Posted by alexandra_k on November 14, 2005, at 14:01:10
This is a bit long, but I do think it is worth it. He is terrific because he doesn't tell you WHAT to think he just tries to get people thinking in the first place...
Justice (from "What Does it all Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy")
‘Is it unfair that some people are born rich and some are born poor? If it’s unfair, should anything be done about it?
The world is full of inequalities – within countries, and from one country to another. Some children are born into comfortable, prosperous homes, and grow up well fed and well educated. Others are born poor, don’t get enough to eat, and never have much access to much education or medical care. Clearly, this is a matter of luck: we are not responsible for the social or economic class or country into which we are born. The question is, how bad are the inequalities which are not the fault of the people who suffer from them? Should governments use their power to try to reduce inequalities of this kind, for which the victims are not responsible?
Some inequalities are deliberately imposed. Racial discrimination, for example, deliberately excludes people of one race from jobs, housing, and education which are available to people from another race. Or women may be kept out of jobs or denied privileges available only to men. This is not merely a matter of bad luck. Racial and sexual discrimination are clearly unfair: they are forms of inequality caused by factors that should not be allowed to influence people’s basic welfare. Fairness requires that opportunities should be open to those who are qualified, and it is clearly a good thing when governments try to enforce such equality of opportunity.
But it is harder to know what to say about inequalities that arise in the ordinary course of events, without deliberate racial or sexual discrimination. Because even if there is equality of opportunity, and any qualified person can go to a university or get a job or buy a house or run for office – regardless of race, religion, sex, or national origin – there will still be plenty of inequalities left. People from wealthier backgrounds will usually have better training and more resources, and they will tend to be better able to compete for good jobs. Even in a system of equality of opportunity, some people will have a head start and will end up with greater benefits than others whose native talents are the same.
Not only that, but differences in native talent will produce big differences in the resulting benefits, in a competitive system. Those who have abilities that are in high demand will be able to earn much more than those without any special skills or talents. These differences too are partly a matter of luck. Though people have to develop and use their abilities, no amount of effort would enable most people to act like Meryl Streep, paint like Picasso, or manufacture automobiles like Henry Ford. Something similar is true of lesser accomplishments. The luck of both natural talent and family and class background are important factors in determining one’s income and position in a competitive society. Equal opportunity produces unequal results.
These inequalities, unlike the results of racial and sexual discrimination, are produced by choices and actions that don’t seem wrong in themselves. People try to provide for their children and give them a good education, and some have more money to use for this purpose than others. People pay for the products, services, and performances they want, and some performers or manufacturers get richer than others because what they have to offer is wanted by more people. Businesses and organizations of all kinds try to hire employees who will do the job well, and pay higher salaries for those with unusual skills. If one restaurant is full of people and another next door is empty because the first has a talented chef and the second doesn’t, the customers who choose the first restaurant and avoid the second haven’t done anything wrong, even though their choices have an unhappy effect on the owner and employees of the second restaurant, and on their families.
Such effects are most disturbing when they leave some people in a very bad way. In some countries large segments of the population live in poverty from generation to generation. But even in a wealthy country like the United States, lots of people start life with two strikes against them, from economic and educational disadvantages. Some can overcome those disadvantages, but it’s much harder than making good from a higher starting point.
Most disturbing of all are the enormous inequalities in wealth, health, education, and development between rich and poor countries. Most people in the world have no chance of ever being as well off economically as the poorest people in Europe, Japan, or the United States. These large differences in good and bad luck certainly seem unfair; but what, if anything, should be done about them?
We have to think about both the inequality itself, and the remedy that would be needed to reduce or get rid of it. The main question about the inequalities themselves is: What kinds of *causes* of inequality are wrong? The main question about remedies is: What *methods* of interfering with the inequality are right?
In the case of deliberate racial or sexual discrimination, the answers are easy. The cause of the inequality is wrong because the discriminator is *doing* something wrong. And the remedy is simply to prevent him from doing it. If a landlord refuses to rent to blacks, he should be prosecuted.
But the questions are more difficult in other cases. The problem is that inequalities which seem wrong can arise from causes which don’t involve people *doing* anything wrong. It seems unfair that people born much poorer than others should suffer disadvantages through no fault of their own. But such inequalities exist because some people have been more successful than others at earning money and have tried to help their children as much as possible; and because people tend to marry members of their own economic and social class, wealth and position accumulate and are passed on from generation to generation. The actions which combine to form these causes – employment decisions, purchases, marriages, bequests, and efforts to provide for and educate children, don’t seem wrong in themselves. What’s wrong, if anything, is the result: that some people start life with undeserved disadvantages.
If we object to this kind of bad luck as unfair, it must be because we object to people’s suffering disadvantages through no fault of their own, merely as a result of the ordinary operation of the socioeconomic system into which they are born. Some of us may also believe that all bad luck that is not a person’s fault, such as that of being born of a physical handicap, should be compensated if possible. But let us leave those cases aside in this discussion. I want to concentrate on the undeserved inequalities that arise through the working of society and the economy, particularly in a competitive economy.
The two main sources of these undeserved inequalities, as I have said, are differences in the socioeconomic classes into which people are born, and differences in their natural abilities or talents for tasks which are in demand. You may not think there is anything wrong with inequality caused in these ways. But if you think there is something wrong with it, and if you think society should try to reduce it, then you must propose a remedy which either interferes with the causes themselves, or interferes with the unequal effects directly.
Now the causes themselves, as we have seen, include relatively innocent choices by many people about how to spend their time and money and how to lead their lives. To interfere with people’s choices about what products to buy, how to help their children, or how much to pay their employees, is very different from interfering with them when they want to rob banks or discriminate against blacks and women. A more indirect interference in the economic life of individuals is taxation, particularly taxation of income and inheritance, and some taxes on consumption, which can be designed to take more from the rich than the poor. This is one way a government can try to reduce the development of great inequalities in wealth over generations – by not letting people keep all of their money.
More important, however, would be to use the public resources obtained through taxes to provide some of the missing advantages of education and support to children of those families that can’t afford to do it themselves. Public social welfare programs try to do this, by using tax revenues to provide basic benefits of health care, food, housing, and education. This attacks the inequalities directly.
When it comes to inequalities that result from differences in ability, there isn’t much one can do to interfere with the causes short of abolishing the competitive economy. So long as there is competition to hire people for jobs, competition between people to get jobs, and competition between firms for customers, some people are going to make more money than others. The only alternative would be a centrally directed economy in which everyone was paid roughly the same and people were assigned to their jobs by some kind of centralised authority. Though it has been tried, this system has heavy costs in both freedom and efficiency – far too heavy, in my opinion, to be acceptable, though others would disagree.
If one wants to reduce the inequalities resulting from different abilities without getting rid of the competitive economy, it will be necessary to attack the inequalities themselves. This can be done through higher taxation of higher incomes, and some free provision of public services to everyone, or to people with lower incomes. It could include cash payments to those whose earning power is lowest, in the form of so-called ‘negative income tax’. None of these programs would get rid of undeserved inequalities completely, and any system of taxation will have other effects on the economy, including effects on employment and the poor, which may be hard to predict; so the issue of a remedy is always complicated.
But to concentrate on the philosophical point: the measures needed to reduce undeserved inequalities arising from differences in class background and natural talent will involve interfering with peoples economic activities, mainly through taxation: the government takes money from some people and uses it to help others. This is not the only use of taxation, or even the main use: many taxes are spent on things which benefit the well-off more than the poor. But *redistributive* taxation, as it is called, is the type relevant to our problem. It does involve the use of government power to interfere with what people do, not because what they do is wrong in itself, like theft or discrimination, but because it contributes to an effect which seems unfair.
There are those who don’t think redistributive taxation is right, because the government shouldn’t interfere with people unless they are doing something wrong, and the economic transactions that produce all those inequalities aren’t wrong, but perfectly innocent. They may also hold that there’s nothing wrong with the resulting inequalities themselves: that even though they’re *undeserved* and not the fault of the victims, society is not obliged to fix them. That’s just life, they will say: some people are more fortunate than others. The only time we have to *do* anything about it is when the misfortune is the result of someone’s doing a wrong to someone else.
This is a controversial political issue, and there are many different opinions about it. Some people object more to the inequalities that come from the socioeconomic class a person is born into, than to the inequalities resulting from differences in talent or ability. They don’t like the effects of one person being born rich and another in a slum, but feel that a person deserves what he can earn with his own efforts – so that there’s nothing unfair about one person earning a lot and another very little because the first has a marketable talent or capacity for learning sophisticated skills while the second can only do unskilled labour.
I myself think that inequalities resulting from either of these causes are unfair, and that it is clearly unjust when a socioeconomic system results in some people living under significant material and social disadvantages through no fault of their own, if this could be prevented through a system of redistributive taxation and social welfare programs. But to make up your own mind about the issue, you have to consider both what causes of inequality you find unfair, and what remedies you find legitimate.
We’ve been talking mainly about the problem of social justice within one society. The problem is much more difficult on a world scale, both because the inequalities are so great and because it’s not clear what remedies are possible in the absence of a world government that could levy world taxes and see that they are used effectively. There is no prospect of a world government, which is just as well, since it would probably be a horrible government in many ways. However there is still a problem of global justice, though it’s hard to know what to do about it in the system of separate sovereign states we have now’.
In case people think it important – yes, he is American: http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel
And on that note I'd like to rephrase (after a lot of thought and a little help) to...
I prefer redistributive taxation because I believe it would go some of the way towards alleviating some of the injustices that people are born to (through no fault of their own). And in virtue of that... I consider it to be a fairer system.
But...
What do other people think?
poster:alexandra_k
thread:578654
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20050924/msgs/578654.html