:

Another important requirement for the proper functioning of market competition is also not often, if ever, covered in lists of factors contributing to economic growth and standards of living: trust in the word of others… In a market system based on trust, reputation has a significant economic value. I am therefore distressed at how far we have let concerns for reputation slip in recent years… During the past year, lack of trust in the validity of accounting records of banks and other financial institutions in the context of inadequate capital led to a massive hesitancy in lending to them. The result has been a freezing up of credit.

G.A. Cohen – critical of Rawls’s institutional focus – is sometimes accused of being exclusively concerned with the ethos of a society and individual behavior, rather than the background institutional structure within which individuals act. In his new book, he denies this – both are important for justice, he says. Unlike Cohen, Greenspan really does seem to be blaming the market participants rather than the regulatory regime – market players should have been more concerned about their reputations. As the Times article summarizes his view, traders “got greedy” and sacrificed their “integrity.” I’m pretty sure Greenspan, the Ayn Rand acolyte, wouldn’t quite put it this way, but still, he holds that no institutional changes could have altered the outcome.

At the same time, of course, he holds that now there’s plenty for the government to do in cleaning up the mess that irresponsible individuals have produced: “the federal government must take aggressive steps to protect workers and businesses from the harmful effects of a financial crisis. The great majority of those deserving this protection had no role in causing the crisis.” Hmm. I thought market transactions weren’t supposed to harm innocent third parties. But when they do, self-professed libertarians “urgently advocate immediate, extensive action that would … prevent a serious economic contraction.” But not, apparently, greater disclosure on market transactions.

I am sceptical about this optimism. At the very least, the “enormous” should be replaced with “some” social effect. Surely some political philosophy has some social effect; but in my judgement, it is especially the work of those philosophers who either are also well-informed about empirical matters and those who are willing and able to translate their insights for a broader public of citizens and policy makers, and who are effectively going into debate with citizens, are having most chance of having any effect. So I think the impact of scholars like Amartya Sen and Philippe Van Parijs will be much bigger, both in the short and the long run, then the Cohen-school of political philosophy. The higher the level of abstraction, the more ‘technical’ and (let’s face it) unaccessible the writing style, the more ideal-theoretical the work, the more based on hypothetical models and simplifying-assumptions-based reasoning, and the less informed by at least some empirical knowledge, the less the impact of a particular piece of political philosophy. Moreover, even the most socially relevant of political philosophy has probably only a modest effect in comparison with the impact of charismatic intellectuals, social activists or politicians. In short, I think Cohen & Co are way too optimistic about the societal and political relevance of their work, though of course I’m happy to be proven wrong.