Among the many sources of inequality, unequal access to books for residents of the Southern hemisphere is not among the most important. But it has delayed my entry into this event, so I hope I will be forgiven for writing about things that others have already looked at. In addition, I come to this complete uncontaminated with any previous knowledge of Cohen’s work on this topic, or of the existing criticisms and rejoinders or even of anything in Cohen’s book after Chapter 3. If that doesn’t worry you, read on.
I want to respond to a point in the introduction and then what I take to be the main argument of Chapters 2 and 3.
Cohen starts with a discussion of objections to reliance on intuition and says that people raise all sorts of difficulties about intuition with respect to moral obligations like giving to charity (for example, how to choose out of the multitude of good causes), but easily overcome similar difficulties when the problem is in the sphere of legitimate self-interest (for example, which restaurant to go to).
This illustrates for me, one big difficulty with basing philosophical arguments on claims about intuitions. In this case, my intuition doesn’t match Cohen’s description at all. Despite the difference in ethical significance, I find the tasks of choosing charities and choosing restaurants very similar, and my (dis)satisfaction with my choices pretty comparable. Do you go/give to the same old favorites or look out for something new? Lots of small expenditures, or a few large and memorable ones? Should you really get around to X or leave it until next year? But, in an argument about intuitions is there anything more to say than “you’ve got your intuitions, I’ve got mine?”
The big problem I typically have with philosophical appeals to intuition is nothing like this. It’s the claim that intuitions about totally counter-intuitive situations unrelated to anything I have, or could have, experienced, (Trolley Problems set on Twin Earth and so on) ought to be treated as data on which to base ethical reasoning.
But Cohen’s arguments do raise some concerns about intuition that are a bit closer to real life, and this comes up in later chapters.

Reading chapters 2 and 3, it seems to me that Cohen sets up the Barry/Rawls position as follows (with some missing points interpolated by me). Suppose we have a starting point in which there are two groups of people, talented and untalented. Society owns all the material resources and sets wages, but individuals decide how much to work. Consider a starting point where wages are equal for everybody and everyone works the same number of hours, but the talented produce more. Now Barry and Rawls say, if society paid the talented more than before, but less than their additional output, there would be surplus enabling the untalented to be paid a bit more as well (but not as much as the talented). Thus, since everyone is better off, the difference principle is satisfied by the introduction of wage inequality in this case.
But Cohen argues, this only happens because the talented aren’t willing to work harder without a substantially higher wage. Suppose instead that the talented voluntarily worked longer hours and received an additional wage that exactly compensated them for their harder work relative to that of the untalented. Then, we would have an equal position in which the untalented were better off than in the unequal case considered by Rawls and Barry. So, the difference principle is only satisfied because it privileges the unjust behavior of the talented.
I have a couple of problems here. The first is that the difficulties actually start earlier. Go back to the initial case with equal wages, and suppose that society cannot observe how much effort workers are putting in, only how much they produce. Then some talented workers might choose to slack off, producing the same output as the untalented in the same working hours, but spending much of their time reading blogs or, worse, writing them.
There is a huge subfield of optimal taxation theory which takes this problem as the starting point and tries to work out complicated incentives structures by which the talented will be induced to reveal their type. A bunch of Nobel prizes in economics (yes, yes, I know about the Sveriges Riksbank) have been given for this stuff, most recently to Roger Myerson. I don’t think this affects Cohen’s basic point, but I tend to feel that people (including economists) should pay a bit more attention to what is going on in other disciplines.
The second problem is, to me, more fundamental and comes back to the question of intuition. Suppose instead of two types, talented and untalented, there are lots of types who differ on multiple dimensions. How is anyone supposed to work out where they stand in the scheme of things, and how hard they should work. Let’s take, for example, a skilled worker with an arduous job, such as a bricklayer, and suppose (not always the case) they can choose how much to work.
In the Rawls-Barry story, the solution is simple. Work until the additional disutility (physical effort, missing time with the family and so on) offsets the extra pay. Society then sets up an incentive structure that maximises the welfare of the worst-off, conditional on choices of this kind.
But Cohen wants to argue, I think, that the bricklayer, unless at the bottom of the welfare distribution, is morally obliged to work extra hours, so that they can contribute more to those at the bottom (in the simple example, this contribution is the difference between wage and marginal product; in real societies presumably the tax system is supposed to do the work).
But how many hours of inadequately (relative to private preferences) compensated work is needed before the bricklayer is sufficiently badly off that no further effort is justified? And, in the initial case where wages are equal, how can anyone tell if they are putting in more or less effort than others to produce the same output. Maybe the person in the next cubicle who is always complaining about how hard they work actually enjoys complaining, while the one who finishes an hours work in five minutes is mentally exhausted by this effort. This is a problem that seems to me so difficult as to be insoluble. Maybe Cohen’s initial objection about the private convenience of limitations on intuition about morally obligatory activities is meant to apply here, but I don’t find it convincing.
{ 46 comments }
harry b 03.01.09 at 1:47 pm
The thing about intuitions is that they are pretty much all we have to start with. If you start with your intuitions and do nothing to launder them (ie, treat them as foundational data) then you’re going to get into all sorts of trouble, because most of us have contradictory intuitions. The purpose of thought experiments is precisely to launder intutions — that is, to show up the various contradictions, and press us to figure out how to make our final judgments consistent. They don’t do much more than that — finding that A and B are contradictory doesn’t tell you which of A and B to abandon — so you just have to have confidence that as you proceed you’ll find reasons to prefer one rather than another side of the contradiction. But the thought experiment that forced you to reocgnise the contradiction doesn’t usually help with that.
My favourite illustration is Judy Thomson’s violinist case. The violinist case does not yield any conclusion about whether there is a right to abortion. What it does, very elegantly, is show that the following two claims “There is no right to abortion” and “There is no obligation to give extensive aid to strangers in need” are contradictory. As I point out to my students, if you’re a normal Roman Catholic this comes as no surprise to you, or at least doesn’t bother you because it never would have occurred to you that the second claim was true. But if you are a certain kind of (American) conservative it is deeply unsettling.
(I don’t really understand Cohen’s discussion of the disagreement between him and Rawls on method. That may be because I don’t believe that he (Cohen) is really as intuitionist as he says, or it may be because I think Rawls is more intuitionist than Cohen does.)
Slocum 03.01.09 at 5:41 pm
What continues to amaze me about this discussion is how impoverished the concept of ‘better off’ is. As societies become wealthier and everyone is assured a standard of living above subsistence levels, wages become a less and less useful measure of well-being, and people (very sensibly) make employment choices bassed on a variety of factors other than wages. The kinds of non-wage factors that matter to people should be beyond obvious, but I’m thinking about: status, security, comfort, longevity, flexibility, phsyical risk, location, intrinsic interest, etc, etc.
I recently crossed paths with some people who work as wilderness guides. What would Cohen think about such people? Their wages are not high (or secure either). And the work is phsically demanding and probably more dangerous than coal mining. So are they among the class of unfortunates who should be subsidized by society? But consider that virtually all of them are smart, young, and healthy, and could do other jobs that are safer, less strenuous, and pay much more (and would generate far more income taxes for society). So are they shirkers? I felt more than a twinge of envy talking to them, even though my job pays much more and my work environment is safe and comfortable. But their work involves doing the kinds of things that I pay to do in my free time. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as much fun as a job as it is as a hobby — except that talking to them suggests that it *is* actually that much fun, which is why they keep doing it despite the low pay, insecurity, hard work and physical risks. I felt some envy for their jobs — they expressed none for mine. So would justice demand that they should be taxed more heavily to subsidize my wages?
And what would Cohen make of the fact that ‘wilderness guide’ would be the ultimate dream job for certain people and the ultimate nightmare for others? That, because of individual differences, we all put different weights on the factors I listed above (of which salary is only one factor — and not necessarily the most important)? It strikes me that a simple talent/effort/wages model is a crude simplification that misses much of what matters to people and, so, cannot be the foundation of a general theory of social and economic justice.
Matt 03.01.09 at 5:41 pm
_I don’t believe that he (Cohen) is really as intuitionist as he says,_
That’s interesting, Harry. I wonder, though, once Cohen has rejected constructivism and contractualism and utilitarianism and the other views he doesn’t accept, if there’s anything left for him except a quite strong and through-going intuitionism that depends on a more or less ad-hoc balancing of intuitions? This methodological point is often lost in the substantial debate, but I don’t see how Cohen is left with any other position, and that’s one of the things that makes his view as unattractive to me as it is.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 6:20 pm
A couple of thoughts from me ….
My reaction to John’s post at various points was “harumph! – typical economist!”. That’s because a standard reaction of economists to these kind of debates is always to stress epistemic issues that don’t get to the heart of the matter. So, for example, John writes “how can anyone tell if they are putting in more or less effort than others to produce the same output” and “suppose that society cannot observe how much effort workers are putting in”. But whether we can tell or observe this or that seems secondary to the issue of what justice _is_.
On Harry on Rawls and Cohen ….
I’m a bit puzzled by the relationship between Harry’s main comment and the parenthetical addition at the end because I think the issue of reliance on ethical intutions to argue about moral principles doesn’t have that much to do with “intuitionism” in the Rossian sense that Rawls objects to. The former, I agree with Harry, is unavoidable but the practice is variable. The use of examples to show that some usage is in tension with some concept (e.g the very idea of the moral) seems entirely respectable to me; picking moral judgements out of thin air isn’t. Deciding whether a given instance is a case of the former or the latter isn’t alway straightforward.
On intutionism in the Rossian sense (i.e. the idea that there is a plurality of fundamental moral principles and that (some) conflicts between them are unresolvable by algorithmic methods), that’s clearly what Cohen is (a radical moral pluralist). The question then would be whether Rawls is secretly or unconsciously one too (because constructivism breaks down somewhere). My guess is that he probably was.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 6:24 pm
Matt:
_I don’t see how Cohen is left with any other position, and that’s one of the things that makes his view as unattractive to me as it is._
Well his view (see the Introduction) is that he agrees with you that a non ad hoc method would be nice, but he doesn’t believe there is one and we shouldn’t go around pretending that a finely honed machine for deciding these things exists, when it doesn’t. Such is our predicament.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 6:26 pm
And apologies to everyone for not having posted about ch.4 yet.
Pete 03.01.09 at 8:54 pm
Chris Bertram writes: “So, for example, John writes ‘how can anyone tell if they are putting in more or less effort than others to produce the same output’ and ‘suppose that society cannot observe how much effort workers are putting in’. But whether we can tell or observe this or that seems secondary to the issue of what justice is.â€
I think the series of problems that John is pointing to are actually worse for Cohen than he makes them out to be. John’s worry is that these problems are insoluble. But I think a worse problem is that there are many solutions, each of which would be consistent with Cohen’s underlying intuitive conception of equality. If there are many metrics that would satisfy the idea of (something like) ‘distribution in accord with labor burden,’ then we are faced with a distinct problem: how are we to choose one of these metrics, one of these systems of distribution, over all of the other intuitively just systems? This is an indeterminacy problem with respect to what justice in fact requires.
To solve this problem, we need a procedure for choosing one of the systems over the others. How are we to select this procedure? Well, we can’t just select the one that will best approximate the outcome that justice requires, because it is this outcome that is itself indeterminate. But then we can’t just define a just procedure in terms of some end of justice that is specifiable independently of the procedure itself. Still, we know that the procedure should not itself be inconsistent with justice, but should be fair and true to our status as free and equal persons. So, we arrive at an idea of pure procedural justice. We need to find a just means of picking a system of distribution.
To sum up, we need principles that we can use to evaluate the justice of our procedure of making collective decisions about our systems of distribution, and these principles cannot be, because of the indeterminacy problem, simply derivable from the end at which this procedure aims. This, of course, is Rawls’ project. So, a fundamental need for Rawls’ work comes out of a problem that is internal to Cohen’s luck egalitarianism.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 9:07 pm
Pete, I’m afraid that I don’t think your objection is a good one. If there are, indeed, many solutions that are consistent with substantive justice, that would be a good reason to be indifferent between those solutions from the point of view of justice (there might, of course be other values that would rank one solution better than others). It wouldn’t be a good reason for choosing some principle that is inconsistent with justice, which is Cohen’s complaint against Rawls.
salient 03.01.09 at 9:27 pm
What continues to amaze me about this discussion is how impoverished the concept of ‘better off’ is.
I’m reading Rawls and Cohen concurrently, and here’s what strikes me as a crucial defect: there’s an absence of rural sociology, or if you like, the entire discussion of social justice seems predicated on an urban-minded market mentality that doesn’t capture what it means to be happy and satisfied, for example, in a rural or agricultural community.
It seems intuitive to me that a just society would develops and refine its structure in order to minimize the individual experience of desperation. Specifically by ‘desperation’ I intend the feelings we express idiomatically as having one’s ‘back to the wall’ or feeling ‘trapped’: at its worst an intense suffering, anxiety at its mildest. I would like to think this is the core experience we seek to identify as “worse off,” since this encompasses most human experiences of suffering and implies a reasonable assessment of relative severity (the intensity of desperation we understand would be felt by most persons in situations X and Y should guide us whether to prefer conceptions of justice that tend to induce situation X or Y). This notion of “worse off” also transfers rather seamlessly across cultures.
Yet I’m finding a lot in these readings that casts “better” and “worse” off in market terms: resources. It’s inherently very optimistic, isn’t it? We start off in a neutral state and seek to improve our lot, and that’s why we interact with each other. Which implies some urban model of social interaction in which we can exploit the resources at our disposal in order to acquire the things we want. Markets, but not just markets: a large, extensive, interconnected market system in which we’re all immersed, and through which we can determine our identity.
That sounds mildly kooky; maybe I should explain what I mean. Utilitarian models in particular seem to all imply some vast array of choices enabled by a densely interconnected society, one in which infrastructural boundaries are minimal: the material things that I want are on the market, there’s a listed price for them. And a lot of material things I don’t want are on the market with listed prices; I learn to identify myself myself as a consumer and locate myself within my culture by those market goods which seem to me a bargain, fairly priced, wildly overpriced. This is how I’ve learned, from my life in a densely interconnected urban society, to evaluate what makes me happy and what doesn’t: my time and money are resources, and I am in a process of continuous expenditure. I structure my value system for material goods as a response to a market. I learn who I am by comparing what I like to what other people like, and the system of “like” is predicated on prices we’re willing to pay, in money and time, for each thing or experience.
All of this contributes to my intrinsically held model of who I am, and who you are, and what we’re all doing here. But I don’t think that particular model is especially apt when attempting to understand agricultural, non-industrial communities, or anywhere where that kind of suffusion of consumer identity doesn’t exist.
And without that consumer identity, a lot of what Rawls and Cohen are offering seems weak. They’re both heavily invested in a notion of justice that founds itself on material resources, the physical world. Ironically, the physical world becomes a proxy for psychic/emotional experience: what we have is used as a proxy for how satisfied we are, or ought to be. Resources, the resources Citizen X has at X’s disposal, are not just a convenient proxy for X’s experience as a human being: they are the metric through which X’s experience is evaluated. More generally, this metric is used to determine the value of various conceptions of justice in a society. I think it’s only applicable across a narrow swath of human experience, one in which our experiences of being human are accurately evaluated and compared by the crude proxy of the relative quantities and worth of material goods at our disposal.
I’d like to hear: Am I off-base here? What all am I missing or misunderstanding about Rawls, Cohen, and what a theory of social justice ought to be?
John Quiggin 03.01.09 at 9:50 pm
Harry, I agree we have to start from intuitions, and try to make some sense of them. I just don’t think intuitions about wildly counterfactual situations are very useful. The violinist example (about which all I know is the Wikipedia article) seems to me to be a good illustration of this, and the array of confusing responses are a reflection of the problems of this kind of example.
I’d much prefer to look at the question: should blood donation be compulsory, and if so under what circumstances? BTW, a quick Google suggests this question has been raised by lots of others including (in response to another of these examples) me so at least my preferences over intuition examples appear to be stable.
Pete 03.01.09 at 9:53 pm
Chris, I believe my problem may be that I was not being clear enough about the target of my argument. Jon Mandle mentioned previously here that he thought the central difference between Cohen and Rawls was that Rawls thinks distributive justice is a matter of pure procedural justice and Cohen does not. I tend to agree, and I am not defending the choice of the difference principle in my comment above, but rather the idea that there is an in principle need for pure procedural justice. If I am successful at that defense, this shows a weakness of many of Cohen’s arguments against the difference principle, since many of them, I think, rely quite heavily on the rejection of pure procedural justice. I have not certainly not shown this reliance in the above comment. I do, however, think it appears throughout chapter 4, so perhaps we can discuss the issue in the comments of your upcoming post?
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 10:03 pm
Well you’re certainly right about that, Pete. That is, that Rawls thinks that we can (and must) address questions of distributive justice via pure procedural justice. Thinking that, and it being plausible are, of course, two different matters!
mpowell 03.01.09 at 10:35 pm
I don’t see any problems with John’s criticisms of Cohen’s argument, but I am surprised that Cohen would pose this problem at all. Why does he believe that the principles of justice that govern what the laws of society ought to also apply in the same way to each person individually? I think Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument starts looking a lot less compelling if that’s how you construe its conclusion.
John Quiggin 03.01.09 at 10:48 pm
Salient, I think the real missing figure here is not the market, but the state. I think, with with Bob Goodin that utilitarianism only makes sense as a public philosophy, and the kind of state for which it is suitable only arises in the kind of complex, densely interconnected, society you describe. Typically, these societies have a big role for markets, but the need for some sort of utilitarian calculus is even bigger in areas like health and education where markets are relatively marginal. And obviously a similar point applies to Rawls and others whose arguments are, to a large, extent, critiques and modifications of utilitarianism.
As I read him, Cohen is mainly concerned to reject a distinction between private and public morality, and this makes your point particularly pertinent in this discussion.
Following on from my first para, and responding to Chris, there is obviously a disciplinary divide here. A project in which we seek to determine what justice “really is”, without worrying about whether we could ever determine whether any actual social order was just, or more just than another, let alone propose policies that would promote justice, does not appeal to me. And once you start worrying about these questions, the epistemic difficulties are front and centre.
The only economists I can imagine who would not share this response are those (regrettably numerous) who would say “Great! That means we can leave justice to the philosophers and get on with promoting efficient markets”.
Matt 03.01.09 at 11:00 pm
_A project in which we seek to determine what justice “really isâ€, without worrying about whether we could ever determine whether any actual social order was just, or more just than another, let alone propose policies that would promote justice, does not appeal to me._
This gets to my worry, too. If justice isn’t something that can guide us, why care about it? but it’s at least consistent with Platonic views like Cohen’s that Justice is unknowable and not action guiding. Now, you can say, “but we should care about what justice _really is_”, but why? That’s a mystery to me, and something I don’t understand about any Platonic view. If the idea of justice isn’t essentially action guiding I’m not sure why it’s of interest. To the extent Cohen wants to say (as he sometimes seems to, though not always) that justice is completely independent of rules for social order or whatever, then I’m just not interested at all in his project as it seems like a huge waste of time to me. I’m also not sure that he’s entitled to insist that his account is what Justice _really is_. (I don’t find the arguments in “facts and principles” at all convincing.) But even if so, I think he would have at most proved that we’re not, and shouldn’t be, very interested in justice if his methodological and metaethical points were right. But, I think they are not.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 11:09 pm
_A project in which we seek to determine what justice “really isâ€, without worrying about whether we could ever determine whether any actual social order was just, or more just than another, let alone propose policies that would promote justice, does not appeal to me. And once you start worrying about these questions, the epistemic difficulties are front and centre._
I don’t think that what you say after your first comma here is helpful, John. Cohen is as concerned as you or me about real world questions of social justice, policy etc. But you can have those concerns without letting them drive the content of what justice is.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 11:15 pm
_If justice isn’t something that can guide us, why care about it? _
But since Cohen clearly believes that we have reason to act so as to make the world more just, why would you foist such a view on him?
_If the idea of justice isn’t essentially action guiding I’m not sure why it’s of interest. _
Not sure what the “essentially” is doing there Matt. Obviously, justice is _inter alia_ action guiding, thought not always. I have interests in a wider range of questions that guiding my actions, don’t you?
Matt 03.01.09 at 11:21 pm
Cohen believes we have reason to act so as to make the world just, but his meta-ethics is such that what justice is may well be something we can never know. But if we can’t know it, it can’t guide our actions, can it? To my mind the “really” in all of this is the trouble, as it is with all Platonic views. It’s just not something that I’m interested in, nor do I see why anyone else should be. If they are interested in it, that’s fine, of course, but it seems an idle game. I don’t see how questions like “how should we live?” could be answered by something completely apart from us, as is the case on Platonic views like Cohens.
Chris Bertram 03.01.09 at 11:35 pm
Matt, think about it for a moment. Even if it were the case that, as you put it, “what justice is may well be something we can never know”, it would not follow that it could not guide our actions. Compare, beauty, if you like. The fact that we might never get a compelling philosophical account of the beautiful doesn’t mean that we can’t promote what is beautiful at the expense of the ugly.
(By the way, I don’t recognize Cohen in your account of him: on p. 7 of the present book, he gives a characterization of what justice is. It isn’t a fully determinate one, to be sure, but enough to get some traction. )
Matt 03.02.09 at 12:37 am
I guess I’d reject the idea that there is an interesting account of what beauty is that’s independent of what various people find beautiful. This seems to me to go to the heart of the difference here.
John Quiggin 03.02.09 at 4:29 am
Chris, I’m reacting not to Cohen but to your comment ‘whether we can tell or observe this or that seems secondary to the issue of what justice is.’ In raising the epistemic issues in the first place, I didn’t presume that Cohen is not interested in them, or has no concern with policy, just that they can’t be ignored if you want your account of justice to be of any real interest.
I think this has some significant consequences for the issues we are talking about here. Justice and moral obligations generally depend in important ways on who has the information necessary to make relevant judgements. For example, I think there is often but not always, a moral obligation to act as a Good Samaritan (say in the case of someone passing a car accident). But I don’t favor attempting to make that a legal obligation because I don’t think the state can determine when individuals have morally sound reasons for not doing so.
On the other hand, while I’m confident that a progressive income tax can enhance social justice in aggregate, I’m much less certain that any particular transfer from higher-income person A to lower-income person B will do so, and hence much less willing to impute a moral obligation to A.
Chris Bertram 03.02.09 at 8:43 am
John: I find your middle para there puzzling. How is the fact that _the state_ lacks this information relevant to the basic issue we’re addressing? The significant gap in your example is surely between what the person actually does and what they have most reason to do.
Matt: since Cohen doesn’t make his account of justice independent of what “various people” find just (what do you think all those thought experiments are for?) , it is hard to see that it would get to the heart of the difference.
Alex Gregory 03.02.09 at 8:56 am
John,
I’m not sure how best to understand your objections to ignoring the epistemic issues in the area.
I take it that you might crudely think of the standard view as this. There is one debate about what justice is. There is then a second debate about how measure real world societies and decisions against these principles of justice, whatever they turn out to be. Finally, there is a third debate about which real world societies and decisions are best, from the point of view of our principles of justice.
It looks like what you want to deny is that the first question is in any way prior to the others. You want to say that answers to the second and third questions should somehow influence what we say about the first. But I just can’t see how that’s plausible. You surely don’t want to say, for example, that we shouldn’t maximise the well-being off the worst off for the reason that measuring their well-being is difficult. That just seems to be an independent issue.
An analogy: Imagine I’m comparing a number of books in length, but unfortunately have no way to count other than in my head. Perhaps there are some issues about what I should be counting: Pages? Words? Characters? Then there is a debate about how I should go about measuring those things. If I’m having to count in my head, then starting on page 1 and just counting character by character is clearly going to lead to error. To make the analogy complete, we have to imagine a third issue of how to best write a book of great length.
I take it that philosophers are asking the first question: what is “length”? Imagine that we came to reasonably believe that it was the number of characters in the book. What you seem to be suggesting is that if it’s hard to measure length in terms of the number of characters, then we should start counting in something else. But that just seems to be the wrong response to the problem. What we wanted from the outset was informantion about the length of books (where we’re assuming that philosophers are correct to think that this is the number of characters). We shouldn’t change the question just because measuring the answer is turning out to be tricky.
I wonder if part of what’s influencing you is a worry that it looks as though framing the issue in this way suggests that we should somehow cease any discussion of the latter two questions until we have answered the first. (I did, after all, call it the “prior” issue”.) But that just isn’t true, for the obvious reason that we have to muddle on in the here and now, and work with very rough principles of justice that we hope are at least approximately correct. But it’s equally true that the necessity for that muddling doesn’t make any difference to the truths about what is actually just.
Chris Bertram 03.02.09 at 9:02 am
Thanks Alex, you stated the issue better and more clearly than I was managing to do.
dsquared 03.02.09 at 10:10 am
You surely don’t want to say, for example, that we shouldn’t maximise the well-being off the worst off for the reason that measuring their well-being is difficult
Well maybe you do. (I have now gritted my teeth and bought a copy of the book, after realising that biting my tongue was causing me more than twenty nine quid’s worth of disutility). If you can’t tell what might improve the well-being of the worst off, and can’t tell whether past courses of action have in fact changed it for better or worse (which is what “measuring” means), then you might come to the conclusion that this isn’t a sensible goal to have. In general, to repeat a general purpose sermon of mine, there isn’t much point in doing something if you aren’t going to be able to tell whether you’ve done it right or not.
John’s epistemic point (which I have a lot of sympathy for, although not in the precise case noted above; surely the bricklayer can either make or not make a good faith attempt to go the extra mile for his mates, and that’s as much as can reasonably be expected) is not really addressed by the “length of books” example, because his point isn’t that it’s difficult to measure the quantity of interest – it’s that it might actually be impossible to measure. This matters a lot. For example, say that nationalist librarians were all agreed that what matters about a book is its Britishness. The objection that this is meaningless in the absence of a measure of what Britishness is, principled way of saying that one book is more British than another, etc, would in that case be a sensible one, even if all nationalists were agreed that Britishness means “the quality of being British” and there were loads of clear-cut paradigm cases like “The History of the English-Speaking Peoples” being more British than a translation of “The Analects of Confucius” into Thai.
But it’s equally true that the necessity for that muddling doesn’t make any difference to the truths about what is actually just.
Again, maybe it does; specifically it does if the muddling is all there is and there is no possibility of getting beyond it. Compare with the 1970s Capital Controversies, where it actually turned out that the “epistemic” issue of the difficulty of measuring the aggregate capital stock was a result of the fundamental incoherence of the concept. In these sorts of cases, we end up accepting that there’s no “thing in itself” hiding behind the veil for us to theorise about, and the best that we can do is to improve the quality of the muddling along. In which case, epistemic arguments about the kind of knowledge we can expect to have about muddling become very important indeed.
Chris Bertram 03.02.09 at 10:42 am
_The objection that this is meaningless in the absence of a measure of what Britishness is_
Nice to see the semantic form of the objection being deployed! I was present at a seminar only the other week at which an economist objected that Parfitian-style comparisons between the aggregate welfare levels of populations were “meaningless” in the absence of a method to derive a social welfare function.
_even if …. there were loads of clear-cut paradigm cases_
Why this? Why the insistence on fine discrimination where there are coarse cases we can distinguish. You seem to be dogmatically ruling out all sorts of vague predicates here Daniel, unless I’ve misunderstood you.
John Quiggin 03.02.09 at 11:50 am
Alex, you seem to be claiming (more sharply than Chris) that there is some sort of world of Platonic forms, within which exist Ideas like “justice” and “length”, and that philosophers can somehow discern the nature of these forms, independent of any actual real-world events.
But I want to argue that the meaning of these terms will depend on the measures available to us and the uses to which we want to put them. To take the seemingly simple notion like the length of a book, for example, if it was the case that there were many different orthographic conventions, affecting the number of characters used to spell a given word, then it would seem to me that the philosophers would be incorrect to measure the length of a book by the number of characters, just as they would by incorrect if, acting on some kind of first principles, they measured the length of a book by comparing its horizontal dimension with the metre bar in Paris. And, of course, the notion of measuring length with reference to a physical object became problematic when we discovered that the length of objects varies according to the reference frame of the observer.
Coming back to the main point, if you want to argue that it is sensible to have a concept of justice that is applicable both to states and to individuals, it seems to me that you need to show that states and individuals can assess justice in similar ways. The examples I gave, which Chris didn’t like, were meant to show that this is not true.
dsquared 03.02.09 at 11:59 am
Well, the way in which vague predicates get dealt with in the real world is basically either by arbitrary stipulations (like the definition of a “well capitalised” bank), or by something approaching a “reasonable man” test. I am guessing that the first is not attractive as a basis for our definition of what “justice” is, while the second is what I’m trying to say here – that the muddling along and intuition is all we have, and that this whole debate is basically about what we’re going to consider to be reasonable behaviour. I think this is why I end up agreeing with Cohen; whatever justice is about, it isn’t identically the same thing as a particular set of procedural rules, in the same way that “Britishness” can’t be identified with whatever classification system the nationalist librarians come up with to sort the books out onto the shelves.
Phil 03.02.09 at 12:02 pm
I’m with Chris. Britishness in this case would be an ideal-typical quality, with books being rated by the consensus of nationalist librarians on their perceived degree of fit; the fact that judgments wouldn’t always agree, and that disagreements might in some cases be unresolvable, is surely secondary.
If you can’t tell what might improve the well-being of the worst off, and can’t tell whether past courses of action have in fact changed it for better or worse (which is what “measuring†means), then you might come to the conclusion that this isn’t a sensible goal to have.
True, but you’re answering a different question. Alex distinguished between three inter-related questions – (a) what the principles of justice are; (b) how we measure existing societies (and policies) against those principles; and (c) which societies (and policies) come out best on that measure. You’re answering the question of whether we should come down in favour of redistributive policies (level (c)) if we can’t say whether they work (level (b)). Alex was asking, rhetorically, whether difficulties in measurement (level (b)) should rule out maximisation of the well-being of the worst-off as a principle or goal (level (a)).
Phil 03.02.09 at 12:03 pm
That’s level ‘open-bracket-lower-case-c-close-bracket’, of course, not level ‘copyright’.
Chris Bertram 03.02.09 at 12:13 pm
John writes:
_Alex, you seem to be claiming (more sharply than Chris) that there is some sort of world of Platonic forms, within which exist Ideas like “justice†and “lengthâ€, and that philosophers can somehow discern the nature of these forms, independent of any actual real-world events._
I’m not sure that is is helpful for you to turn up the metaphysical heat here, John. All Alex (and I) need, is the thought that what there is and what we know (and can know) are logically distinct questions. (I’d be surprised if you disagreed.) Certainly neither of us needs to claim anything resembling “philosophers can somehow discern the nature of these forms, independent of any actual real-world events”.
dsquared 03.02.09 at 12:23 pm
No, I might be making a mistake but not that particular one. That was the point of the analogy to the Cambridge Capital controversy. “Maximising the total amount of capital in the economy” sounds like a goal that might be possible, but it actually isn’t, because capital can’t be aggregated. So if someone says that’s their goal, then they’ve actually got an incoherent aim. Even if some such person can say things like “well obviously building a new factory increases the amount of capital in the economy”[1]
Compare “the greatest good of the greatest number”. Lots of people used to think that this was the goal of society, and it took some fairly interesting developments in economics and mathematics to get the formalisations to a point where we could realise that it’s actually not a coherent concept – I take it that you wouldn’t say that utilitarianism is actually all about promoting “the greatest good of the greatest number” despite a load of practical problems in doing so.
I think it’s entirely open to John, me, etc, to say that “maximise the welfare of the worst-off”, which looks like it’s a coherent goal for society to have, might also have serious conceptual problems. Some kinds of epistemic problems aren’t just “practical difficulties”.
[1] And in fact a lot of economists who have forgot or never learned the CCC do in fact claim that it’s merely an epistemic problem or can be ignored because “reswitching” doesn’t happen very often in the real world.
Chris Bertram 03.02.09 at 12:31 pm
Dsquared:
_Compare “the greatest good of the greatest numberâ€. Lots of people used to think that this was the goal of society, and it took some fairly interesting developments in economics and mathematics to get the formalisations to a point where we could realise that it’s actually not a coherent concept – I take it that you wouldn’t say that utilitarianism is actually all about promoting “the greatest good of the greatest number†despite a load of practical problems in doing so._
Is this a reference to Arrow? If so, then the claim is that there’s no non-arbitrary way of aggregating individual preferences into a SWF. But it doesn’t follow from that that the very idea of maximizing the good is incoherent, because maximizing the good might not be a matter if individua preference aggregation.
(If you were making a different point, then ignore me.)
dsquared 03.02.09 at 12:42 pm
no, it’s just that “the greatest good of the greatest number” doesn’t define a SWF of any sort, because it doesn’t provide any rule for aggregating at all – there are too many candidate pairs of distributions where “the greatest good of the greatest number” doesn’t provide an ordering. It’s a bit like “never has so much been owed by so many to so few”; great as rhetoric but when you try to work out what sort of superlative is being asserted, you get all tangled up.
John Quiggin 03.02.09 at 8:34 pm
Chris, I think the problem here is twofold. First, you and Alex keep referring to “what there is” as if “justice” was something like “Pluto” that has an objective existence, pretty much independent of what people think about it, know or can know about it and so on. Maybe that’s right, but it’s far from evident to me.
More importantly, rather than arguing that the particular epistemic problems I’ve raised aren’t serious difficulties, or that there is an adequate response available (which I’m perfectly prepared to believe), you’ve just ruled them out of court from the start. As the examples dsquared and I have given suggested, there are lots of concepts that turn out to be incoherent (greatest good of the greatest number and aggregate capital stock are neat examples) or to be misdefined because they rest on assumptions about the world that aren’t true (such as that the length of an object is a well-defined property independent of the observer).
Mg 03.02.09 at 10:34 pm
I’m not sure what the problem is here. If a concept is outright incoherent, if under close analysis it does not mean anything or anything acceptable, then sure, we abandon or reformulate it. I’m not going to be convinced by anyone arguing for the “greater good” if they can’t tell me what that means. But if for example a distribution is just, then regardless of any practical or epistemic problems it -is- just. Let’s take a similar case: moral utilitarianism. There may be difficulties judging which of our actions will maximise utility, but we are still obliged to attempt to choose the one that does, and if we choose the wrong one then we choose the wrong one. If we have absolutely no idea what the effects of our actions will be, then I suppose we can bring in “ought implies can” and say that whatever action we take will be neither right nor wrong, but that does not invalidate the principle that we should be choosing the action that maximises utility. If we went further and said that nobody could have any idea about the effects of their actions, we still don’t invalidate the principle – we’re just stuck unable to be moral, and too bad.
John queries whether justice has an existence pretty much independent of what we know about it. Well, yeah, obviously – though it’s a jump to say so in a Platonic sense. This reminds me of a post-modernist argument: we can’t know for sure anything about the external world, so surely we cannot say it exists? The problem is that the epistemic problem of knowing about the external world does not entail an ontological problem about the external world’s existence. Likewise with our justice problem here, epistemic problems with achieving the distribution do not entail that it is not just to achieve it. It is simply a non sequitur to say otherwise, and that is why Chris can dismiss from the start -any- epistemic concerns with the principle of justice. That is not to say those concerns are unimportant, they had pretty dire consequences in the moral utilitarianism example above, but simply to say that they alone cannot invalidate a particular justice principle.
Mg 03.02.09 at 10:37 pm
Bah, ignore the strokes through “is” and “any”.
Chris Bertram 03.02.09 at 10:52 pm
Well I do believe that there are truths about justice that are independent of what people think about it. That doesn’t commit me to believing that justice is “something like Pluto” any more than it commits me to believing that the number 7 is “something like Pluto”. Of course, what the objectivity of moral values or mathematical objects amounts to (if they are, in their similar or different ways objective) is a deep philosophical problem.
I’m still thinking through the incoherence point which seems to go deeper than the suggestion that it might just be difficult or even impossible to find out whether a conception of justice was being realised in practice. (I took your point to be the latter, and I see that I may have missed something there.)
Jon Mandle 03.03.09 at 2:40 am
The problem (as I see it) is that Cohen doesn’t give us enough information to determine whether his account is coherent. This was the point of my accusing him of a “cheat” way back in a comment on the first post about this book, when I pointed out that he hadn’t told us what is to be equalized. His examples often are concerned with income, but he also wants to factor in the subjective unpleasantness of work. What I don’t know is whether he thinks that there is anything special about work in this regard – or income, for that matter. I suspect that he thinks justice is simply concerned with equalizing subjective satisfaction, so all the discussion of income is “merely” determining which policies would likely approximate what justice really requires. Actually, given what he has written elsewhere, that’s not quite right. Justice is concerned with equalizing the degree of subjective satisfaction for which an individual is not responsible (him- or herself) – inequalities in satisfaction for which a person is responsible are not unjust. For what it’s worth, I do think that position is incoherent, but I don’t know whether he continues to affirm it or how he understands the ideas of “subjective satisfaction” and “responsibility” as they figure in the account.
Chris Bertram 03.03.09 at 7:31 am
Jon, I’m sure that the equalization bit is right, but not the “subjective satisfaction”. See, for example, his “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” where he defends the slightly broader notion of equal access to advantage rather than Arneson’s equal opportunity for welfare (which is an exact match for the position you identify).
dsquared 03.03.09 at 8:00 am
If we went further and said that nobody could have any idea about the effects of their actions, we still don’t invalidate the principle – we’re just stuck unable to be moral, and too bad.
This does at least look consistent (although we’re assuming here that “the effects of their actions” has a referent – actually, me and John have swapped arguments in the past over whether there exists a suitable probability measure over events of the sort that would be needed for an expectation to exist), but surely it is too bad; if we end up in that position, surely we need a different theory of morality (and even more so if we want a theory which is going to underpin the institutions of society).
I think that there is clearly a “typical economist” problem here though – I think me and John both would tend to regard the transformation problem, the socialist calculation problem and the problem of interpersonal aggregation of utilities (and a bunch of other aggregation problems) as deeply, intrinsically insoluble in a way in which people coming from other backgrounds might see them as merely epistemologically very difficult. But I do think there’s an issue here; to take John’s example, if we had settled on a concept of justice which depended very much on there being a fact of the matter about length, then surely General Relativity would have been a serious blow to that concept.
My guess is that this is only really of a problem for someone who thinks that the meaning of justice has to do with specific rules about the institutions of society. As I said above, if John’s bricklayer makes a good faith effort to contribute a bit toward the welfare of others, then there’s a sense in which he’s behaving in a “just” manner, and if he purely responds to his personal incentive schedule then there’s a sense in which he’s being “unjust”, and it seems to me to be perfectly clear that Cohen is in tune with the normal meaning of justice in disagreeing at a fundamental level with Rawls here. And I don’t think there’s much of a problem created by the fact that whether a good faith effort has been made is private subjective information to the hypothetical bricklayer – I don’t think that kind of epistemic problem is important.
John Quiggin 03.03.09 at 8:06 am
Chris @ 38: If I get started on the existence of the number 7, I’ll never stop, so let me try and get back to the substantive point, which isn’t quite the claim that the concept of justice is incoherent, but is more than a mere measurement problem.
If I read Cohen correctly, he says that in thinking about justice in the situation described in my post, we shouldn’t take as given that people will work as much as they want to and no more because, in acting this way, the talented are violating principles of justice. It seems to me that, for this argument to go the way he wants, this must be a deliberate violation of justice by the individuals concerned, not merely an unfortunate outcome of ignorance. (cf his discussion of paying ransom to kidnappers).
So, it seems to me to matter whether talented individuals can determine their own obligations. If, for argument’s sake, you agree that no individual can determine how much they ought to work, then it seems to me that Cohen’s argument fails. As I hinted in my post, I thought the response was going to be (following the charity/restaurant comparison in the intro) that people can determine this pretty easily (see also Daniel @ 25 & 41, which came up as I was writing this) and that those who suggest it’s difficult are being self-serving.
That seems plausible to me, but in view of my difficulties with the initial intuition, not as convincing as I would like.
Alex Gregory 03.03.09 at 8:31 am
There’s a lot going on here, but just a couple of points:
1) If we’re aiming to give an analysis of justice, one of the things about justice that our analysis had better retain is the fact that we can be fallible about what justice requires. That there are individuals and groups who are systematically misguided about what justice requires must be true if there is anything properly called justice at all. But once you accept that, you also have to accept that the requirements of justice do not depend in any straightforward manner on what people do or can know. (As Chris notes, saying this certainly doesn’t commit you to thinking that justice has some physical or spiritual existence.)
2) One point that’s floating around is whether the concept of justice will turn out to be coherent at all. Perhaps this is fuelled by a worry that the above thought – that justice is supposed to be independent of what we think about it – is somehow incompatible with other features that justice is supposed to have (e.g. that it is supposed to be action-guiding) . This is very roughly the John Mackie-style error theory, only applied to justice. This kind of view is certainly academically respectable. But one obvious and salient problem is that if you go down this route it’s not clear that you can come out with any political views at all. If nothing is just, are you going to say that systematic sexism (for example) is only bad, if at all, for pragmatic reasons?
Chris Bertram 03.03.09 at 10:48 am
_As I hinted in my post, I thought the response was going to be (following the charity/restaurant comparison in the intro) that people can determine this pretty easily (see also Daniel @ 25 & 41, which came up as I was writing this) and that those who suggest it’s difficult are being self-serving._
I think that’s right. Or at least, whilst it is difficult for people to fix the quantum with precision, this isn’t really necessary, and we can pretty easily identify egregious violations.
Matt 03.03.09 at 12:34 pm
_If we went further and said that nobody could have any idea about the effects of their actions, we still don’t invalidate the principle – we’re just stuck unable to be moral, and too bad._
This was something I was trying to get at before. (I’m not sure who said this- I pulled it as a quotation from Dsquared, so maybe it’s wrong to attribute an idea like this to Cohen, though he does seem committed to something like this to me.) But, I don’t think that morality or justice could be like this, that is, that we could in principle fail to meet the standards, at least some of the time. (We might fail to meet them much of the time for completely banal reasons, of course.) This is what I meant by saying that ideas like justice or morality are essentially action-guiding. If it turns out that on one’s account of justice or morality, we might always fail to meet it because we can’t figure it out, that shows you’ve got the wrong concept. In this way justice and morality are not like numbers or the like- we might think it makes sense to say there’s an answer to the continuum problem but that we are not smart enough to work it out, but I don’t think that, or something like it, can be right about justice or morality. But that seems to be an essential part of any Platonic view. And even if that view can be made coherent (I think it cannot), the answer would just be “who cares?” It wouldn’t at all be clear why we’d care about such concepts. The two reasonable answers would be “it turns out that justice or morality are not something we do or should care about” or “that’s not justice or morality, as those have to be something that _could_ be action-guiding. ” The second answer seems better to me.
Phil 03.04.09 at 10:04 am
If it turns out that on one’s account of justice or morality, we might always fail to meet it because we can’t figure it out, that shows you’ve got the wrong concept.
I think ‘meet’ is a bit too strong. Imagine that we incontrovertibly, axiomatically know – perhaps because God’s told us – that there is a Platonic ideal of Justice, and that no human understanding of justice encompasses it or ever will. Meanwhile back in the 21st-century philosophy-reading world, people are still talking about justice and putting forward alternative conceptions of it, all of which are more or less comprehensible and more or less capable of guiding actions. I don’t have a problem with calling both of these things justice, or with teleological arguments which assume a progress towards a closer approximation of the ideal of Justice – even if our conception of what that ideal is, and what constitutes progress towards it, changes over time. I think our conception of justice as something that has a coherent ideal form is a large part of what makes justice worth talking about, even if we know we’ll never have a final answer to what that ideal form is. In Nigel Simmonds’s words, “law is the process of its own becoming”; I think there’s a similar, if not quite so tight, linkage between the Justice behind the curtain and the debate between versions of ‘justice’.
To put it another way, what’s the difference between being told “you’ll never know what justice really looks like” and being told “you’ll never know what the stars really look like”, other than that a few dozen astronauts can actually say the latter?
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