You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the appropriateness of people in a just society being motivated by money. Last week, reading around about why on earth we organize work life the way we do, I had a eureka moment about how these two are connected.
The Rawls-Cohen debate is about whether within the institutional framework of a just society, it is justified to use monetary incentives – and the ensuing inequalities – in labor markets (and one can add, for the sake of argument, motivation by status, which is usually intertwined with money, even though Carens had famously argued they could, theoretically, be separated). This allows for an efficient labor market allocation that can ultimately benefit the worst-off members of society, some in camp Rawls would say. It is incompatible with an ethos of justice to require a high wage for making a societally useful contribution, Cohen and others would reply (and those are, of course, not the only arguments in this debate).