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Summary Political Philosophy - Adam Swift
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Part 1 – Social JusticeConcept v. conceptions: the case of justice
The ‘concept’ is the general structure, or perhaps the grammar, of a term like justice, or liberty, or
equality. A ‘conception’ is the particular specification of that ‘concept’, obtained by filling out some
of the detail. The basic concept of justice is that it is about giving people what is due to them, and not
giving them what is not due to them. And, of course, there are many different conceptions of this
concept, because people who agree that this is what ‘justice’ means, as a concept, can still endorse
different conceptions of justice, can disagree about what justice ‘means’ in terms of the content
fleshing out the grammar of that term.
Hayek v. social justice
According to Friedrich von Hayek (1899 – 1992), the very idea of social justice is a ‘mirage’, or the
kind of confusion that philosophers call a ‘category mistake’. In his view, the idea that ‘society’ is
something that might be just or unjust involves a misunderstanding of the concept of justice. Justice
is an attribute of action, a predicate of agents. A person acts justly when she undertakes a just action.
The aggregate distributions of resources that result from individuals interacting in the market are
unintended by any individual agent, and therefore not susceptible of being judged just or unjust. The
idea of ‘social justice’ involves a fundamental failure to see this point. ‘Society’, not being an agent, is
not the kind of thing that can be just or unjust.
Hayek says other influential things too. He thinks any coercive redistribution by the state
beyond the meeting of common basic needs involves an unjustifiable interference with individual
liberty. For Hayek, the state’s ambition to realize ‘social justice’ implies a centralized authority
making people do things they might not want to do, interfering with their freedom to do what they
like with their resources – and all this in the name of a conceptual confusion. Relatedly, Hayek thinks
that state policies in the area of welfare and redistribution necessarily involve the state making
judgments about the criteria that should govern distribution. Finally, Hayek thinks that, just as long
as the state doesn’t stick its nose in and distort the process, individuals interacting freely will produce
a ‘catallaxy’ or spontaneous order that crystallizes the information and wisdom dispersed in their
individual heads. The free market represents such a catallaxy – with the price signal supplying
knowledge of a kind in principle unavailable to any central planner, and guiding individuals towards
economic activity conducive to the general good.
It is worth saying something about Hayek’s distinctive rejection of social justice as a mirage.
To begin with, even if it were true that nobody intended the overall distribution of resources that
results from the market, it doesn’t follow that nobody is responsible for it. People can be responsible
for outcomes they don’t intend. Think of the man who fails to check his brakes and, as a result, runs
over somebody. He didn’t intend to run anybody over, but, because he could reasonably have been
expected to have checked his brakes, he is responsible for having done so. He is negligent, culpably
negligent. Now Hayek would say that there is no agent in the distributive case who can be held
responsible, even in the sense of being negligent. But is that right? Surely we, as political actors, are
capable of coming together and deciding that we are not prepared to permit certain kinds of
distributive outcome – say that some members of our society, though no fault of their own, will live
in poverty and without access to education for their children. If we accept that this is a matter of
justice, not something that should be left to individual charity, then each individual is responsible for
ensuring that she does her fair share of contributing to the prevention of that outcome, by agitating
politically and by bearing her share of the financial cost involved in its prevention. What matters is
not whether anybody intends the injustice, but whether anybody is responsible for the fact that it
exists. When governments devise their economic policies, they have a good sense of the distributive
outcomes that will result. If they devise, and citizens vote for, policies that can reasonably be
expected to produce distributions that include avoidable and unjustified inequalities, then, whatever
their intention, they are responsible for the existence of those inequalities. If those inequalities are
,unjust, then the act of voting for them is an unjust act. Hayek’s attempt to sever the link between
individual agency and aggregate distributive outcomes fails. He misses the fact that individuals can
act politically, in concert with others, to prevent outcomes that, as individuals, may indeed be
beyond their control.
Rawls: justice as fairness
The ideas at the heart of Rawls’s theory of justice, which he calls justice as fairness, are the original
position and the veil of ignorance. Rawls believes that the way to find out which principles of justice
are fair is to think about what principles would be chosen by people who do not know how they are
going to be affected by them. He thus imagines people choosing principles in an original position,
behind a veil of ignorance. The idea is to help us think about what would happen if people deprived
of all knowledge that might serve to distinguish them from one another were to get together and
decide how they wanted their society to be organized. Justice, for Rawls should be understood as
that which would emerge as the content of a hypothetical contract or agreement arrived at by
people deprived of the kind of knowledge that would otherwise make the agreement unfair. The
intuitive idea is the link between fairness and ignorance. If I don’t know which piece of cake I’m going
to get, I’m more likely to cut fairly than if I do. Depriving people of particularizing knowledge means
that they will choose fair principles rather than allowing that knowledge to bias the choice of
principles in their own interests.
There are two kinds of things that the parties to this hypothetical contract don’t know. First,
they are ignorant of their talents – their natural endowments – and their social position. They don’t
know whether they are bright or dim, or born into a wealthy or a poor family. Second, they don’t
know their conception of the good. They don’t know what they believe about what makes life
valuable or what is worthwhile, whether they are religious or not, and so on. But there are some
things they do know. Most importantly, they know that they have what Rawls calls ‘the capacity to
frame, revise and pursue a conception of the good’. Indeed, they regard this capacity as one of the
most important things about them and are very concerned to protect it, and provide conditions for
its exercise, when they engage in the process of deciding what principles should regulate their
society. And they know that, to exercise that capacity, they need certain all-purpose goods, which
Rawls calls ‘primary goods’: liberties, opportunities, powers, income and wealth, self-respect.
The original position, then, is a device of representation. It is a way of representing particular
claims about how we should think about justice. Rawls’s idea is that it models fair conditions by
abstracting from people’s natural endowments and social (class) position, and from their particular
conceptions of the good. It models conditions under which people solely regarded as free and equal
are to agree what he calls fair terms of social cooperation. Society, for Rawls, should be understood
as a fair scheme of cooperation between free and equal citizens, and the original position models or
represents that understanding.
So what principles does Rawls think people behind the veil of ignorance would choose?
These:
1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of basic liberties
compatible with a similar system of liberty for all
2. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both
a. To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and
b. Attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of
opportunity
Taken together these mean that a just society will, first and most important, give each of its
members the same set of basic liberties or rights – freedom of expression, of religion, of association
etc. Then, if there are social and economic inequalities, it will make sure that all citizens enjoy
equality of opportunity in the process by which they come to achieve the unequally rewarded
positions. Finally, it will only allow such inequalities at all if they tend, over time, to maximize the
position of the worst-off members of society.
, Would people in the original position really choose these principles? Many critics say that
they wouldn’t. In particular, a lot of attention has focused on Rawls’s assumption – essential to the
difference principle – that they would behave as if they were risk-averse, concerned to make the
worst-off position as good as possible for fear that they might end up in it themselves. Wouldn’t it be
more rational to choose principles that would maximize the average position, perhaps subject to
some ‘floor’ level beneath which they would indeed not want to take the risk of sinking?
Another focus of objection is ‘the priority of liberty’ – Rawls’s view that the parties to the
hypothetical contract would not be prepared to trade off the basic liberties for the sake of economic
gain. Here Rawls would appeal to his claim about the importance of people’s capacity to frame,
revise and pursue their conception of the good, and the way in which the basic liberties are essential
to the exercise of that capacity. Would you be prepared to take the risk of not being allowed to say
what you believed, or of not being allowed to associate with whom you liked, or of being forced to
practice a religion you thought was nonsense, in return for more money? Your answer will probably
depend on how poor you would expect to be without the extra.
Nozick: justice as entitlement
For Nozick, justice is not about agreeing fair principles by imagining that we don’t know how lucky or
unlucky we have been in the natural or social lottery. It is about respecting people’s right to self-
ownership and their right to hold property, leaving them free to decide for themselves what they do
with what is theirs. The proper role of the state, for Novick, is not do meddle with the distribution of
resources as to produce some ideally ‘fair’ distribution. That would involve unjustified intrusions into
people’s legitimate holdings of private property. Its role should rather be limited to that of
protecting people from such intrusions by others. Where Rawls is a ‘left liberal’ advocating a
substantially redistributive welfare state, Nozick is a ‘right liberal’, committed to the idea of self-
ownership and arguing for a laissez-faire ‘night-watchman’ state. Nozick attributes to Rawls, and
objects to, the view that we can regard goods as ‘manna from heaven’. Goods are made by people.
They are the result of individual people’s work, sometimes in cooperation with others. They are not
like manna from heaven, unowned and up for distribution in accordance with fair principles. They
come into the world already owned, by the people who produced them.
Rawls objects to utilitarianism because it fails to take seriously the separateness of persons.
But Nozick thinks that Rawls does not take the separateness of persons seriously enough. Rawls does
not see that we are individual, separate people, each with her own talents and attributes, which
belong to her and her alone, and which may not be used to benefit others without her consent. She
can choose voluntarily to give the fruits of her labour to others, but the state acts wrongly, failing to
respect her separateness when it forces her to give up some of those fruits to others.
In Nozick’s view, people can do what they like with what is theirs. He identifies three ways in
which people can acquire a legitimate property holding (or entitlement): initial acquisition, voluntary
transfer and rectification.
Initial acquisition refers to the case whereby somebody comes to appropriate – to make their
own property – previously unowned bits of the world. Imagine people settling for the first time an
uninhabited continent. In Nozick’s view, the land and natural resources of that continent do not
belong to anybody, and may legitimately be acquired to individuals on a first-come-first-served basis,
as long as nobody is made worse off by their doing.
The second way to acquire property is by being given it by somebody who, by owning it
herself, has the right to give it to you. Once somebody owns anything, she can do what she likes with
it, including, of course, giving it to whomever she likes, on whatever terms may be voluntarily agreed
between them. This, for Nozick, is what happens in the market.
Nozick’s third principle is meant to deal with the fact that the history of the world is actually
one of unjust, involuntary transfers, whereby those with better weapons have forced those weaker
than themselves to give up what – in his view – was rightfully theirs. An example of this is the white
settlers’ treatment of the native populations of North America or Australia. It is the principle of
rectification, which holds that unjust transfers may be rectified by compensating transfers that
, themselves create entitlements. In practice, of course, as Nozick is well aware, the difficulties raised
by this idea of rectification are enormous. There is no way that we can identify who would own what
if there had been no unjust appropriations, hence no way of rectifying properly. At one point Nozick
suggests that the best thing to do might be to give everybody, as a starting point, equal amounts of
property – that might at least be a closer approximation to a just set of property holdings than the
vast and structural inequalities that have been built upon those unjust acts of appropriation.
Nozick can perfectly well insist that existing inequalities are unjust, precisely because they
have not come about in accordance with his three principles. That said, what is really significant
about his position is that, on his view, vast and structural inequalities could be just. As long as
people’s property rights are respected, which means no coercive state action except that which is
necessary for the protection of property rights, whatever distribution results, however unequal it
may be, is just. People can, of course, give voluntarily to those less fortunate than themselves. Nozick
may well think that they ought to do so. But there is no justice claim involved – and no justification
for coercive state action directed against the better off.
Popular opinion: justice as desert
To clarify our thinking about desert, let’s distinguish three positions, which I’ll call the ‘conventional’
view, the ‘mixed’ view and the ‘extreme’ view. The conventional view holds that one person can
deserve to earn less or more than another even if this is due to factors that are beyond their control
(talent).
Contrast this with the ‘extreme’ view. This says that people do not deserve to earn less or
more than another even if they are exerting – or have in the past exerted – different amounts of
effort. Somebody who works hard does not deserve to earn more than somebody who does not.
What could possibly justify such a view? Answer: how hard somebody works is itself something
beyond their control. People’s character and psychological make-up are a function of their genetic
constitution and their childhood socialization. Some or born with a will to succeed, or to try hard.
Others have the attitude instilled in them by their parents or other formative influences from an early
age. Some are not so lucky. Why should those who have the good luck to be the kind of person who
works hard deserve to earn more than those who have the bad luck not to be?
The ‘mixed’ view is the halfway house position. People don’t deserve to be rewarded
differently for things that are genuinely beyond their control, like being born clever or stupid, or into
a wealthy or poor family. But they do deserve to be rewarded differently for things that are
genuinely a matter of choice – which include things like how hard you work, or what job, from those
available to you, you choose to do.
Like many concepts in this area, the term ‘desert’ is sometimes used rather loosely. First,
there is a difference between desert and ‘legitimate expectation’. Imagine an institutional structure,
a firm or the market economy as a whole, in which, as a matter of fact, people are rewarded
unequally depending on their possession of certain qualifications. We might then say that somebody
who acquired those qualifications ‘deserves’ the reward just because the institutions were set up in
such a way that the person acquiring the qualification has a legitimate expectation that, by acquiring
the qualification , they would receive the reward. This is sometimes called an ‘institutional’
conception of desert.
Second, some people use the term ‘desert’ when they are talking about compensation or
equalization. Suppose I think people whose work is dangerous, stressful, dirty, boring or
inappropriately stigmatized should, other things equal, earn more than people whose work is safe,
comfortable, interesting, healthy or prestigious. I might well say that they deserve to earn more.
There’s nothing wrong with this kind of desert claim as long as it is clear how it differs from the kind I
was discussing above. That kind was specifically to do with the issue of whether people might
deserve less or more than others on the basis of their various attributes, and to what extent
responsibility for those attributes was relevant. What we are talking about now uses a desert claim
essentially as an equalizing claim. We can think of it in terms of the idea of ‘compensating
differentials’. In order to ensure overall or net equality between different people, we take into
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