Cohen on rescuing justice from the difference principle (ch. 4)

I am still confused by the argument Cohen is making. Following along in what might be the same vein as Matt Lister, how is this an action guiding distinction? Specifically, how would this recommend constructing social insitutions differently than what Rawls difference principle would recommend? Until Cohen is willing to argue that equality is more important than maximally aiding the least advantaged, his philosophy would not recommend any change for constructing social institutions. Additionally, if you believe the requirement of justice extend to individuals in the same manner as they do to institutions, there is still no distinction from Rawl’s society. If you end up getting paid a lot more, you should then be willing to donate your money to the least advantaged under either Rawls conception of the most just society or Cohen’s.

And the step where Cohen radicalizes his critique just appears to highlight this problem to me. If you are trying to compare the situation where more talented individuals need compensation to continue their hard work versus one where they don’t, you are positing a basic change in human nature that, by assumption, you cannot influence through social institutions.

The result is that it sounds like all Cohen can add to Rawls description of justice is something along the lines of: “Well following Rawls guidelines would result in the most just society we could actually achieve based on what human nature is. But wouldn’t it be nice if human nature was different, and here is this nice criterion that we could use to evaluate what kind of human nature would result in a more just society.” There are two problems here. First, as Lister and others suggest, this is not very interesting as it is not action guiding. Secondly, can this even be regarded as a critique of Rawls? Couldn’t a Rawlsian just grant Cohen’s argument and say, “well we’re just interested in what we can actually do to achieve the most just society possible, and your theories don’t actually have anything to contribute to that project”?

I hereby certify that I have read chapter 4.

“The key shock of this chapter is Cohen’s rejection of the difference principle itself as a basic principle of justice.”

Minor point probably, but I don’t feel the ‘shock’. (But I really don’t mean to start a useless argument about what should and shouldn’t be a ‘shock’.) The rejection of the difference principle as a basic principle of justice seems explicit in chapters 1-3, or at least unmissably implied. 4 seemed to me to go over the same ground from a somewhat different angle. As you say, it involves more forensic combing over different formulations in Rawls text.

My partner Marsha spent the last five or six year of her life in a nursing home. (She had multiple sclerosis.) I spent about half my non-work, non-sleep time being a support for her: psychologically, bringing her food she liked, maintaining a Rube Goldberg computer/TV/music setup on an over-the-bed hospital table, and so forth.

I calibrated the time I spent for Marsha to be the maximum I could manage — any more (in my sincere but of course hopelessly biased opinion) would have degraded my performance enough that it would have been worse for Marsha. You might say that without having heard of Rawls, I’d rediscovered the difference principle.

Three points:

(1) It was not Rawls’ difference principle I rediscovered but Cohen’s. From descriptions of Rawls I take it to be Rawls’ view that I might have had a duty under justice to agitate for better conditions for nursing home residents, but that my work for Marsha did nothing for justice; while on Cohen’s view it did.

(2) Clearly I myself can have no confidence that in fact I did as much as I could; how much less so anyone else? And yet (and despite John Quiggan’s post about complaining about the difficulties of such measurements) clearly I did more than I’d have done had I not been trying to do my best.

(3) It was not just. It was not just. Even granting that I did do my best, it was not just that one of us was cut off from the world while the other went to his pleasant job, visited with friends, had a fairly normal life.

Had I thought it was just, would I have done as much for Marsha?

Cohen develops his argument that Rawls’ own commitment to egalitarianism, exhibited in Rawls’ claim that equality should be the benchmark when applying the difference principle, is inconsistent with the endorsement of the difference principle (section 6 of Cohen’s chapter 4, pp 166-8). Cohen interprets Rawls as holding that it is the moral arbitrariness of differences in natural endowment and social position that justify starting with equality, but considers a counter-interpretation:

“Some say that it is a misinterpretation of Rawls to attribute to him the view that distribution ought not to be sensitive to talent-explained differences in productivity. They think that the texts that might appear to say so in fact merely deny that distribution ought to be sensitive to talent” (Cohen 166).

I’m one of those people. While Rawls’ texts are not always as clear as I would like, on this point he is explicit. Cohen cites a passage in Rawls that he takes to be in tension with the above counter-interpretation, and the payoff phrase is that the liberal conception of the two principles is deficient because“…it still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents” (Theory 63-4 (I’ll just stick to the Revised edition), Cohen 166).

He neglects to point out that this is followed just a sentence later by: “There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune” (Theory 64). But now it is clear that Rawls is not denying that distribution of natural talents should play some role, he’s denying that this distribution should settle the distribution of shares of primary goods. Rawls is even more explicit later: “No one deserves his greater natural capacity or merits a more favorable starting place in society. But, of course, this is no reason to ignore, much less to eliminate these distinctions”; and just down the same page, “The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust” (both quotes, Theory 87). So this initial distribution is not unjust, and there is no reason to ignore or even eliminate inequalities in it, given, of course, that this unequal distribution can be harnessed for the good of all (and to the maximal benefit of the least well off).

So, I think Cohen is just flat wrong in his interpretation of the justification for equality as the staring point for application of the dp. But this means I must face the second part of his argument in this section. He says, “…[I]f Rawls did not hold that talent differences shouldn’t determine distribution, he would have no argument for the proposition that we are to begin with the equal distribution, D1. For it does not justify beginning with equality that talent differences do not justify inequality” (Cohen 167). The second sentence is clearly correct, but the first is not. Rawls’ argument for beginning with equality is so straightforward and obvious, not to mention quick, that I think it must be easy to miss entirely.

Rawls says, “Now consider the point of view of anyone in the original position. There is no way for him to win special advantages for himself. Nor, on the other hand, are there grounds for acquiescing in special disadvantages. Since it is not reasonable for him to expect more than an equal share in the division or primary goods, and since it is not rational for him to agree to less, the sensible thing is to acknowledge as the first step a principle of justice requiring an equal distribution” (Theory 130). That’s it. That’s the argument. No mention at all of desert, or morally arbitrary factors, or anything like that. Of course, Rawls go on to say that is rational for the parties to accept inequalities that work to maximize the benefit to the least well off, but this is in no way in tension with the initial argument for equality.

(Apologies for all of the textual citation.)

Hey, everyone,

I have been reading along as an outsider, a grumpy epistemologist and Aristotle reader a little frustrated with Cohen’s level of clarity and rigor. But I think I am coming around.

I don’t understand how a guide for action is separate from a standard of judgment, at least insofar as we desire of actions to be just as opposed to efficacious. This distinction Lister and Mpowell are pointing to seems to be relevant iff we desire the most efficaciously just social structure that is possible given the fixed circumstance and their is only one possible circumstance.

But is it not the case that the critique here is the same as those who would argue that true belief and knowledge are the same with respect to their usefullness, so who cares about knowledge? Bill has traveled the road to Larissa many times. He has even guided many tourists to Larissa on the same road with complete success. If we ever wanted someone to write a guidebook for getting to Larissa from here, then he is our man; it will be the most efficacious guidebook to correct road taking to Larissa around. Yet, Bill is not a cartographer or is he capable of dealing with the complextities of directionality and such (i.e. a compass). Shelly on the other hand is a cartographer and she could give you the directions based upon some absolute standards, which give her a stability and security in the conviction of her directions, but her directions will have the same result as bill’s. Potentially, she could also give you many other particular directions. She has the universal knowledge that allows her to do this that Bill doesn’t. Now, it seems to me that we would all prefer to let shelly write our GPS system.

However, now let’s imagine a scenario in which there is only one road; the road to Larissa. Who would we choose? Would it matter? Probably not, if all we care about is getting to Larissa, having a person guide our actions.

This seems to be the critique offered by Lister and Mpowell. They are suggesting that there is only one “road”, i.e. one road of action that forwards justice, and Rawls does a good job at pointing us there as any. If that is what we are interested in, then Cohen doesn’t help, because his theory doesn’t point the way down a road that seems to have better results or the results shown by Rawls are as good as any.

But is that really all we are interested in? I doubt it. My doubts don’t center on the fact that our ideals of justice should entail more than the greastes quality of justice that can be achieved in our actions (i.e. super human justice). Rather, I want to know my actions to be just, and the only way to be clear on that is in terms other than examining the quality of the results, which of course get their qualitative power from my understanding of justice simpliciter. At the end of the road, I want to know that I am in Larissa and not houston. But without an understanding of justice as justice, if Rawls really corrupted the concept, we are searching for a black dog in the night. This being the case, and if Cohen really has shown a corruption of the concept of Justice in the hands of Rawls, then we are literally helpless with respect to knowing whether this distributive model is the best result or not. We just don’t know.

Next, there is no reason to assume that the admission of human suckitude should keep us from pressing forward to a more robust conception of justice that pushes for better and actual distributive models with an emphasis on equality, unless you think this suckitude is a necessary condition so grave that we can’t do anything more than what Rawls pushed for. But this is ridiculous. I mean, if you want to bring in conditions, such as “human nature”, that block a conceptual exploration of justice as justice, rendering it irrelevant, then that would demand a certain level of effort concerning the various possibilities and impossibilities of human behavior, and, next, telling me that any judgments I make from mine or Cohen’s conceptual structure are irrelevant to the actual realm of possible action. Again, if my elucidation of justice enumerates principles that cannot be true in any possible world much less ours, then that would render my theory irrelevant. Fair enough. But in order to make that argument against Cohen one would be required to offer a level of analysis, a metaphysical, political and psychological one, so large that I don’t think a critique from this perspective is credible without the analysis in place. And just saying that Cohen’s theory is off the mark because it cannot enumerated or has not enumerated a distributive scenario that has better results than Rawls’ fails because: 1) we cannot know what even good results and actions would mean without a correct evaluative standard and conceptual clarity (see above) and/or 2) this critique assumes a position about the realm of human action and the justice found there within that properly delineates all possible and impossible modes and manners of actual distributions.

I’ll piggy back on DD’s certification and look for some factual clarification on the action question, which still hasn’t become clear to me following the one chapter at a time approach, instead of skipping to find out the ending

Reading the post and comments above it seems as if
(i) Rawls recommends that public policy should be based on the difference principle and asserts that the result will be just, while
(ii) Cohen agrees that public policy should be based on the difference principle, but says the result will be unjust because (among many other things, I’d say, though this is the only example so far) the talented are holding society as a whole to ransom by refusing to work harder unless they get paid more.

Is this interpretation (or something like it) correct, or does Cohen conclude something substantially different, for example that public policy should promote equality in wages even if everyone is worse off as a result?

John Quiggin: [Does Cohen agree] that public policy should be based on the difference principle, but [that] the result will be unjust … . or does Cohen conclude something substantially different, for example that public policy should promote equality in wages even if everyone is worse off as a result?

Cohen ain’t sayin’: “Luck egalitarians are interested in the very nature of distributive justice, not in that different question as to what principles, to be influenced by distributive justice but also by other things, a society should adopt as its basic ones.” (p. 301, italics in original)

Certainly he holds open the possibility that we might choose a course of action that increases equality in a Pareto sub-optimal fashion because to some extent our concern for distributive justice outweighs other concerns; but he’s not going to let us know anything more specific than that. I wish he would; those are interesting questions. (He does speak with some warmth, short of endorsement, of Joseph Carens’ Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market. See pp. 189-192.)

#15 What I meant in the passage you cite, Chris, was that the unwillingness/inability of the talented to work harder is not the only problem that might be considered when we are thinking about the achievement (or even the definition) of equality and justice.

For example, there’s the issue we discussed not long ago of parental efforts on behalf of their children. And we haven’t yet said anything about gender.

To Chris @ #21

Thanks for pushing me to make this more clear. I don’t mean to say, quite, that justice’s status as a higher-order value implies pure procedural justice; instead I am redescribing what it is to be a regulative value of this sort (although strictly speaking, of course, that a thing is a chair implies that it is also a place to sit, but the idea is that this is a redescription of the thing). So, justice is concerned with how we pursue other values – one way to think about this is that it sets limits on permissible means that we may use to pursue our ends, whatever our ends are – as opposed to being concerned with producing some particular, independently specifiable state of affairs. This is to say that justice is a procedural value: it is a value concerned first with correct procedure (“first” because we still can evaluate outcomes, but only as the outcome of some procedure), rather than with evaluating the procedure in terms of some independently correct outcome.

So, my claim (for better or worse) is that when we understand what it means for justice to be a higher order, regulative value, we see that this is for it to be a matter of pure procedural justice.

I certify that I have just finished reading Cohen’s book. I am not a philosopher, so I find the exchanges on this site between people who are helpful in formulating my thoughts on it – Chris and Pete’s exchanges in particular. What is at issue, as they point out, is the scope of justice. While I find it pretty difficult to contest Cohen’s restricted version of justice’s scope , let alone his (‘luck-egalitarian’ ) view of what justice is (which I find quite congenial), I am left feeling uncomfortable with what this means for real world issues….Cohen talks a lot about rules of regulation, but when it comes down to it, there don’t seen to be any in his view of things; instead, there’s a fact-insensitive principle of distributive justice and then there are all the messy facts of the real world, and that’s about it….if there are enough egalitarians around, practical outcomes will be acceptably just, if not..well you have to swallow your principles and, for instance, send your kids to private schools…..(which is more or less the conclusion of ‘If You’re An Egalitarian..). I prefer the view of the late Soviet philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, as expounded in The Yawning Heights, who says a single individual can by his/her words and example, raise the whole moral atmosphere in society (he has in mind Solzhenitsyn). And here I am bound to say that viewed from this angle, Rawls, in virtue of Part III of ‘A Theory…’ alone, trumps Cohen, who says a lot about ethos, but next to nothing about social relations…which when you think of it are surely where justice is, or is not, to be found.

Now I have got that off my chest, I promise to relate my thoughts more rigorously in future contributions to the actual arguments of Professor Cohen’s formidable book.

Yarrow @ #26

In your first paragraph, you worry that parties in the original position might choose to accept a lottery whereby one person will be exploited for the benefit of a great many. Rawls’ argument from maximin (or, better, by analogy with maximin) is I think pretty decisive against concerns like that. It’s important to recognize that the parties in the OP aren’t considering specific sets of institutions, like a particular lottery system, but rather principles to evaluate systems of institutions, and have no information whatsoever about the probabilities of occupying one social over another in the society well-ordered by the conception of justice they come to – they don’t even know what the social positions are, since these are defined by the as-yet-unselected institutions.

Your second paragraph raises an interesting point. There are some outcomes that cannot be accepted, even if they come as a consequence of a just procedure. I agree with this, and I believe that Rawls does, too. No system of institutions is perfect, and even an otherwise just democracy can pass an unjust law. But note that for Rawls, this outcome will be judged unjust according to principles that were themselves selected through a constructivist procedure, on the basis of what we can accept as reasonable and rational persons, and not on the basis of some standard selected or determined independently of such a procedure.

Pete and harry b: Let me see if I understand. It’s not that the people in the OP are taking their chances as to the position they will occupy in the resulting society (or in a society resulting from the application of the rules they choose). Instead, they are making a game-theoretic move — they choose the rules by which a society will be chosen, then their game-theoretic opponent chooses their place in a possible resulting society. Assuming the opponent wishes them great harm, that will be the worst possible place out in the worst possible society allowed. Thus each person in the original position will choose rules that disallow the William James society, because otherwise the opponent will make them the torturee.

That makes more sense. It doesn’t make more sense (to me!) than appeals to the heart, but it makes more sense of Rawls’ position than I’d had before.

Chris,

I just wanted to note that you’re right that I’ve not been arguing that (my understanding of) Rawls’ and Kant’s stance on the concept of justice is the right one, or better than Cohen’s. I’m trying for now to get as clear as I can on the fundamental disagreement(s) between them, which clearly run much deeper than a conflict over the difference principle. I do hope to consider some arguments as this reading group continues, and some have already been made (such as some previous commenters’ position that Cohen’s concept of justice is incoherent, which even if correct wouldn’t show that Rawls is right).

I don’t think that the relationship between the general and special conceptions is a way of making justice one value among others. If some particular society, for historical and cultural reasons, cannot support a liberal constitution, then Rawls allows that it may restrict liberties in ways not permissible in a liberal society. But it is allowed by justice to do so only for the purpose of moving that society towards a just liberalism, including especially a guarantee of the priority of the basic liberties.

Finally, while Kant, especially in the Groundwork, really does seem to think that justice is to regulate the pursuit of all other values (I see this as following from his metaphysical account of the source of value – the good will), I think that with respect to Rawls I’m only justified in making this claim about social justice. It might be that with respect to other social roles, other values can trump justice. Perhaps, on some comprehensive moral view, it is more important for me to be loyal to my family than to ensure a “proper balance of competing claims”1 for everyone in my community. And, a separate point, even in cases where we might think that justice (of some kind other than social, distributive justice) is the most important value, it is not the case that Rawls always claims that it must be purely procedural. His example of a criminal trial shows this. The procedure of trying a criminal case must aim at an independently specifiable outcome: finding the innocent to be innocent, and the guilty to be guilty. I want to emphasize, though, that this is not a form of distributive social justice.

1. This is what Rawls identifies as his concept of justice on Theory, Revised p. 9.