On Basic Structures and Starting Points

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls writes (7):

The basic structure is the primary subject of justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start. The intuitive notion here is that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different social positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply.

He elaborates (82):

The primary subject of justice, as I have emphasized, is the basic structure of society. The reason for this is that its effects are so profound and pervasive, and present from birth. This structure favors some starting points over others in the division of the benefits from social cooperation. It is these inequalities which the two principles are to regulate. Once these principles are satisfied, other inequalities are allowed to arise from men’s voluntary actions in accordance with the principle of free association. Thus the relevant social positions are, so to speak, the starting places properly generalized and aggregated.

In this post, I want to jot down some thoughts on why I find this a concerning aspect of Rawls’ approach. My concern arises from Rawls’ supposition that basic structures “contain” social positions, and thus the array of social positions in a society are the result of the choice of basic structures in that society. But the basic structure of society does not itself directly produce the distribution of starting places. In each instance where a person is born into a particular starting place, it is the consequence of some people having a child. It is somewhat difficult for me to imagine why we would think that the basic structure of a typical society could directly cause a baby to be born. Perhaps we could coherently say this if we lived in a mechanistic totalitarian society in which children were in an important sense a product of social planning, but this seems like an odd way to think about the way children are born in our society.

The extent to which the basic structure of our society impacts the array of starting places is the extent to which it has some influence on the range of opportunities that prospective parents are able to offer their children, in those cases where these people actually do choose to have children. Approaching things with this mindset, we can see that any society will “contain” an infinite number of potential starting points, and in certain relatively rare circumstances, a child will actually be born into a particular starting point. But these starting points will be the product not only of the principles governing the basic structure of society, but also (and undoubtedly more importantly) the incredible confluence of events that led up to the possibility of a particular child being born into a particular set of social circumstances, almost all of which are only tangentially related to the basic structure of society. And significantly, the way that we characterize a starting place will be significantly conditioned by the kind of parenting the individual in question will receive. I would at least be hesitant to think of the quality of one’s parents’ personal contributions to one’s childhood as being entirely the product of the basic structure of society (I would actually be a bit hesitant to make these claims about pretty much any of the social interactions that help to shape a child’s life, but for our purposes it will not be necessary to raise this challenge). If it’s true that the distribution of starting points is at least partly determined by the way that people choose to treat their children, then Rawls’ claim that the basic structure of society “contains various social positions” (where the relevant social positions are “starting places”) seems a little worrisome.

But Rawls might counter that even if the basic structure of society does not solely determine the array of starting points into which people will be born, it still has some impact on the range of opportunities that will be available to individuals whose parents decided to have them. And this, he could say, may be cause for some concern. Intuitively, this seems fair enough. I think it’s entirely reasonable, for example, to think that we may want to consider the idea that we have some duty (as individuals, social groups, communities, or whatever) to ensure that people have certain opportunities provided to them if we can help it (I don’t intend to engage this question here, but I certainly wouldn’t want to rule this out). Rawls might say that we ought to help poor families to provide education, food, or clothing for their children. He might say that we ought to help children from less fortunate backgrounds get into college or enter the workforce. Though these suggestions might be problematic for one reason or another, they don’t seem totally unreasonable on their face.

But this isn’t what Rawls wants to argue: he wants to suggest that by allowing a certain array of starting points to come into existence, the basic structure of society might itself be seen to be unjust, and would thus need to be replaced with another basic structure. This, I think, is where Rawls might be running into real trouble.

Here’s what I have in mind: Individuals who are born into particular starting points are the products of particular reproductive events. These events are the products of long histories of social changes and reproductive events which produced the circumstances in which these events occurred. Altering the basic structure of society would bring it about that a different set of reproductive events would occur, and so a different set of starting points would come about, but into these starting points would be born a totally different set of people. This is a problem because Rawls’ view is built on a scenario where the members of society are supposed to try to agree on the basic structure of society -- a mutually beneficial system of cooperation. But if we assume that living is not itself a bad thing (I have heard this disputed, but whatever), then it seems clear that the most beneficial choice of basic structures for any individual would be whatever structure brought that individual into existence. No one would really have any grounds to complain about their starting place because it would be a necessary precondition for them existing in the first place. Altering the array of starting points in society might be justified, but not on the basis that it would somehow benefit the people whose “undesirable” starting points would be eliminated. And if we’re not trying to benefit these people, then it’s sort of difficult to see how we’re still talking about a contractarian view that’s focused on starting points.

(To be honest, I’m sort of unsure about this conclusion. In this case, when I say that it’s difficult for me to see how this could be accommodated, I am not saying that rhetorically; I don’t know how it works. If anyone can explain to me how Rawls’ approach could accommodate the fact that no one will benefit from the choice of any basic structure besides the one that causes them to come into existence, that would be sweet.)

So hopefully, this post has served to establish two points on which I am confused: a) the basic structure of society doesn’t itself produce the distribution of starting places, and b) messing with the basic structure in order to alter the distribution of starting points in fundamental ways would bring about an entirely different population, which would most certainly not benefit the people whose starting points are being eliminated, and would therefore seem not be an appropriate goal of a contractarian view like Rawls’. As should be clear from the above, none of this should be taken to be “damning criticism” of Rawls; I am just hesitant about the way that Rawls is proceeding, and I think he might have made a big mistake. Even so, these do seem like the sorts of things that would need to be addressed.

Does the "Vintage Sedan" Commit Us In "The Envelope"?

In his book, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence, Peter Unger seeks to show that by allowing people to suffer and die in the third world, we are failing in our moral duties. He offers an intriguing thought experiment, which has been called the case of the "Vintage Sedan":

Not truly rich, your one luxury in life is a vintage Mercedes sedan that, with much time, attention, and money, you've restored to mint condition... One day, you stop at the intersection of two small country roads, both lightly traveled. Hearing a voice screaming for help, you get out and see a man who's wounded and covered with a lot of his blood. Assuring you that his wound is confined to one of his legs, the man also informs you that he was a medical student for two full years. And, despite his expulsion for cheating on his second year final exams, which explains his indigent status since, he's knowledgeably tied his shirt near the wound as to stop the flow. So, there's no urgent danger of losing his life, you're informed, but there's great danger of losing his limb. This can be prevented, however, if you drive him to a rural hospital fifty miles away. "How did the wound occur?" you ask. An avid bird-watcher, he admits that he trespassed on a nearby field and, in carelessly leaving, cut himself on rusty barbed wire. Now, if you'd aid this trespasser, you must lay him across your fine back seat. But, then, your fine upholstery will be soaked through with blood, and restoring the car will cost over five thousand dollars. So, you drive away. Picked up the next day by another driver, he survives but loses the wounded leg.

Unger suggests that in such a scenario, it is natural for people to feel a strong commitment towards the idea that we would act monstrously by abandoning the hitchhiker. As many of the readers of this blog are libertarians who likely have stronger intuitions about the importance of self-determination than does Unger, it may be helpful to recast the illustration in order to make the danger to the hitchhiker more severe, or the cost to the owner of the vintage sedan less significant. The relevant point here is that most of us feel rather strongly that if the hitchhiker were in some real danger and if our actions could make the difference as to whether or not that danger were averted, we would have a moral duty to act to avert the danger even if doing so would require that we incur some costs ourselves.

Unger then offers an illustration that is referred to as "The Envelope":

In your mailbox, there's something from (the U.S. Committee for) UNICEF. After reading it through, you correctly believe that, unless you soon send in a check for $100, then, instead of each living many more years, over thirty more children will die soon.

Unger's intuition is that if we believe that we should help the hitchhiker in Vintage Sedan, then we should surely send the $100 in The Envelope, where the costs to us are so much smaller and where we would be averting so much more regrettable outcomes.

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For a long time, I haven't known what to do with this argument. In another post, I agreed with the sort of intuition that Unger offers about Vintage Sedan, writing:

...the reason that we endorsed a broadly liberal approach to ethical reasoning in the first place was that we want to take proper account of the value of individuals. Wouldn't it seem odd if on one hand we were saying that individuals must be respected because their lives are important and valuable, and on the other hand we were saying that there's nothing wrong when people act as though others are irrelevant and worthless? I think so.

But I offered a vague defense against the sort of move Unger takes in extending the intuition produced in Vintage Sedan to The Envelope:

But in saying that, I don't mean to create the suggestion that we are "sacrificial animals" (to use the phrasing of the ever-abrasive Objectivists), required by morality to subordinate ourselves to others whenever they can coherently make the case that their needs and wants are "more important" than ours. An important part of what makes our lives valuable and worth respecting is that we can live them for ourselves. Another way to think of this is to say that even though we may have a peripheral or relatively unimportant interest in any particular activity we may be engaging in over the course of a normal day, we have an important or even basic interest in being able to plan and execute our lives according to our own plans, without having to think of ourselves as being at the beck and call of anyone who finds herself in a bind at any particular moment.

I continued that:

...because it's important to us that we be able to live our own lives, we have no duty to devote ourselves to empowering others. That's not to say that it is not virtuous to do so, or that we should not focus on the richness that helping others can bring to our lives. I only seek to suggest that if someone chooses to pursue his own dreams, living his life primarily for himself except where impelled by emergency to come to the aid of his fellow people, it wouldn't be fair for us to say that he has failed morally or behaved in an evil manner.

But to be honest, I haven't been totally satisfied with this argument. That is, I don't think it's wrong; I just feel like there's something missing. It seems to me that we don't have a duty to send the $100 in The Envelope, and it's not just because we don't have a duty to devote ourselves to solving world hunger. It seems to me that there's something importantly different between Vintage Sedan and The Envelope that could support a moral distinction between them.

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For the longest time, though, I couldn't think of what the distinction might actually be; they just seemed totally different. Now, obviously there are differences between Vintage Sedan and The Envelope where Unger is going to get to laugh sinisterly if you retreat to them. These include appeals to the distance or anonymity of the people in The Envelope -- these are the sorts of things that don't seem like they can support the distinction we intuitively want to make. And it's going to be especially ugly if we try to go down the road that leads to, "Well the hitchhiker's suffering here is worse than that of the thirty people who will die for lack of basic necessities."

But now I'm toying with another sort of distinction, which I think may have at least some merit. In Vintage Sedan, it seems that the hitchhiker has found himself in an emergency situation. Something has happened to him that threatens the expectations that he very reasonably had about his future. If he is not taken to the hospital, he will need to make drastic adjustments in the way he thinks about his life and his future. In The Envelope, on the other hand, the people to be helped are "in trouble" simply as a result of the sort of lives they lead. To the extent that they are not in any particularly unusual circumstances given the sort of lives to which they are accustomed and acculturated, their fates will (at least as far as we know in the example) fall more or less within the range of the expectations that they could reasonably be expected to have. Surely we would want to acknowledge that these individuals find themselves in a rather regrettable lifestyle (given global standards), and that perhaps it would be nice if they had different and better opportunities available to them. But it seems to me that this is a very real and very significant difference between the people we are to help in The Envelope and the hitchhiker's situation in Vintage Sedan.

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Now, Unger's point is that because we think that we should help the hitchhiker in Vintage Sedan, we are committed to sending the $100 in The Envelope. If, however, the difference I have outlined between Vintage Sedan and The Envelope really is significant, then Unger will be incorrect; our position in Vintage Sedan does not commit us to a particular stance on The Envelope. But it could still be true that this difference does not justify our failure to send the $100 in The Envelope -- it could be that Unger's conclusion is correct even if his argument is not.

So, then, what do we think about the idea that we have a moral duty to provide assistance to people who find themselves -- through no fault of their own -- in living situations which are (by current global standards) very dire? I'm not sure what I think. It seems to me that our obligation towards them is certainly not quite the same as the obligation we feel in Vintage Sedan, but saying much more would likely open me up to charges of begging the question -- that is, unless I were to here try to construct a theoretical defense of one conclusion or another, which isn't going to happen. I think this is an issue that requires a lot more thought, and that it would be premature of me to arrive at any definitive conclusion here. I guess I'll leave it at tentatively rejecting Unger's argument, then. I think I'm happy with that.

On the Two Functions of the Principles of Justice in A Theory of Justice

So the other day I finally started reading Rawls' A Theory of Justice. I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to feel this book out, since it's pretty darn important that I get it right. In this post I want to trace a single stream of Rawls' thought, connecting the choice of the appropriate conception of justice to the determination of how we should conceive of the original position.

I

Rawls thinks that in evaluating political institutions, we must first focus on the question of whether or not they are just. He writes (3):

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

But whether or not we find that a set of institutions is just will turn on the conception of justice that we use to evaluate those institutions. He thinks that while people may hold different conceptions of justice, the concept of justice itself, where basic social institutions are concerned, is uncontroversial (5):

Those who hold different conceptions of justice can...still agree that institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life.

So ignoring for now the question of whether or not we agree that this really is the concept of justice we all share in thinking about social institutions, we can see that for Rawls, the concept of institutional justice makes two demands of a social system: (1) Basic rights and duties must be assigned in a manner free of arbitrary distinctions; and (2) The rules adjudicating competing claims to the advantages of social life must produce a "proper balance." Our individual conceptions of the justice of social systems, then, will similarly need to do two things: 1) They need to specify what distinctions are significant in assigning basic rights and duties; and 2) They need to define what counts as a "proper balance" between the competing claims to the advantages of social life. Rawls writes (5):

Men can agree to this description of just institutions since the notions of an arbitrary distinction and of a proper balance, which are included in the concept of justice, are left open for each to interpret according to the principles of justice he accepts. These principles single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties and they specify which division of advantages is appropriate.

II

So, then, how are we to decide which particular conception of institutional justice is right? Here Rawls seeks to utilize an intellectual crutch to help us think about the decision. He proposes that we imagine ourselves as people at a hypothetical negotiating table at the beginning of a society who are trying to determine what principles should govern the choice of institutions in the society. We are to imagine that we are all destined to be born into whatever social system is put into place on the basis of our decision, but we are deprived of certain pieces of information about who we will become. Rawls writes (11):

Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

But why should we think that the results of this thought experiment will be relevant? Who cares what people in such a ridiculous set of circumstances would think? And won't the conception of justice that we choose in such a situation simply reflect the choice of what information we were allowed to consider?

Rawls is quick to clarify. He acknowledges that clearly, the features of the choice situation are no small matter; in fact, the design of the "original position" is a critical part of the choice of the appropriate principles of justice. He writes (14):

...justice as fairness [the name of Rawls' theory], like other contract views, consists of two parts: (1) an interpretation of the initial situation and of the problem of choice posed there, and (2) a set of principles which, it is argued, would be agreed to.

The design of the initial position, he contends, is meant to help us abstract away the things that we think are morally irrelevant in choosing an appropriate conception of justice. We don't know who we're going to be when we're in the original position, or what we're going to value, because those sorts of things aren't supposed to matter in thinking about justice. Rawls explains (16-17):

One should not be misled...by the somewhat unusual conditions which characterize the original position. The idea here is simply to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of justice, and therefore on these principles themselves. Thus it seems reasonable and generally acceptable that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstances in the choice of principles. It also seems widely agreed that it should be impossible to tailor principles to the circumstances of one's own case. We should insure further that particular inclinations and aspirations, and persons' conceptions of their good do not affect the principles adopted.

So, then, the way we are supposed to think about the original position is to first deprive all the people at the table of the information that we think is irrelevant to making their choice. We are then supposed to ask what kind of decision they would make.

III

Now, Rawls insists that we add a further condition: the people at the table in the initial situation are completely self-interested. He writes (12):

One feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational and mutually disinterested. This does not mean that the parties are egoists, that is, individuals with only certain kinds if interests, say in wealth, prestige, and domination. But they are conceived as not taking an interest in one another's interests.

Now, it's not clear to me exactly what Rawls means by this. Two possibilities come to mind: 1) People in the initial situation should not care about the other people in the situation; their focus should be entirely on the people who will be born into the social system that will be produced by their decision, each of whom they have a chance of coming to be; and 2) People in the initial situation should focus only on the self-regarding interests of the people who will be born into the social system that will be produced by their decision.

It seems to me that (1) is reasonably plausible. The initial position is just a thought experiment, and so the interests of the imaginary people in the initial position are irrelevant. So if Rawls means (1), then that's fine. But if Rawls means (2), then I can only ask...well...why? It seems like Rawls is going to talk about it later (he notes section 25, entitled "The Rationality of the Parties"), so I'll hold off on passing final judgment. But it does seem rather curious that we would want to ignore any interest that people have in the fellow members of their societies in thinking about what kind of society they would want to live in. For the time being, I'm just going to assume he means (1) until I see any indication otherwise.

IV

Here's something puzzling to me:

As we saw, the initial position is supposed to help us choose a conception of justice by abstracting away all of the irrelevant things we might otherwise consider in trying to make the choice. And remember, the conception of justice that we choose is supposed to do two things: 1) Assign basic rights and duties; and 2) Define what distribution of social advantages is appropriate. Is it really going to be the case that the relevant considerations for choosing the principles for (1) are going to be the same as the relevant considerations for choosing the principles for (2)? Are they at least not necessarily the same?

Here's why I ask:

It seems to me that when we think about assigning basic rights and duties, we think that there are very few distinctions between people that are really relevant. And Rawls seems to capture this intuition in all of the considerations he abstracts out of the initial situation. We don't think that rights or duties should depend on personal identity, social circumstance, personal interests, or our own conceptions of the good. These things aren't supposed to matter. And for assigning basic rights and duties, it seems like we would want to rule that these things are irrelevant.

But in talking about how the advantages of social cooperation are distributed, it's not entirely clear that these same considerations are irrelevant. Imagine that Mark, Rita, and Beatrice are the only three people in their society, and they all live as subsistence farmers. They honor the boundaries of their respective plots, and the third party is always relied on to settle disputes. They are generally pretty happy with their peaceful coexistence. One day, Beatrice invents a new game and sets to work in her scant spare time producing the equipment to play it. She then insists that Mark and Rita pay her a small bit of what they produce if they want to play the game. They happily oblige, and inequality is born. In this illustration, it's clear that we have a situation where everyone is being made better off by their social arrangement; Mark and Rita gain because they get to play a game that they enjoy, and Beatrice gains because she gets to enjoy their company as well as the payment they provide.

But now imagine that we turn to the question of whether everyone is getting an appropriate share, and we use Rawls' tool. We think of Mark, Rita, and Beatrice all at the beginning of their society, trying to decide what rules to adopt for distributing the advantages of social cooperation. Is it really true that the personal identity of these three is irrelevant for thinking about who should get what? Should we expect Beatrice to agree that the appropriate way to settle the issue is to pretend that all three of them had an equal chance to be her, and that she could just as easily be the one paying? I at least don't think it's obvious that Beatrice should be willing to grant this.

And even if Beatrice should grant this, is it really for the same reasons that she ought to grant the irrelevance of personal identity in assigning basic rights and duties? It just seems to me that if the considerations that are relevant in choosing each set of principles are going to line up, it's going to be a coincidence. But maybe Rawls defends this way of doing things later; we'll have to see. Maybe I've already missed something! If anyone's actually reading this post, do you know why Rawls structures things this way?

V

Something else that has me confused:

How does the original position contribute anything to the process of assigning basic rights and duties? Rawls tells us that our conception of justice is supposed to "single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties" (5). And in designing the thought experiment that is supposed to help us decide how to do this, we are supposed to abstract away "those aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view" (14). It seems to me that if we can design the original position, then we must already know "which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties." So what are we gaining through the thought experiment?

VI

My notebook is riddled with nitpicks, reservations, and qualms about this whole thing, and I'm sure I could go on all night -- I'm equally sure most of my objections would be dumb. So I think that for now, I'm happy to leave it at this. I've at least gotten a post up about the book, which has actually been more difficult than you might imagine (this is the fourth try, if my memory serves me correctly). Believe me, there will be more.

Redistribution and Organizations

[Update: I rewrote the piece so that it would actually be readable by financial people, and have replaced the earlier version of this post with the even more overly-simplistic (and not even necessarily historically accurate) version that appears below.]

Today my boss came in to work with a smile on his face, telling me he had a project for me. This is the result of that project. It draws a lot on this previous post, and admittedly oversimplifies some of the issues at hand. I didn't mean it to be a thorough examination of the issue, but I figure it might be somewhat interesting to some of you folks. So here it is:

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Introduction

[My boss] asks, “Is it consistent to think that wealth should be redistributed from rich individuals to poor individuals, but not from rich organizations to poor organizations?” To answer this question, I will explore the reasons that one might advocate redistribution from wealthy individuals to poor individuals, and then ask whether those reasons apply to organizations as well. In doing so, I will not address important objections to wealth redistribution policies, and so this discussion should not be seen as a defense of implementing them. The goal here will only be to establish whether someone who accepts the legitimacy of redistributions from wealthy individuals to poor individuals would be committed to being in favor of those arrangements between organizations as well.

Why Do We Care About the Distribution of Wealth?

Typically, redistribution of wealth is justified on the basis of empowering the poor. This seems simple enough. But if we are to try to apply this thinking to other areas, it will be important to understand how the argument for redistribution is supposed to work, and what moral problem the redistributive policy is supposed to fix. I will therefore offer a brief overview of where the argument for redistribution comes from, and how it responds to some of the ideas that have underpinned our society from its birth.

Our society is built on the foundations of classical liberal philosophy, which is itself built on the idea that we should treat freedom as a value in itself. It is second nature to think of the ideal America as a “free country” dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These are values that are taken directly from the classical liberal movement, and which still form the backbone of our worldview today. But why should we (and why did the classical liberals) care about freedom? Today’s political discourse has turned liberty into a buzzword, and has masked the connection between exaltation of liberty and the ideas that motivate redistributive policies. So in order to understand why redistribution is not just a matter of expedience or charity to its intellectual defenders, but is rather a matter of principle in their eyes, I will start out by setting the record straight on this issue.

Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson and the other liberal thinkers of their time observed that human societies are elaborate and dynamic systems, and that no individual (or group of individuals) could effectively design and operate a complex society according to a rational plan. The problem of society was, according to these thinkers, too complex for any mind to solve. Accordingly, the liberals postulated that successful societies would need to rely on mechanisms like the market system to produce “spontaneous” order – that is, to allow individuals to live together peacefully and productively without a comprehensive plan of action. A spontaneous system of producing social order would allow societies to function without all-knowing, benevolent rulers who would produce order and prosperity in accordance with their divine insights. And this was particularly important to the liberal thinkers, as it was painfully apparent to them that such rulers were generally not forthcoming, and attempts to produce a rational order in their absence were universal failures. The market system, then, could substitute for the benevolent and all-knowing ruler, producing prosperity and order as if by an invisible hand.

But the classical liberal defense of freedom extended beyond the simple idea that freedom tends to produce desirable social systems. The liberals argued not only that freedom promotes prosperity, but also that freedom is an essential component of human well-being. People, according to the liberals, can only realize themselves as individuals in an environment in which they are free to design their own lives, make their own choices, and live according to their own plans. And we still generally believe this today, which is why we care to live not only in a wealthy country or an advanced country, but also in a free country.

It was through the desire for mechanisms for spontaneous ordering and the belief in the importance of self-determination that the classical liberals came to be advocates for institutions of private property. By securing our possessions, property rights enable us to plan our separate lives without having to fear the arbitrary authority and incursions of other citizens or government agents. The classical liberals recognized that our lives are built in the outside world, and not just within ourselves, and that we therefore need security in our property in order to live full, meaningful lives. Property rights also set rules that allow us to interact in peaceful and productive ways without the need for social planning and all-knowing, benevolent rulers.

But a number of different groups of thinkers saw a flaw in the classical liberal argument defending individuals’ rights to their property. If property rights are a core element of liberty, and individuals need liberty in order to live good lives, then what about the people who do not have any property? Critics of the classical liberal position pointed out that the property-less, talent-less individual may have liberty in the sense of being free from the incursions of others, but she sure didn’t have much leeway to live her life according to her own desires or to be the master of her own fate. The impoverished man faces a choice between submitting to labor for someone else on one hand, or death by starvation or exposure on the other. Only in a technical, abstract sense could someone in such a situation be called “free.” And this, the critics held, was unfair.

The argument for redistribution, then, is that by redistributing wealth to those without access to it, we ensure liberty for all members of society, and not just those who can empower themselves through luck, talent, or the generosity of their benefactors. Such a policy, it is held, takes full consideration of everyone’s interests and needs in order to foster the conditions under which all individuals can pursue their own happiness, free (to some extent) from the concerns which might lead us to object to the circumstances faced by the property-less proletarian.

Empowerment and Organizations

When [my boss] asks about the potential for extending this line of thinking to organizations, it should be more or less clear at this point what he has in mind. Like individuals, organizations can have or lack the resources necessary to pursue their own goals. As is the case with individuals, a wealthy organization has more than enough resources available to it to meet its basic needs, and accordingly has more of a say in its fate than an organization which struggles simply to remain in operation. As we have seen, it is out of a desire to provide for the effective freedom of all individuals that the advocates of redistribution seek to transfer resources to those who lack property of their own. But does arguing this way commit them to the position that “needy” organizations should also be empowered in order to promote their abilities to plan their own “lives”?

In order to answer this question, it will help to ask why it is that liberty is morally important in the first place. The classical liberals thought that freedom was valuable because it could produce spontaneous social order and because it was a component of human wellbeing. But why should we attribute moral significance to order and wellbeing?

According to one very simplistic view, moral concern is built on the idea of promoting the interests of entities that have “goods of their own.” Each of us clearly has a good of his own, and our interests are promoted by living in orderly, peaceful, and prosperous societies in which we can pursue our own happiness. And similarly, our interests are promoted by having access to resources that enable us to make freer choices. But organizations can have “goods of their own” too. A University does well when it is able to sustain a thriving academic community, play an important role in its community, and operate with a strong budget. A corporation does well when it is able to generate income for its stakeholders, or when it successfully expands its operations into a new market. And in order for organizations to pursue their interests, they need access to resources just like individuals do. So if it is for the good of individuals that we enact empowering redistributive policies, then it seems like a similar line of thinking could lead us to advocate empowering organizations.

But one might object that moral concern should not attach simply to anything with a good of its own. We might notice that where we actually experience our own goods, organizations (that is, conceived of separately from the people who make up the organizations) do not. Whether or not a person’s interests are promoted actually makes a difference to that person. But except in a metaphorical sense, an organization is not the sort of thing to which something can make a difference. And this seems like a very important distinction.

To be sure, the individuals who compose the organization and who are impacted by its success have an active interest in its wellbeing. However, it is critical to notice that the interests of the individuals who make up an organization are not the same as the interests of the organization itself. If we are going to empower an organization because of the organization’s interests, then we need to separate the organization’s interests from the interests of the individuals from the organization. And if we deny that an organization’s separate interests can be morally significant because organizations cannot experience their own goods, then it appears that we would want to reject the analogy between the moral significance of an individual’s need for empowerment and an organization’s need for the same.

One might still want to argue that empowerment of poor organizations should be justified not on the basis of the organization’s own need for liberty, but rather on some need possessed by the individuals constituting the organization or by those with a stake in the organization’s performance. That is, by empowering organizations, we can indirectly empower individuals. And because we care about individual empowerment, we might be able to achieve our goals through the empowerment of organizations. But notice that this would not be an extension of the ethical argument in favor of empowering individuals to cover organizations. Rather, it would simply be an alternative way to carry out the redistribution called for by the original argument.

Ultimately, I am not convinced that we can coherently extend the moral concern which motivates redistribution to empower individuals to cover needy organizations. This can perhaps be supported best by comparing the way that we think about the death of an organization for lack of resources to the way that we would think of an individual’s death due to the same causes. When organizations fail or struggle, it seems like our proper concern should be focused on the individuals whose lives are worsened or constrained by those processes, and not on the organizations themselves which fail to live up to some constructed conception of their good. Accordingly, where redistribution is to be justified in order to empower those in need, I think it should be individuals to whom resources are allocated, and not organizations.

A Tentative Plan for an Overly Ambitious Climate Change Project

Anyone who's been following my work will know that a main focus of my research is global climate change, viewed from an ethical and political perspective. In this post, I want to sketch out where I'd like to go with that research and how I'd like to compose a complete product. These will only be sketches, and only working sketches at that; I imagine things will change rather dramatically as I move forward. But hopefully they'll help me to organize my thoughts. And if anyone out there is interested in helping me work on some of this stuff, I'd really love to know. It would be amazing to be able to finish this project for a dissertation, but I don't know if that will be possible if I have to do this all alone... Anyway, here it is (as usual, the mainstream scientific standpoint is taken as a premise for the first parts):

1. Collective Action Problems and Coercion

Climate change is a problem that, on its surface, seems to fit right into the model of a public goods problem. People acting on their own independent interests are collectively producing something that appears to be bad. If we were to desire to prevent this bad thing from coming about, we would either need to alter the set of incentives facing the relevant agents (in this case, basically everyone) so that they would adjust their behavior, or perhaps we would need to take steps to mitigate the effects of their actions.

When we talk about an appropriate response to climate change, however, we don't have in mind a sort of Buchananite consensus-building endeavor in which we try to get everyone to agree to a system that would uncontroversially represent an improvement over the current one. Rather, we intend to coerce people -- that is, to influence them to follow plans besides their own by force if necessary -- in order to bring about the desired outcomes.

But we can't just go around coercing people whenever we think we could bring about "better" social outcomes by doing so -- we need some justification for infringing upon individuals' rights to self-determination. Accordingly, this section would attempt to sketch the kinds of reasons that one might offer in defense of an infringement of someone's right to self-determination, all focusing on duties held by the individual whose rights are being infringed.

I will discuss self-defense briefly, acknowledging Roderick Long's contributions in thinking about dealing with climate change from this paradigm, but ultimately conclude that it doesn't make much sense to approach the issue of climate change in this way. I will therefore sketch out two alternative sources of duties which might help us to justify coercion: the duty to show appropriate respect for others' rights and the duty to attempt to mitigate tragic or catastrophic consequences. The next two sections will be elaborations of these issues.

2. Climate Change as an Infringement Upon Rights

This section will draw heavily on my paper, "Justice and Climate Change: Towards a Libertarian Analysis," which will be coming out in The Independent Review in the Fall. It will outline the foundations of a duty to respect others' rights, and explore the ways in which we might think of climate change as infringing upon rights. I will build upon my earlier paper to address some of the issues that were left undiscussed there.

One way in which I will go beyond that paper in this section will be to discuss the question of whether these infringements upon rights would constitute rights-violations. I will predicate this discussion on the premise (which I will challenge in Section 4) that individuals who contribute to global climate change are responsible for the rights-infringements, and search for ways that those individuals might try to defend their actions. The purpose of this discussion will not be to reach any definitive conclusions, but rather to give us a starting point for thinking about these questions in Section 4 when we try to pin down exactly what individuals are responsible for, and how we should think of their duties in light of such an analysis.

3. When Are Consequences Correlative?

This section draws its inspiration from the concept of correlations between duties and rights, observing that some intuitively plausible kinds of duties don't seem to correlate with rights. Some of these duties which are non-correlative with rights seem to make reference to things that we owe to ourselves or to ideals to which we are committed. But others seem to have to do with our duty to promote "the good," or at least refrain from promoting "the bad" or destroying "the good."

In this section, I will attempt to approach the impacts of climate change from this sort of consequentialist perspective, trying to decide when consequences correlate with duties to act in certain ways. I will initially focus on impacts on groups of humans and on cultures, but I will attempt to expand my discussion to incorporate a consequentialist theory of environmental ethics. Much like in the previous section, my discussion in this section will be structured so as to rely on a set of carefully chosen suppositions about individuals' responsibility for bringing about these consequences that will be challenged in Section 4, but not in a way that makes the discussion here useless. Again, the purpose of the discussion here will be to create a starting point for the analysis in Section 4.

4. Collective Responsibility and Individual Duties

This section will bring into focus the emergent nature of the climate change problem, and attempt to engage the literature on collective responsibility in order to understand how we should approach this problem. I will focus particularly on Virginia Held's discussion of the responsibility of "random collections" to organize themselves to address faults corresponding to non-distributive predicates like "caused global climate change." I will draw attention to Held's reservations about the choice of a proper decision-making procedure and search for a resolution to this problem in the literature relating to the selection among sets of alternatives that are impartially reasonable to prefer to inaction.

I will also use this section to directly engage the idea of the social provision of public goods, wondering whether we can think of the ideas presented in this section as justifying or demanding this practice, or if we should rather treat the discussion here as suggesting serious limitations on the extent to which we should be looking to social decision-making mechanisms to fulfill this capacity. I will attempt to show that in certain situations, the line of thinking introduced here can be used to support social measures aimed at providing public goods without relying on perfectionist ideas. But I will also show how these arguments do not establish the sort of paradigm that perfectionists would want, and that my view cannot therefore be seen as a reconciliation between liberalism and perfectionism.

5. Justifying the Enforcement of Duties

In this section I will discuss the jump from the idea that individuals have certain duties (as discussed in the previous sections) to the idea that we could be justified in coercing these individuals to act in the manner prescribed by their duty. I will need to explore the sorts of considerations which justify the enforcement of duties and use them to try to distinguish cases where intervention is justified from those where it is not. Here I will flesh out the questions introduced in Section 4 relating to reasonable pluralism and impartiality, expanding my discussion to cover all duties. I will also explore a dialectical approach to thinking about the justice of coercive enforcement of duties. This section will set the stage for Section 6 and Section 7 by arguing that certain kinds of answers to the questions posed in those questions would make coercion unacceptable.

6. Centralized Policy-Making in a World of Reasonable Pluralism

This section will explore the foundations of political authority outside of voluntary associations. I'm really not sure how I want to approach this section, but a coherent place to start seems to be with the philosophy of Joseph Raz. I'm very much over my head in even trying to imagine what sorts of things I'll want to discuss in this section, but it does seem like I'll have to address this issue. I guess this is what grad school will be for! Hopefully by the time it's ready to actually start writing this, I'll have done a whole bunch of work on the issues raised by this section and will have something worthwhile to say.

7. Finding an Appropriate Role for Uncertainty

Everything that will have been said to this point in the project will have been predicated on the idea that global climate change is undeniably happening in the way forecasted by the IPCC. This section will question this premise and introduce some of the uncertainties involved in the mainstream scientific analysis. It will also introduce the concept of storyline uncertainty and discuss the degree to which we can be comfortable with our predictions about the future.

I will then try to think about how uncertainty should play into our thinking about this issue. I will discuss the precautionary principle and the principles of procedural justice which are enshrined in our current legal system, as well as concerns about the burden placed on victims by standards of proof. I'm not entirely sure where I'll want to go with this, but I think I'm attracted to the idea of some kind of middle ground. I'm not sure, though, so don't hold me to it!

8. Pulling It All Together

In this final section I will attempt to put together all of the pieces discussed in the previous sections in order to compose a coherent answer to the question of how we should think about the justification for a coercive and centralized policy aimed at addressing global climate change. I will highlight areas where I think that reasonable people might find room for disagreement, and where I think my discussion here could be expanded or improved. I will also voice any doubts I have about my conclusions and attempt to identify some avenues for rejecting them. Finally, to the extent that I can do so coherently, I will offer some closing thoughts about the ways that my arguments might be engaged by the policymaking community and the general public.

Left-Libertarianism Is Not Communism: A Reply to Joel Davis

It appears that over at Reddit.com, a fellow going by sblinn decided to share one of my previous posts on resource-egalitarian left-libertarianism with the rest of the Reddit community.  So a big thank you goes out to sblinn for checking out my work and posting it over there!  I received some criticism, though, in the comments section of the listing by someone named Joel Davis, who appears to be a communist [edit: later in the comments thread, Joel claims not to be one, so I'm not entirely sure what to make of the fact that he defends points he calls communist throughout his reply...].  Joel clearly put a lot of time and effort into his comments, and so I wanted to try to think about some of his points here.

First, Joel wonders:

Isn't "property" itself a system? Can't we solve this "problem" by just choosing not to enforce property, thus securing egalitarian conditions through a net decrease in coercive authority?

I do agree that property -- or more specifically, any society's set of conventions for recognizing claims to possessions and adjudicating disputes arising over those claims -- is a system of social organization, and that such a system could be dispensed with if a society so chose.   And I can see why Joel would conceive of such a move as involving a net decrease in coercive authority.  After all, by abandoning a set of social conventions for dealing with property claims, we would seem to dissolve the mechanisms by which those conventions were enforced, and also the mechanisms by which those kinds of conventions were formed in the first place.  And that seems like a curtailment of a certain kind of authority.

But it's less clear to me why Joel thinks that such a move would bring us closer to egalitarian ideals.  It seems like in the absence of a property system, there would either arise a set of social relationships that were substantially similar to a sort of property system, except without any unifying set of conventions (since that would seem to be a property system itself), or else there would be a system in which claims over possessions were not widely recognized and protected.  

In the former case, we seem to wind up right where we started.  I don't see why having a pluralistic system of property rights would militate against inequality any more than a more universal system of property rights would.  To defend this, one would only need to point out that whatever possession-respecting manner in which some members of a pluralistic society related to each other with egalitarian results could simply be practiced on a society-wide scale.  And by doing so, we could coherently claim to have instituted a sort of property system, though it would likely need to be different than the sort of property system we generally see in practice today.

In the latter case, where there is no generally accepted set of cultural institutions regarding possessions, and where individuals have not created a similar -- though pluralistic -- system to put in the place of one, it would seem like the only remaining alternative would be to not recognize claims to property at all (since doing so would seem to involve one of the two possibilities already discussed).  But such a system would be anarchy in the pejorative sense of the word.  People would simply do whatever they wanted with other people's property -- remember, if they restrained themselves from this, we would be dealing of an example of the sort discussed in the previous paragraph.  If this would bring about egalitarian consequences, it would only be in the sense of mutual destruction.  But more likely, egalitarians would be angered to find that the strongest could exercise their power over the weakest, generating a different sort of inequality, but inequality nonetheless.

So I really can't see why Joel would think that the abandonment of property altogether would tend towards egalitarian goals.  It must be noted here that I have spoken of property in a broad sense, and many people have historically talked about the elimination of capitalistic standards of property as if they were talking about dispensing with property altogether.  But presumably, there would still be a desire to kick trespassers out of one's house in the communist utopia, and to have the trespasser seen as the morally faulty party in such a scenario.  And one simply can't make sense of this besides through an appeal to something like a right relating to one's own house, which would be a sort of property right.  A property right of a different kind, to be sure, than the one which enables the capitalist to bequeath access and title to the means of production to his children, but a property right nonetheless.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the latter sort of system would not be something that left-libertarians would want to endorse, at least as far as I can discern.  Most left-libertarians seem to be in favor of property rights of some kind, though they might be open to the second sort of set-up in which there is no property system as such, but rather a kind of pluralistic, decentralized approach to dealing with these rights.  And the reason it makes sense that left-libertarians favor these rights is that left-libertarians believe in self-ownership partly because they want people to have the freedom to "do what they want with their own."  Hence Peter Vallentyne began his entry on Libertarianism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with the claim that "Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions." So in summary, I agree that one can abandon a property system if one wants, but I don't see why this would tend to encourage equality, and unless the alternative to a property system were substantially like a property system, I don't think a left-libertarian would want to endorse it (remember, my post was about left-libertarians, and so might not respond to other sorts of views).

Joel's next substantive point is this:

It (obviously) doesn't follow that just because there will be some inequality that we need to endorse a system of property as it exists today.

And this is undoubtedly true. I certainly didn't mean to suggest in anything that I said that the only alternative to the left-libertarian views I challenged in my other post involved a wholesale endorsement of today's property norms.  Even the most right-wing libertarian views don't entail that.  So to the extent to which my previous post suggested anything like this, I apologize for the confusion.

The point I had been trying to make starts with the claim that with an egalitarian initial allocation of resources, differences in luck, effort, and ability would eventually bring it about that some individuals would end up with more than others.  This would not be the case because of any defect in the initial distribution's fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, but rather because it would simply be impossible to engineer an egalitarian distribution such that the tendencies towards movements away from equality would be preempted indefinitely.  This is not a point that I introduced, and is accepted by both right-libertarians like Nozick and egalitarians like Cohen.  I didn't think it particularly necessary to defend it in depth because...well...very few people disagree with it.  But I again apologize if I didn't articulate the point as clearly as I might have.

This is important in the context of our discussion of left-libertarianism because the reason that the left-libertarian wants the egalitarian distribution of resources in the first place is because she wants there to be equality without the kinds of coercive redistributions that I and others have claimed would be necessary to preserve equality, even with an egalitarian initial distribution.  That the left-libertarians in question want this can be easily evidenced by Michael Otsuka's somewhat recent choice to name his excellent book Libertarianism Without Inequality, and I think you'd be rather hard pressed to find one of these people who would disagree with that characterization.  Accordingly, my argument is that if it isn't true that an egalitarian initial distribution would ensure equality over the long term, then the left-libertarian argument would essentially just be an objection to the mere fact that there was not an egalitarian intial distribution -- that is, that a society did not have the right kind of history.

Joel's next point is:

...if [by "self-ownership"] you mean control of your body, then most communists would agree with that as a human right. If you mean it (as is often the cause) already-bundled with private property, then they would disagree, but only for the propertarian aspects. If "property" isn't legitimate in the first place, then denial of it can't be an infringement on self-ownership. Just like a person who dies can't claim that the still living "stole time" from him. The time wasn't his, he has no natural or moral claim to it, and he's just being an obstinate spook.

The problem here is that what communists think is entirely beside the point.  A left-libertarian is not a communist, and vice-versa.  So it may be true that one can save self-ownership by making it purely formal, as Joel suggests, but this option is not open to the left-libertarian, and so this point is a non-sequitar.

This applies to a number of Joel's next points, which I will not address here.  The problem appears to be that Joel thinks that I was trying to engage with communists, when I simply was not.  The article was about a very particular approach to political philosophy, and I think I made that very clear.

A point that I will address, however, stemmed from my claim that there would not be any objectively acceptable way to implement the left-libertarians' principles even if we accepted them at face value.  Joel responded that all moral codes suffer from the same problem of non-objectivity.  But I think that Joel misunderstood my point.  I didn't mean that the left-libertarians' moral principles were not objectively true, and that this was a problem for them.  If I had argued this, then Joel's criticism would be a good one.  

But my argument was that even if we grant the left-libertarians their point, and accept that what one needs to do is perform an egalitarian distribution of resources that ensures that everyone gets their fair share, the left-libertarian would have no way to carry out such a plan.  It simply doesn't make sense.  Accordingly, they'd need to construct a somewhat ad hoc system to approximate their ideal.  And this would be fine except for the fact that their approach to political philosophy is a rationalist one, and not an instrumentalist one.  This, I think, creates a tension for their view, since on one hand they seem to want to set the conditions that would allow for an impartially legitimate society, but on the other hand it wouldn't be strictly possible to determine how to set those conditions.  That seems like it's a problem to me.

I guess having gone through this, all I can say is that I don't really know what Joel was trying to accomplish here.  He very rightly showed that my critique of left-libertarianism is not a very critique of communism, and basically tried to show that my points of contention with the former view can be avoided by taking a position incompatible with that view.  And in some cases, I haven't disagreed.  But I don't really 

[Hmm...I'm not sure what happened here, but it looks like the end of this post got chopped off. Oops!]

On the "Other" Kind of Left-Libertarianism

Update: See the bottom of this post for further discussion.

So earlier today I wrote a post about why consider myself a left-libertarian if I disagree with the views of some of the most prominent thinkers who call themselves left-libertarians, and a fellow named Dan Waxman asked:

I'd be interested to know your rationale for rejecting the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne style left-libertarianism (i.e. self-ownership coupled with a very stringently egalitarian proviso regarding the initial acquisition of external worldly resources).

I feel as though temperamentally I am in a similar position to you - I also have a problem with oppression and mistreatment, and I think that in a libertarian society - including (especially?) the ones which reject common world ownership - these evils would be far less common. But I don't think I have worked out a satisfactory answer to my own conflicted intuitions about the initial acquisition of property, and, to be perfectly honest, I don't think it helps that the literature is notably thin on actual *arguments* either way. At most we get a bald assertion that the earth is originally unowned from Nozick and co, then we get people like Cohen and Otsuka complaining that this assertion is 'blithe,' without putting forward any argument whatsoever for their alternative! So like I said, I'd be interested to know your thoughts, especially if you've come to some kind of stable reflective equilibrium on the issue

I think that's a great question, and want to take the opportunity to post a few thoughts in rejection of the resource-egalitarian liberarian point of view (though in actuality, it is not a single point of view; these objections may variously miss the mark when applied to specific views which preempt them). I might try to flesh these objections out a little bit in a future post (or series of posts), but for now I just want to put them out there. If they don't make sense, I'll be happy to try to clarify. I'm going to put off for now the task of trying to justify a particular alternative view of property rights, and confine this post to attacking this view. Without further ado:

1) Freedom disrupts patterns. The point of an egalitarian distribution would be to secure liberty for all, but it seems clear that any kind of real, effective liberty would produce inequality. In order to maintain equality, constant coercive redistribution would be needed. If the resource-left-libertarian is truly committed to liberty and effective self-ownership, then she must countenance the inequality that would result even if there was at one point an egalitarian distribution of resources. This was Cohen's argument in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality. But if the resource-egalitarian libertarian is comfortable with this, then her position seems to reduce to some claim that the thing that's wrong with our property regime is merely that it doesn't have the right sort of history. Is this a reasonable basis for a political philosophy? Is the problem with our society really just that a hundred years ago, things weren't alotted equally? I just don't think there's anything there.

2) Society is not like a situation where everyone comes to a negotiating table to claim their fair share, or where we all move away from a starting point to pursue our individual lives. The system of resource ownership is a dynamic and evolving system, with new participants coming and going all the time and different allocations of resources every day. If we wanted to ensure that everyone got a particular share of natural resources (regardless of what rule is used to determine what kind of share it would be), and we refused to engage in coercive redistribution (as this would seem to impinge upon effective self-ownership), we would seemingly need to have coercive enforcement of use limits. But these measures would require us to make projections about the future which we simply cannot make, and to make assumptions about the availability of natural resources which can't be based on anything besides speculation. The resource-egalitarian libertarians want this to be a rationalistic framework, but there's simply no objective way to do anything like this. Do we save a bunch of the gold for future generations? How much? Are we sure that someday people won't be able to make gold out of other stuff, making our non-use unnecessary?

3) Value and wellbeing do not come from access to natural resources. The value of natural resources is subjective, changes over time with different circumstances, and is not directly related to the value of the things that are made with those resources. Treating them like a commodity with timeless value doesn't make sense. And if they lack this special kind of status, then it's not clear why we should focus our entire political theory on them as if a proper way of dealing with them would fix all of our problems.

4) The original objection to the appropriation of the natural commons was based on the idea that natural resources provided the means for production. In today's society, the means of production are increasingly detached from natural resources. The lack of access to the means of production is not a lack of access to natural resources, and most people complaining about the former would look at you pretty strangely if you "solved their problem" by dealing with the latter. If lack of access to the means of production is a problem, then the solution will not be found in an egalitarian resource distribution.

There are probably other reasons I could offer in favor of rejecting this view, but I think those four will do for now. Hopefully that helps! [Note: I apologize for the sloppiness of this post; I wrote it right after I finished work...can you tell? If something is confusing in an interesting way, please let me know.]

Update:

Please see Joel Davis' critique of this post, as well as my reply.

Why Do I Call Myself a Left-Libertarian?

I received a very fair comment on my previous post, "On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process," from an anonymous reader, asking:

Reading this post, I am quite baffled why you name your blogspot libertarian-left.blogspot.com. How can you say that you work in the Left Libertarian tradition, when in this post you completely reject the ideas of all the most famous Left-Libertarians including Henry George and Steiner and Otsuka and Vallentyne? How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework? I cannot find aything leftist about your ideas. Exactly what distinguishes your beliefs from Right-Libertarianism pure and simple?

I thought it might be worthwhile to give that question a thorough answer, since I anticipate that it may come up again, and others might find this answer interesting.

There is definitely a tension within the world of libertarian thought regarding the meaning of the term, "left-libertarianism." One school of thought identifying itself as left-libertarian describes its ideas as upholding the libertarian conception of self-ownership while insisting that a just society would distribute worldly resources according to some egalitarian principle. This is the tradition into which writers like George, Steiner, Otsuka, and Vallentyne fall. As you rightly notice, I am clearly not a part of this camp [Update: I discuss this position in this post].

The other interpretation of the term "left-libertarian" has been offered by Roderick Long, building on Rothbard's (and later Samuel Konkin's) idea that libertarianism is more naturally allied with the political left than with the right. Dr. Long gives a really good explanation of his views in this interview. And as you might have gleaned from my description of this site on the sidebar, I basically agree with his approach.

I've been very conflicted about using the term "left-libertarian" to describe myself, as it's unquestionably true that the first meaning is more widely acknowledged and used today, and I'm not a big fan of inherently confusing terminology. But I'll offer two points in my defense. The first is simply that I chose the name for my website before realizing how deeply I disagreed with the folks in the Steiner camp, and the status quo has thus become somewhat entrenched.

But secondly, and more substantively, I don't think that left-libertarianism of the Steiner mold has much to do with leftism, except to the extent that it has something to do with egalitarianism and, in some sense, it views a non-egalitarian property regime as oppressive. The bread and butter of the left, I think, has always been to root out oppression and mistreatment in society and demand its rectification. And that has been my concern as well, as I search for different ways to think about the respect to which people are due and build ideas about living together that try to embody that respect.

Now, an important part of the commenter's question was this:

How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework?

This, I think, is a somewhat unfair reading of my earlier post. In the last section of that post, I wrote:

Perhaps it is the case that, as individuals who appreciate each other's value and moral worth, we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand in times of need. And if we did not lift a finger when others were facing crisis, that we would be failing to uphold our duties as morally responsible people. To say this implies no injustice in the market system which brings about unfortunate outcomes, nor does it imply that somehow we need to find some point in the past to serve as a "source" of injustice. Rather, we can think of distributive injustice as a recognition that in a community or society where so many live free of need, there are individuals among us who struggle to survive, without so much as a helping hand from their neighbors.

Of course, the mere existence of need and want surely cannot entail the presence of injustice. The same respect for the value of life which commands us to care about our neighbors also commands us to recognize the importance of living our own lives according to our own goals and desires. Earlier, we noted an idea from F.A. Hayek that coercion is evil because it "eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another." We suggested that the tragic need which drives individuals into exploitative labor relationships is evil for this reason as well. But we must now acknowledge that the attitude which places on the successful individual the burden of caring after the world's needy is evil for exactly the same reason (I discussed this in a previous post). Addressing one evil through the introduction of another seems like a questionable way to proceed. But it does not seem that either extreme -- ignoring the suffering of others or sacrificing oneself for the good of those in need -- is the correct one. What is needed is a balance between the two.

In saying this, I had hoped to address what I felt to be some of the important and relevant concerns that people on the left might have had in response to my argument. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that other leftist concerns (e.g., about the proper social response to inequality, oppression, lack of opportunity, etc.) "cannot be incorporated into my libertarian framework."

My point was that these concerns cannot coherently be levelled as a moral objection to the market process itself. It was my hope to convey that a just society would not simply accept the often arbitrary, sometimes lamentable, and always sub-utopian products of the market process, insensitively brushing the unpleasant bits under the rug. The market process, I think, is just, and cannot be condemned wholesale because of its inherent potential to generate undesirable outcomes for some people. But I think that there is more to living together than the market process, and that the concerns of the left are valid reasons for searching for solutions outside of the typical consumeristic market paradigm. That, I think, is where the "left" in my "left-libertarianism" comes through.

On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process

This turned into a long, long post. But I really like it a lot, so hopefully you will too!

Introduction

This post started out as not much more than a stream of thought. But I'm pretty happy with where it went, so here's an introduction to help you figure out what the heck is going on. In this post, I wanted to explore the idea of distributive justice, basically just to get a handle on how I felt about it. I started by hammering out a few thoughts on the simple fact that we're not actually talking about the justice of an act of distribution, which has led some thinkers to reject distributive justice. In that section, I offer some reasons for thinking distributive justice can still make sense without an actual distributive act. I then consider what I take to be the most obvious objection to my argument, which comes from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In the process of thinking about distributive justice through the lens of Nozick's argument, I end up rejecting Nozick's position, but I nevertheless arrive at a conclusion that I think might be unpalateable to most proponents of conceptions of distributive justice. I then offer some closing thoughts about why I think we can satisfy the desires of those who hold these views without depending on the idea of distributive injustice. Because I basically wrote this off-the-cuff, there might be a little less organization than normal, but I hope it will still be readable enough to get through.

Distributive Justice Without Distribution

The concept of distributive justice is an interesting one. After all, social resources are never actually distributed. So what can distributive justice mean when resources are never distributed? Some thinkers are quick to say, "nothing." But notice that there is more sense of the word "distribution". There is the sense where we take a distribution to be an outcome of an act of distribution, but there is also the sense of a statistical distribution. If the word "distributive" in "distributive justice" is to be understood coherently, I contend that it will need to be the statistical sense of "distribution" which informs our understanding of the term.

But how can a statistical distribution be just or unjust? After all, our normal conceptions of justice tend to apply between individual human beings, not vague statistical aggregates. Imagine a man who, after his ship struck a reef and sank, managed to swim to safety on a small, uninhabited island. Surely he would be at the far low end of the distribution of social outcomes. But could he coherently get upset at the reef for wronging him? At the island for being unjustly hospitable? At the cosmos for not preventing the shipwreck from happening in the first place? I don't think so. It seems important in thinking about justice that the problem be one where people could coherently have had a say in determining the outcome.

So injustice needs to involve people somehow, but does it need to be the result of human design? In "The Atavism of Social Justice," Hayek writes (58):

Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just nor unjust.

Surely it is true that each individual's fate in our spontaneously organizing society is not the intended outcome of the market process. And it also seems true that in most cases, no one would have been able to foresee exactly how things were going to turn out for each individual over any considerable time scale. Accordingly, we might think that Hayek is right to say that we cannot consider the outcome of a market process to be unjust. The outcomes of the dynamic market process are simply not within our control, and when thinking about its products, we might say that (to take a line from George Reisman [13]) "the proper way to regard them is as the equivalent of acts of nature."

But in Progress and Poverty, Henry George notes (7):

...just as...a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress--just as closer settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population--so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The "tramp" comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of the college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.

If George is right to note that the same forces which promote progress in society also explain the emergence of poverty, then it will be a seemingly hollow position to argue that the undesirable outcomes produced by spontaneous ordering mechanisms are unforeseeable and unintended. Surely we could not predict or intend that each individual consequence were going to occur, nor could we foresee exactly who would be affected, and how and when. But we could nevertheless predict with relative certainty that someone would be affected by the dark side of the market process. Consider this observation from Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (59-60):

Yes, we should keep an eye on Joe Smith. He has been thrown out of a job by the new machine. Perhaps he can soon get another job, even a better one. But perhaps, also, he has devoted many years of his life to acquiring and improving a special skill for which the market no longer has any use. He has lost this investment in himself, in his old skill, just as his former employer, perhaps, has lost his investment in old machines or processes suddenly rendered obsolete. He was a skilled workman, and paid as a skilled workman. Now he has become overnight an unskilled workman again, and can hope, for the present, only for the wages of an unskilled workman, because the one skill he had is no longer needed. We cannot and must not forget Joe Smith. His is one of the personal tragedies that, as we shall see, are incident to nearly all industrial and economic progress.

It seems to me that it is for this reason -- that is, it is because we can foresee that there will be undesirable consequences in a free market society, even if we can not foresee exactly what they will be -- that it can make sense to talk about distributive justice at all (I am here taking the opposite position as I did in this earlier post). As I discussed before, we cannot coherently do so if we have in mind an act of distributing, as no such act ever occurs. But to the extent that conceptions of justice apply to human conduct, and to the extent that a free market system is one way in which humans can conduct themselves in a social setting, it seems fair to think that we might be able to criticize the foreseeable statistical outcomes of the market process and ask whether something ought to be (or ought to have been done) about them.

But Wait! A Challenger!

Now in saying this, I will immediately be faced with an important objection, captured by Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (161):

If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn't D2 also just?

In other words, it's important to notice that when we lament any of the outcomes of spontaneous free-market organization, we lament circumstances which seem to arise without anyone doing anything that we could coherently point to as having been wrong, or wicked. The problematic outcomes are typically either emergent, or the consequences of people doing things that we generally think they have every right to do (where there is blatant mistreatment, we generally wouldn't think of the problem as being one of distributive injustice).

So does that mean that the outcomes are just? There are three ways to dispute Nozick's argument: a) to argue that the starting point at which people find themselves in a market society is not actually just, b) to argue that what arises from a just initial position from just steps is not necessarily just, and c) to argue that, contrary to intuition, the consequences of market organization do not necessarily arise from just steps. I will consider each in turn.

What Makes a Starting Point Just?

In thinking about Nozick's D1, we will encounter two very different issues, which we will need to separate in order to proceed sensible. The first issue is whether any starting point in our market society can be legitimately pointed to as being, or having been, just. But the second issue, which is somewhat more important for our purposes, is whether the problems which are contained in the idea of "distributive injustice" are the products of unjust starting points -- that is, whether it would be helpful in disputing Nozick's conclusion to pursue this kind of argument. Because I think that the answer to the second issue is "No," I will only have a few words to say about the first issue, even though it is certainly worthy of a much more thorough discussion.

So is there a "just" starting point from which we can think of a market society as having proceeded? Clearly there is nothing that is literally a starting point which is relevant to our purposes. The free market is an organic, constantly evolving ecosystem of human activity. It started when people started working together (or more accurately, when primates or their predecessors started working together), and continues on until now. It has been characterized through its history by countless injustices, atrocities, and oppressions. These past wrongs have so thoroughly influenced the current state of the system that it would be incoherent to talk about "reversing the damage" that they caused. The people who are alive today would not even exist if history had not proceeded the way that it did.

So our starting point, no matter where we arbitrarily place it, will not represent a perfectly "just" starting point. But does that matter? To an extent, yes. But also, to an extent, no. As David Schmidtz writes in his book, Elements of Justice (212):

Dwelling too much on the past is wrong for the same reason that ignoring the past altogether is wrong: Excess in either direction reduces stability in transactions, thus making it harder to go forward in peace. A routine title search when buying a house (to verify that the seller's holding of the deed is in fact uncontested) is one thing; going back as many centuries as the land has been occupied is another.

But some will not object to our modern starting point because of mistreatment in the past, but rather because of the structure of the society in which we begin. Such a perspective is characteristic of the left-libertarians in the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne mold, where the idea is that non-man made natural resources ought to be initially distributed according to an egalitarian principle.

It's here, however, that I want to pull the plug on this conversation, because as G.A. Cohen points out in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (105):

I believe...that no such constitution is to be discovered: no egalitarian rule regarding external resources alone will, together with self-ownership, deliver equality of outcome, except, as in the case of joint ownership, at an unacceptable sacrifice of autonomy. There is a tendency in self-ownership to produce inequality, and the only way to nullify that tendency (without expressly abridging self-ownership) is through a regime over external resources which is so rigid that it excludes exercise of independent rights over oneself.

In other words, the problems which concern those focused on distributive justice do not find their roots in the starting point from which social evolution proceeds. Lamentable market outcomes are not simply the outcomes of unjust or unequal initial distribution, or of historical injustice and oppression. Rather, they are a product of that evolution itself. So it will do the proponent of distributive justice no good to focus on this aspect of Nozick's argument. Accordingly, I will move on to the next avenue of objection.

Do Just Steps Preserve Justice?

The next way to object to Nozick's argument is to contend that something that arises as the result of just steps is not necessarily just, even if we don't want to object to the initial set of conditions. On its face, it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that if there's no problem with an initial condition, and all of the changes from that initial condition were perfectly legitimate and just, then we don't really have grounds for calling the outcome "unjust." We may lament them -- as Hazlitt above lamented the fate of the workman who was displaced by the machine -- but we may not have reason to say that the outcome is unjust. Perhaps it is merely unfortunate. This is the intuition which Nozick seeks to capture, and does.

But consider this: In his essay, "The Institution of Property," David Schmidtz suggests:

Note a difference between justifying institutions that regulate appropriation and justifying particular acts of appropriation. Think of original appropriation as a game and of particular acts of appropriation as moves within the game. Even if the game is justified, a given move within the game may have nothing to recommend it. Indeed, we could say (for argument's sake) that any act of appropriation will seem arbitrary when viewed in isolation, and some will seem unconscionable. Even so, there can be compelling reasons to have an institutional framework that recognizes property claims on the basis of moves that would carry no weight in an institutional vacuum.

If a game can be justified even though individual moves, when taken in isolation, might not seem justified, then why couldn't we say that a game can be unjustified even if none of its moves seem problematic? I see no reason why not.

And this seems like exactly the kind of objection that is being raised by the proponents of distributive justice. That is, the problem with the market order is not that it is characterized by unjust moves, but rather that it is supposedly an unjust game -- it is a game which generates consequences that are unacceptable, even if none of the players do anything wrong at any particular time. In other words, the allegation is that market orders generate emergent injustices.

But do they really? Is it somehow unjust of us, as participants in a market order, to "play the game" that we do? Some libertarians and free-market thinkers will point out that all it means to "play the game" of market organization is to relate to each other in a purely voluntry way. By this conception, it would seem unreasonable to think of participating in a market order as contributing to injustice. After all, in a system of purely voluntary interactions, one individual's wealth is not gotten at the expense of anyone else's interests. No one, then, is made worse off in any way to which they do not assent. It might here be noted that a state of poverty is the natural state of man, and that it is wealth that is the surprising anomaly. Accordingly, we might think of the alleged "injustice" of capitalism as simply the product of some individuals being "left behind" by the rising tide of progress.

Taking this point of view, we might come to the conclusion that a free-market order is not unjust. People who "play the game" are participating in a process which generates wealth for those who are successful, and which simply leaves the unsuccessful in their original state. We might lament the fact that we don't all win, but we would be hard-pressed to contend that this inherent inequality of outcomes is unjust. By this view, capitalism is a game which individuals play at their own peril, if they so choose; it is a system which allows each individual to do things the way that she thinks is best, on the condition that she respects others' right to do the same. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (2):

This is what the modern concept of freedom means. Every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is not forced to live according to the plan of a planning authority enforcing its unique plan by the police, i.e., the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. What restricts the individual's freedom is not other people's violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production. It is obvious that man's discretion to shape his own fate can never trespass the limits drawn by what are called the laws of nature.

But G.A. Cohen disagrees with this way of looking at things, arguing in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality that within a market society, a property-less proletarian "must either sell his labour power to a capitalist or die" (100), and accordingly "lacks self-ownership, in an effective sense" (ibid). Cohen is seizing upon the idea that if the choice is between voluntarily living according to someone else's plans at unfavorable terms on one hand, and starving to death or dying of exposure on the other, the sense in which one is free to choose one's own fate is "merely formal" (ibid; italics original).

This point can be more fully appreciated by calling on a definition from F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (19):

By "coercion" we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another. Except in the sense of choosing the lesser evil in a situation forced on him by another, he is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims or beliefs. Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

Now, Cohen would not want to say that an individual employer forces a worker into his service -- that is clearly untrue. But he would likely want to contend that the market system, with its institutions of private property and endemic inequality, effectively coerces the proletarian with its choice between death and an emiserated survival by the grace of some exploiter. It is precisely because coercion is evil, by this point of view, that the so-called "free-market" system is unjust.

But if we are to condemn the system in which the proletarian is allegedly coerced, we must consider how the system supposedly brings about this state of affairs. Surely the objection to a market order is not raised to demand rectification for the fate of the person who led himself to financial ruin through bad decisions and poor judgment. Though we may lament such an outcome, it seems clear that we would not want to cite this sort of thing as an injustice. The critic of the market system is most plausible when targetting her objections at circumstances like the one discussed by Hazlitt above, where workers are displaced by the perpetual churning of the marketplace, or circumstances in which individuals are born into unfortunate lifestyles through an inherited lack of access to capital resources. We shall therefore examine each of these indictments in turn.

The destruction of existing order by dynamic market processes is indeed an inherent characteristic of a healthy market process. And it is therefore true that individuals may, as a result of this so-called "creative destruction" (to steal Schumpeter's term), find themselves in a position where they are effectively coerced by force of circumstances into a sort of proletarian existence. But I think that a good case can be made for the idea that this is simply a risk of participating in the market process. That is, it is surely a lamentable feature of that process that some people end up on the losing side, but I am unsure how we would justify calling this an unjust feature of the market. As F.A. Hayek writes in his essay, "Individualism: True and False" (21-22):

...if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice and that in consequence he be rewarded, not according to the goodness or badness of his intentions, but solely on the basis of the value of the results to others.

Perhaps I will need to think about this some more, but I can't see any reason for thinking about this sort of thing as anything more than an unfortunate characteristic of the market system.

More concerning, I think, is the state of affairs faced by the proletarian who is born into his situation -- forced by the nature of his upbringing into a sort of "wage slavery." The free-market proponent can undoubtedly point to a number of examples of such cases where through hard work, talent, and a little bit luck led the individual to a prosperous life. The critic can undoubtedly point to a larger number of such examples where no such thing took place. The point that the free-market critic makes in citing such examples is not that injustice cannot be overcome, as the free-market proponent's counterargument may often make it appear. Rather, the point is that such circumstances are unjust regardless of whether or not they can be overcome.

But how do these circumstances come about? The private property system itself seems like a popular target, given that the most obvious reason for the proletarian's state of affairs is her lack of access to the resources which would empower her to take better control of her life in order to direct it to her own ends, and the most apparent reason why she does not have access to those resources is a coercive set of institutions which will stop her if she tries to use them. As G.A. Cohen observes in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (55-56):

The banal truth is, if the state prevents me from doing something that I want to do, then it places a restriction on my freedom. Suppose, then, that I want to perform an action which involves a legally prohibited use of your property. I want, let us say, to pitch a tent in your large back garden, perhaps just in order to annoy you, or perhaps for the more substantial reason that I have nowhere to live and no land of my own, but I have got hold of a tent, legitimately or otherwise. If I now try to do this thing that I want to do, the chances are that the state will intervene on your behalf. If it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom. The same goes, of course, for all unpermitted use of a piece of private property by those who do not own it, and there are always those who do not own it, since 'private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership on the part of other persons.

But is the problem really that we have a society in which there are rules delineating who has the right of way with respect to the use of specific objects? As David Schmidtz writes in his book, Elements of Justice (157):

We cannot live together without rules that secure our possessions, thereby enabling us to plan our separate lives.

Even Karl Marx, in his essay on "Estranged Labour," allows that material possessions are critical to one's ability to find fulfillment and to shape one's own identity. Marx writes:

It is...in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.

The problem with the market system, it seems, is not that it is characterized by property rules. Rather, the problem appears to be that the proletarian doesn't have property, and is therefore not able to pursue the self-defining ends which both libertarians and non-libertarians prize. In other words, the alleged "injustice" of the market system is not that there is property, but rather that the proletarian doesn't have any.

The critic of the market system must therefore build his case on the idea that the injustice caused by the market system is in bringing it about that the proletarian is born into poverty. But this is where the case crumbles. The case crumbles because it is decidedly not the fault of the market system that the proletarian is born into poverty. Rather, it is the fault of the proletarian's parents that she is born into poverty. Neither the market system nor its propertied participants can be blamed for the fact that the proletarian was put into a position where she had to choose between being a wage-slave and dying. The fact that the proletarian did not simply show up on the scene, but was rather brought to the scene by her parents, seems to absolve "the system" of guilt for the proletarian's position, at least in my mind.

Now there are two ways that I can imagine someone objecting to this conclusion. The first would be to pointedly ask, "Are you seriously saying that poor people shouldn't have children?," and then to rattle off a list of reasons why I am a heartless, evil jerk. To this I would respond that if it is true that it is an injustice for someone to have to live a life of wage slavery, and if it is further true that a parent can foresee that by having a child, she will be condemning him to a life of emiserated labor, in which he will be unable to pursue his own fulfillment, then perhaps that is what I am saying. But I would qualify this claim with the important point that even poor parents can prepare their children for an active and fulfilling role in society by raising them well, and would therefore be responsible for no injustice in having a child. My only claim is that if we find an individual whose life we wish to declare an injustice because of his upbringing and the circumstances of his birth, then it would seem odd to place the blame elsewhere than on the individuals who were directly responsible for that upbringing and birth.

The second kind of response I can imagine would be to insist that the system can be blamed for the state of the parents (or the parents' parents, and so on) because of some past injustice which explains the cycle of poverty in the midst of which we find our proletarian. And while that response is perhaps a legitimate one, I would have to point the responder back to the previous section for my reply.

So, then, it seems to me that in declaring a distribution to be unjust, one cannot blame the market system itself, or the society which participates in that system, for unjustly "playing the game." The game, it seems to me, is not at fault for alleged distributive injustices.

At this point we should pause and retrace our steps. The problem with which we are here concerned starts with Robert Nozick's claim that any outcome which arises through just steps from a just initial starting point is itself just. We were concerned because this claim is at odds with the concept of distributive justice, which suggests that some of the outcomes of market processes are disturbing for intuitively moral reasons. We first asked whether we could save our intuitions by rejecting Nozick's implication that the market process has a just starting point, but concluded that this would not help our argument. In this section, we objected to the idea that just steps preserve justice, pointing out that a system of institutions can itself be unjust. We then considered whether or not the market system is itself an unjust system, and concluded that in the cases where we might intuitively want to identify distributive injustice, we cannot coherently blame the market system for unjustly bringing about those outcomes. Accordingly, rejecting this part of Nozick's argument will not help us to defend our intuitions about distributive injustice.

At the outset of our discussion, we said that there were going to be three steps in our examination, which leaves one left: the claim that the outcomes to which we object do not actually arise from a just initial starting position through just steps. But because we have objected to the structure of Nozick's argument, it will be irrelevant for us to explore this question -- we have seen that just steps do not necessarily preserve justice, and that it is irrelevant whether an initial starting point is in some sense "just." But we can rephrase the issue in light of the conclusions that we have drawn so far.

Ought We Really to Rely Upon the Market Process to Ensure Desirable Outcomes?

We will therefore ask: Even if we do not wish to take exception to some past state of affairs from which our current circumstances evolved, and even if we do not wish to claim that the market system itself is somehow an "unjust game," is it really true that we have no reason to object to the social process by which people have ended up in undesirable circumstances? Another (I think) equivalent way to think about this question is, if it is the case that undesirable outcomes arise for certain individuals purely through the normal workings of the market process (to which we do not want to object), and if those undesirable outcomes are allowed to stand, will it necessarily be the case that everyone has a claim to moral blamelessness?

In his essay, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Peter Singer writes:

...if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

In the example, we are not supposed to assume that the individual walking past the pond has put the child in the pond. No crime is supposed to have produced the child's unfortunate circumstances. And further, it is by no systemic injustice of the complex web of social interrelationships that the child is drowning. Yet if we simply watched the child drown, would that not seem wrong?

Perhaps it is the case that, as individuals who appreciate each other's value and moral worth, we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand in times of need. And if we did not lift a finger when others were facing crisis, that we would be failing to uphold our duties as morally responsible people. To say this implies no injustice in the market system which brings about unfortunate outcomes, nor does it imply that somehow we need to find some point in the past to serve as a "source" of injustice. Rather, we can think of distributive injustice as a recognition that in a community or society where so many live free of need, there are individuals among us who struggle to survive, without so much as a helping hand from their neighbors.

Of course, the mere existence of need and want surely cannot entail the presence of injustice. The same respect for the value of life which commands us to care about our neighbors also commands us to recognize the importance of living our own lives according to our own goals and desires. Earlier, we noted an idea from F.A. Hayek that coercion is evil because it "eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another." We suggested that the tragic need which drives individuals into exploitative labor relationships is evil for this reason as well. But we must now acknowledge that the attitude which places on the successful individual the burden of caring after the world's needy is evil for exactly the same reason (I discussed this in a previous post). Addressing one evil through the introduction of another seems like a questionable way to proceed. But it does not seem that either extreme -- ignoring the suffering of others or sacrificing oneself for the good of those in need -- is the correct one. What is needed is a balance between the two.

With this realization, we can declare our analysis to be complete. I think I'm happy with this conclusion. Thanks for reading along!