The site of distributive justice and the egalitarian ethos: does justice apply only to the basic structure of society, or also to personal choice within it, and what does the interpersonal test reveal about Rawls's incentives argument?

G. A. Cohen, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Justice applies not only to the basic structure of society (its institutional rules and the legal framework that defines them) but also to personal choice within that structure.12 The Rawlsian restriction of justice to the basic structure is an evasion of the burden of respecting distributive justice in the choices of everyday life.3 The talented cannot honestly justify, to those worse off in society, demanding the incentive payments that a strict reading of the Difference Principle would have to authorise on the talented's own stipulation that without those payments they will not productively contribute.4

The interpersonal test — that the rationale for a policy must be one that the agent can sincerely offer to those affected by it — exposes the incentives argument as a piece of bad faith. The Difference Principle, strictly read, is compatible with a strong equality that the lax reading dilutes; the strict reading is what the egalitarian ethos requires.

The egalitarian ethos is not a demand for moral saintliness but a demand for ordinary egalitarian comportment in the conduct of one's working and economic life.5

Sources

  1. Thus, example, capriciously appointing candidate A rather than candidate B to a given post might be judged unjust, even when it occurs within the rules of a just basic structure (since those rules could not feasibly be designed to outlaw the variety of caprice in question). But such injustice in choice is not the sort of Rescuing Equality from... 18.
    Rescuing Justice and Equality, pp. 124–125
  2. The objection says that the difference principle is, by stipulation and design, a principle that applies only to social institutions (to those, in particular, which compose the basic structure of society), and therefore not one that applies to the choices, such as those of self-seeking high fliers, that people make within such institutions.
    If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich, p. 135
  3. Call that "the basic-structure objection." Now, before I develop it further, and then reply to it, I wish to point out that there is an important ambiguity concept basic structure, wielded Rawlsians. The ambiguity turns on whether the Rawlsian basic structure includes coercive aspects social order or, also, conventions usages deeply entrenched legally literally coer- > Justice, Incentives, and Selfishness cive.
    If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich, p. 141
  4. And the second thing that follows from the fact that the inequality is necessary only because productive people would be unwilling to be as productive as they are without it is that the productive people act as they do only because they themselves reject the principle that an inequality is justifi ed only if it benefi ts the worst off. They couldn't act as they do if "Institutions and the Demands of Justice," p.
    On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, p. 247
  5. Who could deny that the distribution of tax burden would then be just than the distribution that we are actually able to achieve?
    On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, p. 246

Where the argument is made

  • 'Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice' (Philosophy and Public Affairs 26, 1997) — the founding statement of the site question, reprinted as Chapter 9 of If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Harvard 2000)
  • If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (the 1996 Gifford Lectures) — Lectures 8 ('Justice, Incentives, and Selfishness'), 9, and 10 ('Political Philosophy and Personal Behavior')
  • 'Mind the Gap' (London Review of Books 1992, on Nagel's Equality and Partiality) — Chapter 9 of On the Currency (Otsuka ed. 2011)
  • Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard 2008) Part I ('Rescuing Equality from . . .') — Chapter 1 'The Incentives Argument', Chapter 2 'The Pareto Argument', Chapter 3 'The Basic Structure Objection', Chapter 4 'The Difference Principle', Chapter 5 'The Freedom Objection'
  • the Tanner Lectures on Incentives, Inequality, and Community (Stanford 1991/2 manuscript)

How the argument was received

The 1997 'Where the Action Is' essay and the 2000 Gifford Lectures triggered the most sustained public dispute in late-twentieth- century analytical political philosophy. The principal objections cluster around four points: Andrew Williams's publicity objection (an egalitarian ethos at the personal level fails Rawlsian publicity because it cannot be administered through clear public rules); Thomas Pogge's mastergoals-and-supergoals objection (Rawls's basic-structure restriction is consistent with a deeper concern for personal conduct, properly construed); Liam Murphy's monism / dualism objection (the ethos requires either total conflation of institutional and personal duty or arbitrary distinction between them); David Estlund's justifiable conflict objection (the talented may have other legitimate personal aims that conflict with the ethos's demands). I engage all four in Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008), especially Chapters 4 and 8. The dispute is not closed — Rawls and Cohen die before either has the last word, and the post-mortem reception has not resolved it.