Chapter Four: Distributive Justice

1. Chapter Four: Distributive Justice Utilitarianism, Rawls Libertarianism Egalitarianism

2. Introduction • Summary of the first part • The first part of the book provides a partial answer to the issue why the coercive power of the state is justified: States are justified insofar as they are created via convention by people in a territory to fulfill certain roles considered to be extremely important for moral and for self-interested reasons.

3. Question: what goals and laws characterize a decent or just state? • There has never been, and is not now, agreement on the nature of justice. Hence, political philosophers as well as citizens of existing regimes find themselves in all sorts of disagreements about what a morally justified state ought to be doing and whether any existing state is reasonably just.

4. Part 2 of the book review disagreements people have about justice. Each chapter looks at one particular aspect of justice, exploring philosophical controversies that have arisen with respect to it. • Chapter 4 concentrates on that aspect of justice in which the disagreements are most severe and that has been the most dominant part of political theory since the late 1960s: that is, distributive justice.

5. Four different ways of defining distributive justice: utilitarianism, Rawlsian contractarianism, libertarianism, and egalitarianism. • There is no way that the citizens of any regime on earth can unanimously agree that any one regime is largely successful at realizing justice.

6. But there is sufficient overlap among these views to allow adherents to reach considerable agreement on those states that are clearing doing badly and states that are doing well. • Nonetheless, there is at present no univocal answer to the question, What does a fully just state look like? At the end of this chapter, readers are left to reflect on the extent to which the states of which they are members satisfy the criteria of justice they think most plausible.

7. Hampton concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of the views of a number of theorists, including Karl Marx, who argue that all attempts to define distributive justice so as to make a society distributively just are “too late”, in that any distribution of resources in the state reflects and is generated by prior systemic (and largely economic) structures in that society. To ensure a better distribution, we must first change these structures, using conceptions of justice that do not directly bear on distributive matters.

8. Utilitarianism • Jeremy Bentham (1784-1832) , English philosopher, who was intent on providing a political theory for the British Parliament and other governments to use in constructing sound, rational legislation. • Discontent with the aimless and “unscientific” character of the legislation process in his day and critical of the idea that significant and genuinely reforming legislation could be based on the traditional idea of “rights” (nonsense).

9. Bentham argues that the lawmakers should use what he called the “principle of utility” to construct morally sound legislation. • The theory has been a powerful influence within the institutional structures of many states today, used in the decisionmaking of courts, government departments and economic institutions. • As a theory of justice for political institutions

10. According to Bentham, for any policy it is considering, the state, should determine how that policy’s adoption would affect each individual’s personal well of happiness—either by increasing or decreasing the amount in it. • Maximizing the happiness of the state: means maximizing the happiness of members of its community.

11. “By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing), or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that part by the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual.” p. 124

12. The principle of utility as a way to place legislation on a sound, rational footing, advocating that legislatures use its clear formula for testing proposed laws, rather than relying upon vague, inchoate, and perhaps biased intuitions.

13. Classical utilitarianism, the formulation: • maximize  ni=1 u1by adding number • Average utilitarianism • maximizen  ni=1 u1 not adding number

14. Advantages: has been persistently alluring to generations of politicians, policymakers, and theorists, very attractive to proponents of the modern welfare state • Simple and seemingly “scientific”: can be given a mathematical formulation, also centrally concerned with what many take to be the core of morality, namely, human welfare

15. Theoretical assumptions built into the Benthamite principle of utility: • --each of us can evaluate our own happiness • --this evaluation can also be made by policy makers in a state • --happiness is something inside each of us that can be measured and represented by a single (cardinal) number • --the happiness of each person can be added to the happiness of any other person, can be compared and added to get a sum total of H

16. Criticisms: e.g. the third one, can we really measure people’s happiness, assuming that happiness only differs in quantity, not in quality? John Stuart Mill: we intuitively think that experiences of “pleasure” not only differ in quantity but also in quality. “it is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other side of the comparison knows both.

17. The problem: if Mill is right, it is hard to reformulate the principle of utility so that it gives determinate answers. We become puzzled: which numbers (of which types) would we use when we tried to “maximize utility”? It seems that we need some principle prior to the principle of utility, making the principle of utility either dependent upon or derived from these more foundational moral ideas.

18. For the first assumption: can every one’s pleasure be measured? How about different types of happiness? • For the second assumption: if we can’t exactly know how happy any of us is, how can politicians or policymakers know how happy we are? • For the fourth assumption: arguably the most troublesome, quantitatively compare our happiness with the happiness of others? Ordinal ranking is not possible

19. The interpersonal comparison of utility problem: the principle of utility however appealing in theory, is impossible to implement and thus a false moral “science”. • Phenomenon of “diminishing marginal utility”: goods should be distributed relatively equally, but why not otherwise giving far more to those who experience steady and significant increases in utility despite great resources, if any?

20. While many critics has dismissed U as an unworkable theory, many people argue for some revision of U: “satisfaction of preference”, a better way proposed in the latter half of 20th to measure happiness: maximizing the community’s “utility” simply involves the maximal satisfaction of preferences of people in the community.

21. Criticisms: as for the idea of “preference satisfaction”, people can have preferences involving other’s harm, should we take these preferences into account? It seems that we need to be concerned with only people’s “important” preferences, but how to define “importance” here? And “importance” here means a moral notion.

22. As preferences change over time, how to determine which preferences at which time the society should take seriously? How about preference of a child?

23. More serious problems plaguing the theory, having to do with the kind of policyrecommendations it would generate if its foundational assumptions could be better clarified and defended: If maximizing the total happiness depended upon impoverishing some members of the society? It strikes as unfair and violates our intuitions about justice. • Response by “diminishing marginal utility”

24. It is the fact that U does not have a principled commitment to equality to which critics object and that makes them reject it as a theory of justice. It is not enough that the theory may be able usually to generate egalitarian policies that eschew the impoverishment of some; these critics require a theory of justice that will always be committed to such policies. U has no principled way of precluding sacrifices on the part of individuals for the benefit of the community that are too great and that cannot be morally defended.

25. Example of punishment leads to response from U: rule utilitarianism—the general rules or policies dictated by the principle of utility do accord with out intuitions. • Responses: utilitarians have to make exceptions to general rules and policies whenever doing so is utility-maximizing, or otherwise they will behave as “rule worshipers”, i.e. care more about rules and rights rather than about total utility.

26. Intuitionism: we have fundamental moral ideas within us that are the source of our conceptions of justice and to which any adequate moral conception must answer. • The problems of intuitionism: p. 133

27. Rawls’s Theory of Justice • A Theory of Justice, 1971 • John Rawls’s influence as a political philosopher advocating a theory of distributive justice • The idea of hypothetical social contract, applied not to the nature of the state’s authority over the people but to the nature of justice. We are, according to Rawls, to imagine ourselves in a contract situation in which we must agree with all those people who will live with us in a society on the principle of justice that will govern it.

28. In modern times, the contractual nature of justice was explored by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), particularly in passages from The Metaphysical Elements of Justice that surely influenced Rawls. • Why does the social contract idea work as a test for the moral adequacy of policies or laws? Kant seems to think that this idea acknowledges the way in which, to use his language, people should be treated as “ends in themselves” and not solely as “means”.

29. If someone is intrinsically valuable and not merely valuable as a tool or a means to someone else’s ends, then her importance and interests should be acknowledged by other people and institutions—including the state. A social contract test of political policies is, in Kant’s view, a way to secure that acknowledgment by hypothetically involving each member of the society in the assessment of those policies in a way that respects his interests and perspectives as an individual.

30. Rawls’s criticism of utilitarianism: a conception that allows the society to use (or sacrifice) some people for the benefit of others in substantial ways. In the utilitarian calculation the boundaries of the individuals are merged, and what is morally important about them—that is, their welfare—is aggregated together.

31. Rawls argues that the contract procedure should test large-scale (and relatively abstract) conception of justice, rather than particular laws or policies. To construct such a conception, Rawls asks us to perform a thought experiment in which people have to decide among alternative conceptions of justice, the two most prominent of which he takes to be utilitarianism and his own theory, which he calls “justice as fairness”.

32. Two principles of justice: • 1. “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.” • 2. “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage—and in particular, to the advantage of the least-well-off persons, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.”

33. Rawls’s basic idea is this: Primary goods are to everyone’s advantage. Whereas unequal distributions of liberty are never desirable, he does accept that it may be possible that unequal distributions of, say, wealth could be desirable insofar as giving more to some people will result in their using these resources in a way that expends the “economic pie”, yielding more for everyone. • The first principle is prior to the second, meaning that equality of liberty must be pursued prior to the distribution of social and economic resources.

34. “original position” and the “veil of ignorance”: In order to ensure that people are sufficiently free of bias, prejudice, racist or sexist views—indeed, anything that could cause their preferences over conceptions of justice to be morally distorted—he makes each person in this position ignorant of her place in society, her particular religious or metaphysical views, her moral beliefs, her social theories, and so forth.

35. He wants a system of justice that treats people as equal no matter their natural talents, life prospects, skills, temperamental assets, beliefs, ethnicity, or gender. 140

36. Certain ideas which are thought appropriate for the parties to take seriously in their consideration of conceptions of justice. • --the parties must know the “circumstancesof justice” apply in their society, such that a conception of justice is required—goods are limited in number and people are limited in their benevolence

37. --the parties must know something about what they want. They want as much as possible of “primary goods”: rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, and self-respect, which are means for achieving individuals’ life plans and whose distribution the state can affect.

38. --the parties should regard their decisionmaking as subject to what Rawls calls the “constraints of the concept of right”. These constraints require that a conception of justice be general, universal, understandable, public, effective at imposing an ordering on competing claims, and final—that is, the final theoretical “court of appeals” in the society.

39. --the parties should make the choice of conception using the “maximin rule”, which tells the parties to choose so as to maximize their minimum prospects. This rule has been proposed as a rational principle governing decisionmaking when a person is in a “situation of uncertainty”

40. The Deliberation of a Party in the Original Position: 7 steps P. 139

41. Reflective equilibrium: our intuitions, duly examined and considered (Rawls calls our “considered convictions”), match the theories (and their conclusions) that we construct. • A theory of justice not only refuses to allow the unreasonable sacrifice of the resources (including wealth, liberty, and opportunity) of some for the sake of others but also insists that a system of justice not penalize some people because they are less well endowed with talents, skills, or luck than other people. • 路12：48“因为多给谁、就向谁多取．多托谁、就向谁多要。”

42. Objections to original position argument--whether it is really “contractarian” at all. Indeed, since every person in the original position, insofar as he is subject to the veil of ignorance, is defined in exactly the same way, Rawls has no basis upon which to ground any kind of bargaining among these identically defined parties.

43. --attacking his conclusion: left-wing and right-wing • The right charged that Rawls has failed to acknowledge that proper role that effort, merit, and responsibility should have in the distribution of resources, this undermines individual responsibility, promotes sloth, and allows the lazy to social unrest and eventual diminishment of the economic pie.

44. On the left, critics have been distressed by Rawls’s willingness to depart from strict equality of holdings, and some have wished for a conception of equality that focuses more on the equality of people’s welfare than the equality of their resources.