Continuing the discussion of G. A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality – sorry about the delay – chapter 7 is on “Constructivism.” Cohen argues against the view that fundamental principles of social justice can be identified by considering a selection procedure that addresses the question, “What rules of governance are to be adopted for our common social life?” (p.275) The selection of principles from the original position is his primary target, although the specific features of that choice situation are not at issue. The main objection that he presses is familiar from chapter 6: constructivism mistakenly identifies the principles of justice with all things considered judgment concerning rules of social regulation. This must be a mistake, for Cohen, because the all things considered perspective encompasses considerations other than justice (including other virtues), and asks how best, given certain circumstances, to achieve the optimal balance of these various considerations.
While the original position is not an appropriate basis from which to identify principles of justice, it, “or some variant of it, might be the right procedure for generating rules of regulation” (p.284) – although Cohen has independent reasons for doubting even that. Understood as selecting rules of regulation, the parties in the original position are properly influenced by considerations related to Pareto, publicity, and stability. These considerations, while relevant to the selection of rules of regulation, are all independent of the nature of justice.
The constructivism of the original position relies on other factual assumptions as well, and this shows – according to the argument of chapter 6 – that it cannot be identifying fundamental principles of justice. For example, it assumes that “there exist goods with which people need to be provided to pursue their life plans.” (p.293) To try to convince us that the fundamental principles of justice are not dependent on such a fact, Cohen has us “think of a being with a life plan that is internally fully provided from its inception with everything that it requires for whatever life plan it might choose.” (p.293) Similarly, a contingent fact which principles of justice ought not presuppose is that “human society is marked by both identity and conflicts of interests.” (p.294) These assumptions – that individuals are not completely self-sufficient and that there is both an agreement and disagreement about values – bring us very close to the assumption that the circumstances of justice hold.
When he turns to the discussion of the circumstances of justice, Cohen distinguishes several different questions that may easily be confused: “(1) Under what circumstances is (the achievement of) justice possible and/or necessary? (2) Under what circumstances do questions of justice arise?” For Cohen, the answers to these questions are independent of the nature of justice – the content of the fundamental principles of justice. This is just an application of his more general argument that the content of the fundamental principles of justice cannot be fact-dependent.
Rawls, on the other hand, when developing his principles of justice, assumes (among other things) that we are addressing members of a society who hold diverse and conflicting – though reasonable – values and who are not individually completely self-sufficient. I don’t know exactly what he would say about conditions in which these do not hold – whether justice would be impossible or wouldn’t be important – but, frankly, I have a hard time imagining such conditions.
The reason why Rawls makes these assumptions is because he thinks that identifying principles of justice is a matter of specifying fair terms of social cooperation. Principles of justice aim to answer the question: “what is the most acceptable political conception of justice for specifying the fair terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal and as both reasonable and rational…?” (Justice as Fairness, pp.7-8) Contrary to Cohen’s suggestion, Rawls doesn’t identify justice with an all things considered perspective concerning how best to design social institutions. He thinks that justice is the virtue that responds to the fact of reasonable pluralism – the fact that reasonable people in a society have different and conflicting conceptions of the good, yet are not self-sufficient. And he claims that in such conditions, this virtue sets a necessary condition for the moral acceptability of basic institutions. This is not a trivial claim – as it would be if he identified justice with an all things considered perspective. (p.305) It amounts to saying that it is more important to design basic institutions that are fair to individuals conceived of as free and equal than it is to proclaim the glory of God, or to preserve a cultural heritage, or to achieve and maintain some particular distribution of welfare. Each of these may be permissible, but not if they conflict with the requirement of maintaining a fair system of cooperation among free and equal persons.
One more relatively minor but perhaps revealing point about Rawls. Cohen says that Rawls holds that Pareto improvement from equality are “required by justice, since principles mandating it would be chosen in the original position.” (p.318) Some passages do suggest this – including some statements of the difference principle itself – but I think Rawls’s considered position is that such inequalities are permitted by justice, not that they are required. It would be perfectly just for a society to maintain equality and forego an inequality that would satisfy the difference principle – and there can be good reasons for it to do so. In Justice as Fairness he points out that the difference principle “does not require continual economic growth over generations to maximize upward indefinitely the expectations of the least advantaged” and goes on to talk about “permissible” (as opposed to required) inequalities. (Justice as Fairness, pp.63-64) What ultimately matters to Rawls is not that the expected share of primary goods of the least advantaged position over a complete life be maximized. What matters is that nobody be subordinated (at a fundamental level) to anyone else. He argues that the inequalities allowed by the two principles of justice would avoid that. But so also – obviously – would greater equality, and (in general) he would have no objection to a society making such a decision.
And this brings us to the question I want to ask of Cohen: what is justice about? I’m looking for an answer analogous to what I take Rawls to hold, which is something like this: justice is about recognizing the diversity of reasonable values among the members of a society and designing basic institutions that won’t subordinate any one to any other one. Let me elaborate my confusion – and please let me know in comments if you have any ideas about how Cohen would reply. First, Cohen holds that justice is more than distributive justice. He refers, for example, to “considerations of nondistributive justice” (p.7) and he mentions that sometimes we must “trade one form of justice off against another, at the level of rules of regulation.” (p.367) Perhaps he has in mind something like political justice – say, the requirement that individuals have an opportunity for democratic participation. My question is why, on his view, are distributive justice and political justice both forms of justice? According to Rawls, they are both requirements of a fair system of cooperation. I don’t see why Cohen would say – if he would – that they are part of a single virtue.
But I’m even confused about how Cohen understands the more limited virtue of distributive justice. I’m not talking about the principle that he advocates (although I admit to being confused about that, too). I’m talking about what we might call the concept of distributive justice. On the one hand, he insists that “it would be insane for the intuition about distributive justice on which [luck egalitarians] focus to be the only norm to be taken into account in organizing a society.” (p.301) From an all things considered point of view, sometimes distributive justice should give way to other principles and virtues. I assume this means that sometimes, in determining who should get what, there are good reasons to do what conflicts with the requirements of distributive justice. But on the other hand, when describing the topic of distributive justice, Cohen says that by “distributive justice” he “uneccentrically mean[s] justice (and its lack) in the distribution of benefits and burdens to individuals.” (p.126) Alternatively, it is “giving each person her due.” (p.7) If this is interpreted as who should get what, this is an all things considered perspective. Any consideration that bears on what a person’s benefits and burdens should be appears relevant from the point of view of distributive justice.
I think this lack of clarity about the nature of justice – and even of distributive justice – shows up in an example that Cohen gives. That a change would be a Pareto improvement is a reason for favoring the change, but not a reason of (distributive) justice. (p.315) It may, for example, be preferable on “ground of human flourishing” (p.319) and this may be sufficient to recommend it, but it may nonetheless be unjust. Consider a state of nature “in which manna falls from heaven and gets shared equally because the sharers think that’s the right way to deal with manna from heaven. Now suppose an extra piece of irremovable but destructible manna falls on Jane’s plot.” (p.317) Jane, being a luck egalitarian, destroys the manna because she believes that it is not fair for her to have more than others for no good reason. Far from thinking that Jane is foolish, Cohen holds that “she is simply a remarkably just person.” (p.318)
My own reaction is that she may or may not be foolish in this case. It is possible, for example, that she is expressing a high degree of solidarity with others. If so, she is still no more or less just than if she simply consumed the manna. It is Cohen, I claim, who is here confusing the virtue of justice with something else – perhaps with solidarity. The case does not yet isolate an intuition about distributive justice (as Cohen conceives it). After all, for Cohen, justice is not about showing others that you are just – publicity is irrelevant to what justice is. So, suppose that nobody except Jane knows that she has this windfall. And suppose (what I take to be already implicit in the example) that it cannot be traded or used to enhance her social status. The example still doesn’t isolate the right intuition because Cohen has us imagine the people sharing the (ordinary) manna. So imagine that they are all completely isolated from each other, and it happens that they all receive equal amounts of manna from heaven. One day, Jane receives more. There is no way for her to share it or even to communicate with the others, but she somehow knows that she has received more than the others. Now I would say that if she destroys the stuff, she is simply being foolish. The principles of justice give her no reason to do so. Without at least even the possibility of interactions – and, indeed, without other factual conditions obtaining – the principles of justice give us no reasons to act one way or another.
{ 30 comments }
John Quiggin 04.26.09 at 1:16 am
I’m breaking the rules, since I didn’t get this far in the book, but I’ll try to justify myself by some metacommentary. An obvious problem with our chapter-by-chapter reading group approach is that you may realise only at the end that some fundamental assumptions about the book you are reading are wrong. I (and I think quite a few others) assumed that the book was about the question “What rules of governance are to be adopted for our common social life?†and was arguing that Rawls had given the wrong answer to this question. As it became apparent that Cohen was really arguing that justice was something else entirely, the discussion was derailed a bit, in ways that might not have happened if we had started on Chapter 7.
If I can now sneak in a substantive comment, isn’t technological progress exactly like Jane’s manna, (considering ourselves as Jane, and earlier-born generations as her neighbour, or our children as Jane and ourselves as the neighbours) and doesn’t Cohen therefore imply that we ought to emulate, or at least admire, the Amish rejection of such progress?
dsquared 04.26.09 at 11:55 am
He doesn’t actually recommend it, but says that it’s not completely stupid or incomprehensible – which I think is a reasonable way to view what the Amish have done.
My only substantive comment on the chapter (I agree with John’s point above – when you get this far in the book, you start to realise that lots of things in the earlier chapters which you thought were going to turn into big and important policy recommendations are in fact very technical disputes inside baseball) is that I don’t understand why he’s got such a scunner against step functions for taxes. If, for example, there were to be a beard tax (as there was in the medieval days), then there would need to be some arbitrary stipulation about where the line was drawn between bearded and non-bearded men for tax purposes. And I think it’s pretty obvious that it wouldn’t be the existence of this step function that made such a tax unjust. Similarly I just don’t see that the banding of council tax is inherently unfair or inconsistent with luck egalitarianism; any tax and benefit system is going to have pinch points. I think that what he wants to appeal to in the council tax example is some loose concept of monotonicity of post tax income with respect to pretax, but he’s trying to shoehorn it into his other criterion about arbitrariness and the CT banding system isn’t really particularly arbitrary at all.
Jon Mandle 04.26.09 at 12:04 pm
Just to clarify your question, John. Sometimes people challenge luck egalitarians by pointing out that the introduction of a new technology by some people but not by others can create an inequality in welfare that is a Pareto improvement. But that’s not your question. You say, suppose from a position of equality, a new technology introduces an improvement in welfare for everyone equally. It still creates an inequality between later generations and earlier ones. And it’s just a matter of brute luck that someone was born into a later generation rather than into an earlier one. So for Cohen, justice demands that we redress this inequality since it is based on a morally arbitrary factor. Of course, Cohen would also say that this demand of distributive justice might be outweighed by other reasons. Still: must luck egalitarians condemn intergenerational inequalities as unjust?
Ryan Lanham 04.26.09 at 2:43 pm
I’ve followed along through this. I must say the conclusions are starting to get to where I am on the book–banality followed by ambivalence about one’s own sense of banality in reading something that should have been important.
R. Stanton Scott 04.27.09 at 2:19 am
Any chance of providing a way for newcomers to follow the discussion from the beginning?
You piqued my interest when you brought in constructivism.
Maybe I’m missing it, but I don’t see tags or categories or a search function.
Just asking. Thanks.
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 5:26 am
I dont know if it is just me but doesnt Cohen fail to see that Rawls is not an intuitionist ? To speak about ‘identifying’ and ‘selecting’ the principles of justice seems to construe Rawls as some sort of intuitionist and a realist too. As I read Rawls’ constructivism , normative concepts are not names of objects or of facts that we encounter in the world ( Cohen obviously as a realist thinks that something like this is true but Rawls obviously does not ). Normative concepts ( justice ) are names to solutions of problems. To talk about ‘identifying’ justice then is misleading to say the least.
Chris Bertram 04.27.09 at 7:07 am
The underlying assumption of Jon’s post here – if I understand him correctly – is that justice is for something, that it has some function or purpose. But Cohen would surely deny this. Justice, qua value, is what it is, and we deform it when we conceive of it as a means to some end.
By the way, Jon is surely wrong here to insist (even for Rawls) on justice as a response to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Suppose we all have the same conception of the good but this cog is individualist in content (I want to maximize my lifetime consumption of beer, and so do you). We then have no pluralism, but we do have a problem (for Rawls) of distributive justice. The separateness of persons condition is essential for Rawls but _not_ the fact of reasonable pluralism.
Finally, on Jon’s Kantian conception, justice is achieved when the conditions for non-subordination are put in place. I don’t think that can be right for two reasons, on about Rawls and the second about justice. The reason it can’t be right about Rawls is that non-subordination surely requires a less demanding distributive principle than the difference principle. A threshold principle (a sufficiency principle) would achieve non-subordination – as it does for Rawls in the global case (among peoples). The second reason, which I’m not sure of by any means, is a sort of version of the open question argument. Suppose we achieve non-subordination and then we look around at the pattern of holdings that there is. We can surely ask, meaningfully, the question “but is it fair?”
dsquared 04.27.09 at 7:21 am
Zdenek: Cohen gives pretty voluminous textual citations for all of his claims about Rawls, did you miss them?
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 7:35 am
“We can surely ask, meaningfully, the question “but is it fair?—
I am not sure what this shows because you can also meaningfully ask –as you obviously know– whether evening star is morning star even though we know that evening star and morning star are indeed the same . But then surely just as the test ‘but is it evening star’ does not work in this case in the sense that it does not show that evening star is not a morning star so it is not clear why it should show anything useful in the justice case.
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 7:53 am
“Cohen gives pretty voluminous textual citations for all of his claims about Rawls, did you miss them?”
No, but Cohen seems to misunderstand Rawls’ position as far the very specific issue regarding the nature of Kantian / Rawlsian constructivism goes in the sense that he is running together epistemic , semantic and metaphysical issues ( maybe ‘running together’ is too strong but certainly they are not as sharply handled as they should be ) . Also it seems to me that Cohen is inclined to beg the question against Rawls as far as the main criticisms of constructivism go and some of it we see in Jon’s discussion of Cohen: criticisms seems to rely on realist premises without which Cohen’s argument does not work ; see what I mean ? This begs the question in this type of debate because Rawls is an anti realist obviously.
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 8:59 am
Chris B @7
” …..But Cohen would surely deny this. Justice, qua value, is what it is, and we deform it when we conceive of it as a means to some end.”
What is this, some sort of Moore’s non- natural intrinsic values view ? Is Cohen a non naturalist about values ? Also, and as far as Cohen’s possible objection Chris is talking about goes, Rawls position about value has been fleshed out by Christine Korsgaard ( The Sources of Normativity ) and so Cohen denial would be question begging in so far as it is plausible to think that Rawls would take the line Korsgaard is taking re value.
Chris Bertram 04.27.09 at 9:45 am
zdenek: a condition of commenting on these threads is actually having read the relevant passages in Cohen. If you had, you wouldn’t need to be asking the questions you are asking.
Chris Bertram 04.27.09 at 10:25 am
_The reason why Rawls makes these assumptions is because he thinks that identifying principles of justice is a matter of specifying fair terms of social cooperation._
Cohenish reply ….
Rawls says that justice is about specifying fair terms of social cooperation, but the procedure he adopts to specify fair terms actually mandates a compromise between fairness and other desiderata (such as publicity, stabilitity etc.). Of course, when we’re deciding on the principles that should govern our common life, we should have an eye to those other values, but fairness is what it is. If we decide to have a bit less fairness to gain a lot of, say, stability, we should be clear that’s what we’re doing. We shouldn’t pretend that the result of that trade-off is what counts as fair.
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 10:45 am
“…a condition of commenting on these threads is actually having read the relevant passages”
Thanks I am reading it as we speak but meanwhile you might want to reply to my comment re open question argument which does not require having to have read ‘Rescuing Justice’ ( note that my PhD dissertation deals with constructivism and so I am familiar with the issues and the relevant literature ).
Rob 04.27.09 at 12:32 pm
Note that Rawls can’t require commitment to anti-realism in order to accept justice as fairness without giving up on the ability to generate an over-lapping consensus (unless we think that realism is unreasonable in the specific realist sense). I think that Cohen does confuse epistemology and metaphysics in his attacks on constructivism – and at times reads Rawls pretty uncharitably – but it is to make at least a very similar mistake to argue that because Rawls regards an original position as the best (or maybe only) way to find out what justice is, he must be an anti-realist. Collapsing questions of truth and justification doesn’t really do anyone any good.
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 12:59 pm
Chris B on open question argument :
” The second reason, which I’m not sure of by any means, is a sort of version of the open question argument. Suppose we achieve non-subordination and then we look around at the pattern of holdings that there is. We can surely ask, meaningfully, the question “but is it fair?â€
This is a good question but Rawls is not making or does not have to be seen as making analytic claims : the definition of justice that is being offered is intended as a ‘reforming definition’ which is put forward as a postoriori identity claim which does not aim at ‘conceptual closure’ ( the relevant thing to focus on is that such claims do not aim at uncovering analytic truths ). The thing is that if this is what Rawls is claiming then open question argument cannot refute it. However one might raise the following difficulty : ok, fine , the definition is a reforming definition but what if the proposed definition does not capture what we felt was central to the original thing we set out to reform and capture by the conceptual redefinition / reform ? I mean would it not be a challenge to a reforming definition of P by means or in terms of Q if it was shown that Q failed to capture what was essential to P ? ( if the property that was central to P was eliminated say and disapears from Q ) . This version of open question argument might still pose problem for Rawlsian reforming definitions .
Pete 04.27.09 at 1:29 pm
Chris says,
By the way, Jon is surely wrong here to insist (even for Rawls) on justice as a response to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Suppose we all have the same conception of the good but this cog is individualist in content (I want to maximize my lifetime consumption of beer, and so do you). We then have no pluralism, but we do have a problem (for Rawls) of distributive justice. The separateness of persons condition is essential for Rawls but not the fact of reasonable pluralism.
It strikes me as funny to say that there is a shared conception of the good here. What A values is beer for A, what B values is beer for B, and so on. B does not find A having beer to be valuable, and A does, so there is a pretty straightforward disagreement about value here. Yes, then, I think there clearly is a concern of distributive justice.
Pluralism of the good is required to get Rawls’ project going, and the fact of reasonable pluralism just points to the idea that, even among people who are genuinely motivated by moral concerns, disagreements can arise about the use of our collective power to decide distributions of shared social resources.
zdenekv 04.27.09 at 1:31 pm
Rob at # 15
No, my thinking that R is an anti realist is because of textual considerations . In “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980” for example ( but there are of course lots of remarks like that ) he says that ethical inquiry is not, as rational intuitionists would have it, a matter of our finding out a body of moral facts prior to and independent of that inquiry and other pronouncements which makes it pretty obvious that R is not a realist in any useful sense. But another thing is that he cannot be regarded as a non cognitivist and that makes his position rather interesting : anti realism ( metaphysical claim ) but also a cognitivism ( epistemological claim ). Another thing of course is is the question whether this type of position is naturalist , I mean is Rawls’ metaethics naturalist ? I think the answer should probably be yes because he has to think that there is continuity between ethics and science because he takes reflective equilibrium seriously which strikes me as naturalist method.
dsquared 04.27.09 at 1:42 pm
The thing is that if this is what Rawls is claiming then open question argument cannot refute it. However one might raise the following difficulty : ok, fine , the definition is a reforming definition but what if the proposed definition does not capture what we felt was central to the original thing we set out to reform and capture by the conceptual redefinition / reform ?
This wouldn’t just be a “difficulty”; that’s what refutation means in context.
What A values is beer for A, what B values is beer for B, and so on. B does not find A having beer to be valuable, and A does, so there is a pretty straightforward disagreement about value here.
this looks a bit shifty to me; it seems that you’re defining “pluralism” in a sense in which there can’t not be pluralism. After all, if A and B were to have exactly all the same desires in all possible situations, then it’s not obvious that A and B can meaningfully be said to be different individuals.
Chris Bertram 04.27.09 at 1:44 pm
Pete, I have to say, that I find your comment above utterly perverse! Pluralism clearly refers to a condition of varied moral beliefs and philosophical outlooks and that poses an interesting set of problems for Rawls which wouldn’t be posed in the same way in a society of acquisitive individualists all of whom lacked strong convictions of a religious or philosophical kind. But we can modify the example if you prefer: a society of unanimous consensus among atheists on the truth of early Rawls (TJ) would not be a pluralistic society. But such a society would still have a problem of distributive justice to solve, just so long as individuals each had their own _interests_. Thus the separateness of persons is more fundamental for Rawls than pluralism.
Pete 04.27.09 at 1:56 pm
Chris also says that justice cannot be about putting into place conditions of non-subordination. He says,
The reason it can’t be right about Rawls is that non-subordination surely requires a less demanding distributive principle than the difference principle. A threshold principle (a sufficiency principle) would achieve non-subordination – as it does for Rawls in the global case (among peoples).
For Rawls, non-subordination is required at two levels: at the level of private interactions in society, but also at the level of the selection of principles that are going to be used to evaluate the institutional rules under which these private transactions occur. Now, it seems immediately clear that private interactions that fail to subordinate one person’s will to another person’s will can take place under institutions that conform to some kind of sufficiency principle instead of the difference principle (especially, if these institutions still conform to the rest of the two principles). I’m happy to defend this possibility of nonsubordination if others here question it, but it seems pretty obvious to me.
But I even believe that we can select some other principle than the difference principle without a problem of subordination, and I think that Rawls believed this too. He says his conception of justice is the most reasonable, not that it is the only reasonable conception of justice, and he acknowledges explicitly that the arguments for the two principles over a “mixed conception” (where, for example, the dp is replaced by the principle of average utility) are not nearly as strong as the case for the two principles over a utilitarian conception of justice. So, a principle other than the difference absolutely could be part of a reasonable conception of justice.
Now, I’ve agreed with Chris here that selecting the difference principle is not necessary to avoid subordination. Still, I think that this is basically what justice is about. Moreover, the conception of justice formed by the two principles and their justification form a very reasonable conception of justice that answers the problem of subordination as an infringement of freedom. The difference principle does not function in isolation, but in connection with the rest of the conception, and it is in this broader context that I prefer it over a sufficiency principle or the principle of average utility. So even though there are other reasonable answers to the problem of subordination, the conception of justice defended by Rawls, that includes the difference principle, is a very good answer (maybe even the best, or most reasonable, answer).
Pete 04.27.09 at 2:18 pm
To Chris @ 20,
I’m not clear on how my comment was perverse, exactly. Anyway, about your example of a society of good TJ Rawlsians: in a society like this, the problem of distributive justice is already solved. That is, people accept the same standards of how to distribute social resources in light of their conflicting interests. Given the way you’ve stated the example, I’m not actually sure if it is or is not pluralistic (being an atheist doesn’t imply any particular full moral and philosophical system as I understand it). I only know that there is a shared conception of justice. If some atheists value being philosophers, while others value being truck drivers (where what I mean to point to is disagreement about the form of a valuable life), then I think there is still pluralism, and reasonably so. Even if everyone endorsed Rawls’ thin theory of the good, there would still be this much pluralism.
This low-level kind of pluralism is all that is needed get Rawls’ project going, but he recognizes that reasonable pluralism in fact runs much deeper, even at the level of our most fundamental moral, philosophical and religious commitments. This problem of deep reasonable pluralism explains a lot of the machinery distinctive of PL: the concentration on public justification, the idea of an overlapping consensus, etc. etc. etc.
Oh, and I do of course agree that the separateness of persons is important.
Chris Bertram 04.27.09 at 2:48 pm
_Anyway, about your example of a society of good TJ Rawlsians: in a society like this, the problem of distributive justice is already solved._
Well yes, there _is_ a problem and, happily, there is a solution. But if there were no separateness of persons, there’d be no problem!
Jon Mandle 04.27.09 at 3:03 pm
In reply to Chris (#7) – I am asking for a further elaboration or clarification of how Cohen thinks about justice. But I am not assuming that it is for something other than itself – I am not assuming that it has an instrumental justification. I simply want a characterization that would help me see what it is beyond his distributive principle. Presumably, he would say something like this about distributive justice – its point is to correct for unequal results of brute luck. I’m asking for a similar statement concerning justice more broadly. He seems to suggest that there is some kind of unity among its different parts, but perhaps not. Maybe different aspects of justice – political and distributive, for example – simply answer to unrelated concerns. This is what I would like to be clarified.
I’m sorry for using the term “reasonable pluralism†– I was using the term in a non-technical way – my point is not about political conceptions of justice or comprehensive doctrines. My point was the simple one that Pete makes (#17)– in Chris’s example, there are conflicting views about what state of the world would be good. We need some way to resolve these disagreements and this is what gets the problem of justice going. This may seem trivial and obvious – and I admitted having a hard time imagining a world in which this were not the case – but Cohen is the one who thinks that justice is independent of such facts. Suppose we each like enjoying sunsets and we each can do so without interfering with each others’ enjoyment. But you take significantly more pleasure in the sunset than I do. Cohen would say that other things equal, and assuming our preferences are brute luck, you owe me compensation for the unequal levels of welfare that we achieve.
Finally, very briefly on non-subordination. I agree precisely that non-subordination requires only a threshold conception in general – and hence in the global case. It is only when there is a shared basic structure – including a system of property rights – that the assessment of those property rights requires more. But this takes an argument, and I agree that the burden is on me to show why more is required in that case.
Pete 04.27.09 at 3:31 pm
Well yes, there is a problem and, happily, there is a solution. But if there were no separateness of persons, there’d be no problem!
Yes, of course that’s correct. If there were no separate persons, there would be no need for justice. But there’s more: if there were many people, but they never did, or never could, interact, there would be no need for justice. If there were many people, and they did interact – even more strongly, if they could not avoid interacting – but they never came into conflict, there would be no need for justice.
But we are human beings, and there are many of us. As human beings we value things, and have interests in bringing about those things we value. We interact with other beings, and sometimes our interests in pursuing the ends that we value do come into conflict. We cannot all be provided the resources required to achieve all of our ends. So, for us as human beings, there is a problem of distributive justice.
The fact of reasonable pluralism is important because for Rawls we have a duty of justification to reasonable persons that we do not have to unreasonable persons (though we may try to justify our positions to unreasonable persons anyway), and the fact that reasonable persons may reasonably disagree on fundamental moral, religious, and philosophical matters puts substantive limits on what may count as a reasonable justification.
Greg 04.27.09 at 3:51 pm
Chris @7:
“By the way, Jon is surely wrong here to insist (even for Rawls) on justice as a response to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Suppose we all have the same conception of the good but this cog is individualist in content (I want to maximize my lifetime consumption of beer, and so do you). We then have no pluralism, but we do have a problem (for Rawls) of distributive justice. The separateness of persons condition is essential for Rawls but not the fact of reasonable pluralism.”
I don’t see your point. Certainly the separateness of persons condition in your hypothetical society assures that the problem of distributive justice still obtains, but since when did distributive justice = justice? The separateness of persons might be essential in creating the problem of distributive justice, but surely you’re wrong to say that reasonable pluralism isn’t essential to Rawls in (at least) his first principle.
Rob 04.27.09 at 5:09 pm
zdenekv,
I’d be careful what you implied about someone’s ontological positions on the basis of their comments about methods of inquiry into some field or other, especially when trying to maintain that they held an ontological rather than an epistemological position, since comments are methods of inquiry are epistemological, rather than ontological. Also, there’s good reason to think Rawls abandons the positions of Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory in Political Liberalism (and further, rightly so).
Also, isn’t reasonable pluralism – for Rawls at least (there may be some reasonable disagreement here, and so perhaps it couldn’t be a part of the doctrine itself) – a direct implication of accepting the significance of the separateness of persons (under the relatively favourable conditions that Justice as Fairness is explicitly formulated for, anyway)? The only way to mitigate the effects of the burdens of judgment in terms of generating reasonable disagreement about the sources of value in human life would be to suppress various freedoms. Suppressing those freedoms would be to not take people seriously as agents with their own lives to lead, which is precisely the point of the separateness of persons.
Pete 04.28.09 at 2:03 pm
I was chatting with Jon M. about some of the relevant intuitions at play here. I’m thinking both of Jon M.’s sunset case (#24) and John Q.’s inter-generational technology case (#1). In the first, A happens to enjoy sunsets more than B, though apart from this difference in brute preferences things are equal. In the second, A was born later than B, and enjoys greater benefits from the intervening technological progress. It seems that in both cases, Cohen recognizes some kind of cosmic unfairness. I guess I can recognize that too, for some sense of “unfairness,” but I really don’t see how, if I am A, this can give me any reason at all to either enjoy sunsets less or to give up the benefits of progress. But, all other things being equal, it seems like for Cohen this is exactly what Justice gives me a reason to do.
I think this point is clearer in the latter case, because there is in fact nothing we can do to compensate past (i.e. no longer living) generations, so that the only option we have to address this putative injustice is to lessen our own standard of living. In the former case, it at least seems open for me to compensate B in some other way for my greater enjoyment of sunsets – here it strikes me as odd that I should be thought to have a moral reason to do so. (It is quite open to claim that, all things considered, we should not in the end do either of the things suggested by justice here, but I’m claiming something different: My intuition is that justice does not give me a reason to limit progress or lessen my enjoyment of sunsets if I am A.) I wonder, have I got Cohen’s intuition right?
I, following Rawls, am firmly committed to the idea that justice does not apply to brute inequalities, but only to how we moral beings handle these inequalities. This is just another way of saying that I don’t think that justice is about bringing about some independently specifiable just state of affairs, but rather governs how we ought to go about pursuing our ends, whatever they are.
Chris Bertram 04.28.09 at 5:19 pm
_only to how we moral beings handle these inequalities_
I guess I find this formulation disturbingly vague since it trades on the idea that we might only be concerned with inequalities that result form human actions or social structures whilst leaving open the possibility that we might be required in justice to take action to mitigate natural inequalities (by providing access to buildings for disabled people, for example). I’d be interested to hear what you think about eye transplant cases Pete. If half the population have no eyes and half have two and we can easily do painless transplants to give everyone monocular vision, are we required in justice to correct the natural inequality? Or is it not unjust at all? Or are we just required to modify things a bit to make the worse lives of the blind a bit better?
Pete 04.29.09 at 12:35 am
I do think we need to be concerned with natural inequalities, but I don’ t think that natural inequalities are inherently unjust. We may handle these inequalities in a way that is unfair to some party or some group, and we may in this way be unjust and the resultant distribution may also be unjust.
In the case you mention, I do not find the initial state, where by brute luck (I take it) half of the population is blind, to be just or unjust. It is simply a fact that half of the people are blind. I think that requiring the other half of the population to each give up one of their eyes would be quite straightforwardly unjust, though it would certainly be kind of any of the sighted to make a donation of this sort. In this case justice requires that the blind be enabled as much as is possible to be full participants in the civic and economic life of the society, in such ways as are consistent with the rights of everyone else. I take it this is a much stronger requirement than a requirement to merely modify things a bit, but it does fall well short of saying that the blind deserve compensation from the sighted for their naturally occurring disadvantage.
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