| Three Modern Approaches | |
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Introduction |
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This lecture is going to be in two quite distinct parts. In this first
hour I’m going to have a look at three philosophers that we can take as
representative of some trends in late 20th C ethical thought.
We’re going to look very briefly at the work of John Rawls, Robert
Nozick, and Alasdair Macintyre. Of these three the most important is John
Rawls and his ideas are going to take up most of our time. I’ve chosen these people for three reasons:
Before we get started let me just point out that these aren’t really at
the absolute focus of modern thinking about ethical questions – but most
of what goes on there is not very helpful in the matter of telling us what
we all ought to do. A lot of the best stuff is what they call
‘metaethics’ where they talk about what’s involved in talking about
ethics. Philosophers find that sort of thing interesting (and it may
eventually be important) but real people find it something else altogether
– and so I won’t inflict any of that on you.
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Rawls on the Just State |
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John Rawls is an American philosopher, widely considered the most
significant political philosopher of the 20th century. His most
important work is A Theory of
Justice, first published in 1971. We are going to examine the basic
outlines of this theory of justice. Recall Locke’s picture of a legitimate government. This is one that
protects individuals’ rights, including property rights, and respects
majority rule (provided majority rule does not infringe upon individual
rights). Should we say that a society that succeeds in running itself
along the lines envisaged by Locke would be a just society? Perhaps it
would systematically allow for great injustices; perhaps a Lockean society
would be deeply unfair in some
way. Consider another theory of justice we have examined in our course:
Plato’s theory of justice. According to Plato, a state is just if and
only if it is divided into three classes corresponding to the three
fundamental tasks of social life and each class performs the work it is
suited to and doesn’t try to usurp the role of other classes. A just
state would then be one in which everything is in its place; it would be a
state run upon perfectly rational lines. But would such a state really be
just? Would it be fair to each
of its citizens? Would you agree to join Plato’s republic if you
didn’t know which class you were going to be assigned to? Justice
as Fairness To get a grip on these kinds of issue, we need to clarify what we mean by
justice in the state. What would it be for a society to be just? A just
society would not necessarily be one in which no injustices ever occur;
injustices can arise for many different reasons, like human error or
foolishness, and we don’t blame society as such for these kinds of
injustice. Instead, we think a just society would be one that is run
according to genuinely just principles: the basic structure of the society
would be just. This is Rawls’ starting point. Rawls also starts from the
idea that a just society would be a fair
society. He calls his conception of justice, “justice as fairness.”
Rawls conception of justice as fairness involves more than respect for
rights and more than fairness within the legal system. It involves the
distribution of what Rawls calls primary social goods: wealth,
opportunities, liberties and privileges, and what Rawls calls the bases of
self-respect (e.g. equality of political representation). For this reason
Rawls is said to be advancing a theory of “distributive justice” in A
Theory of Justice. However, let us start our examination of Rawls’
theory by looking at the concept of fairness. Let us substitute the question ‘What is a just society?’ with the
question ‘What is a fair society?’ What does it mean to say that a
society is fair? Here is one proposal: a fair society would be one that
any rational and self-interested person would want to join. This isn’t
quite right. A rational and self-interested person would want to join a
society in which her particular talents and advantages worked best for her
(she is rational and self-interested after all). For example, if she was
particularly good at sport, she would prefer a society where successful
sportspeople are treated as heroes and rewarded beyond all measure (i.e.
our society). This would be a biased choice and we need a way of
eliminating this kind of bias if we are to describe a perfectly fair
society. Bias emerges on our scenario because rational and self-interested
people are inevitably biased towards rules and principles that would give
them special advantage; this is just an expression of their rational
self-interest. So how could we make this fundamental kind of choice –
what kind of society to join, i.e. what kind of basic social principles to
agree to – without introducing bias? Rawls answer is the
veil of ignorance. The
Veil of Ignorance The veil of ignorance is Rawls most important methodological tool. It is
a kind of thought experiment. Imagine that we had to choose which kind of
society we wished to belong to, but had no idea of the position we are to
occupy in it. We don’t know whether we are to be born into a wealthy
family or a poor one, a well-adjusted family or a crazy one. We don’t
know whether we are to attend good schools or inadequate ones; forge close
ties of privilege or stand largely alone. We don’t know whether or not
we are talented and intelligent; whether, for example, we have a good head
for business or a fog descends
upon us every time someone starts to talk finance or tries to set up a
deal with us. We don’t know whether we are to have great capacity for
work or whether we are lazy or are exhausted easily. We don’t know
whether we are to have strength of will or an addictive personality. What
do we know in this thought experiment? We know general principles of
economics, sociology and psychology; we know about the environment and its
potential and its limitations. We know about the world in a general and
abstract way; we just don’t know about the basic principles of our
society (this is what we are to choose in the thought experiment) or our
particular place in society. Now we ask ourselves the question: what kind
of society would we choose to live in? We are asking the question from
behind what Rawls calls “the veil of ignorance.” Because we are
choosing the basic principles of society from behind the veil of
ignorance, we have eliminated all bias and special pleading from our
choice of basic principles. We are no longer negotiating
as we choose basic principles; we are no longer trying to get the most
advantageous deal for ourselves given our special qualities or situation.
We are therefore deciding what would be fairest for all. Rawls works in the social contract tradition of political philosophy –
like Hobbes and Locke. He imagines a contract between people who wish to
live in a just and fair society, one that reflects equal mutual respect.
According to Rawls, in forming a social contract we decide upon the basic
structure of society, i.e. we decide upon the basic principles on which
society will run. (Don’t worry, this will get less general and more
precise in a bit.) Rawls calls this situation in which we make this
decision “the original position.”
The most important thing about the original position is that, in it,
everyone operates behind the veil of ignorance. In original position,
behind the veil of ignorance, we choose the basic principles of our
society. Although we are self-interested choosers, the veil of ignorance
ensures that we choose fairly. Like other social contract theorists, Rawls
is not hypothesising an actual historical event. The social contract and
the original position are hypothetical constructs. If a society’s basic
structure is one that would have been chosen by self-interested and
rational choosers in the original position (and so behind the veil of
ignorance), this makes that the society is a just and fair one. Or so
Rawls believes. Is Rawls right about this? Would choice behind the veil of ignorance
reveal what is fair for all? Take the example of sporting talent again. A
tremendously talented soccer player (aka football player) can expect, with
moderate luck, to become very rich. There is much hard work and sacrifice
that goes into a successful soccer career, but it isn’t all about work
and sacrifice. Primarily, it is a matter of talent. Should the talented
have great advantages over the untalented? Life, Rawls observes, is a
natural lottery. Is it fair that that the spoils go primarily or
exclusively to the winners of this lottery? Rawls thinks that,
intuitively, this is not fair. A fair society would ameliorate the
advantages got by winning the natural lottery. This is known as Rawls’
natural lottery argument. However, Rawls doesn’t have to appeal to the intuitive support of the
natural lottery argument. Instead, let us try to answer the question by
asking: would we, as rational, self-interested people, choose a society in
which “the winner takes all” if we had no idea whether we were likely
to be a winner or not? Perhaps we would be tempted to gamble. But remember
we are gambling with the whole of our lives and we are gambling only once.
(There’s no chance of making up our losses the next time we choose which
kind of society to live in.) And in conditions of moderate scarcity, we
know that the preponderance of people will not be winners. It seems clear
at least that a “winner takes all” choice would be irrational in these
circumstances. So what choice would be rational? Rawls answers that, behind the veil of ignorance, we would choose very
conservatively. There is too much at stake to gamble, so we would follow
the choice principle called “maximin”. On this principle, the rational
thing to choose in positions like the one Rawls imagines is to maximize
the worse outcome. Choosing according to maximin means that you would be
assured a better outcome than any other if things go badly for you. Of
course, there are certain things that you would want no matter what
position you occupy in society: equal liberties and rights (e.g. freedom
of political association, freedom of conscience in personal matters,
freedom of religious conviction, equal rights before the law); and
equality of opportunity. Rawls refines these basic choices into two
principles of justice. The
Two Principles of Justice The
Two Principles of Justice are:
1
Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic
rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for
all. 2
Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:
first they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under
conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second they are to be to
the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. The first principle is said to have priority over
the second. This means that the first principle must be satisfied in full
before the second is satisfied at all. The second principle has two parts:
equal opportunity and the welfare of the least well off. This latter
principle is highly distinctive. It represents most clearly Rawls’
commitment to the rationality of maximin choice in the original position.
It is called “The Difference Principle.” Let
us look more closely at the difference principle. If primary social goods – such things as wealth
and privileges – were distributed equally throughout society, we would
have a perfectly egalitarian society. But there are good economic reasons
for thinking that everyone would be economically worse off in such a
society. One obvious reason is that incentives are needed for people to
work hard and use their talents to create wealth, wealth which is
distributed throughout the community. And there may be other general
advantages to an unequal distribution of wealth and privilege. For
example, giving special privileges to the Governor General, President, or
Constitutional Monarch might have social advantages for everyone. For
example, it may help ensure political stability in times of democratic
deadlock. (Notice that only Governor Generals and Presidents satisfy the
equal opportunity clause, and then only potentially.) The implications of applying the difference
principle are easiest to grasp in terms of taxation. Taxation,
particularly progressive taxation in which the percentage of tax increases
with taxable income, is one means of redistributing wealth for the benefit
of the least well-off. Too much taxation of the wealthy would generate
significant disincentives for people to pursue wealth. Under the burden of
such taxation people would be likely to scale back their work, or try to
cheat the system, or opt out of it altogether, say by moving their
operations off-shore. The result would be that investment dries up,
innovation and business initiative dries up, as do jobs and other economic
opportunities. Taxation revenue consequently falls and along with it
opportunities to redistribute wealth. Everyone, including the least
well-off, would suffer under an excessively progressive regime of
taxation. On the other hand, too little taxation and the least well-off
suffer economically. Between these extremes there will be an optimum
taxation level, according to the difference principle. This is optimized
to most benefit the least well-off. The inequalities of income – not
redistributed through taxation – are justified because they benefit the
least well-off. The vexed question is exactly where this optimum level is.
But Rawls is concerned to defend a view of what constitutes this
optimality. Inequalities of wealth and privileges are only justified,
according to the difference principle, if any other distribution of wealth
and privileges would leave the least well-off even less well-off. Utilitarians in economics generally hold that we
should try to maximize the total amount of wealth, or in other versions,
maximize the amount of average wealth. Locke thinks that any disparity of
wealth is just provided wealth is acquired justly (i.e. without at any
stage violating the natural rights of others). Rawls agrees that there are
a range of individual rights and liberties all just societies must adhere
to (though he doesn’t think that they are “natural”). However, he
thinks this is not enough for a society to call itself just. A truly just
society would ensure the just redistribution of wealth. Thus Rawls offers
a more egalitarian picture of justice than either Locke or the
utilitarians. A society is just only if it distributes wealth and
privileges to maximize the position of the least well-off of its members.
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Nozick on the Minimal State |
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Rawls’s scheme has been pretty popular. Part of
the reason for that is that his book The
Theory of Justice is a fine piece of reasoning and argument, and
another part is that the political system that he ends up making normative
is the sort of Welfare State that was very popular amongst intellectuals
at the time of its writing. Almost all Western states appeared to be
moving towards a very much greater involvement of the government in
determining the outcomes of economic activity, amongst other things. But
the book appeared just at the time that the problems with that particular
model were becoming more and more evident and there was about to be a
backlash. The reaction had intellectual roots that reached well back into
twentieth century history, but reached political power with the very
significant elections of Reagan and Thatcher in the US and UK. Obviously,
in a democracy, no government is able to enact a pure form of any
fashionable political philosophy – and let us be very thankful for that
– but one of the significant figures in the intellectual adjustment to
this new age was Robert Nozick whose ideas in response to John Rawls
we’ll now look at. Nozick’s book Anarchy,
State, and Utopia was published in 1974, just 3 years after Rawls’s
book, and it is explictly a counterblast to that book. (Note that they
were both at the time at Harvard.) The position that Nozick defends in
this book is called Libertarianism. Basically that position claims that
the state has only a very limited role in society – limited to the basic
functions that have to be
performed by the state if society is to avoid anarchy. Those functions
include, for example, the provision of internal and external security and
the administration of the law. Any other activity by the state is
basically unjustifiable and unjust – and given the extent of the modern
state you can see that we are very far from the libertarian ideal even in
a place like Justice as
Respecting our Rights Nozick’s argument begins with a reference to
Kant’s Categorical Imperative. You’ll recall that Kant had a couple of
versions of this that we looked at. One version said that we had to act so
that the maxim of our action could rationally be taken as a universal law,
and the other version said that we had to ‘act so as always to treat
humanity, whether in ourselves or in other persons as ends and never only
as means.’ It’s the second version that Nozick uses. You’ll recall
that when I was trying to explain how this was to be understood I
mentioned things like telling lies to people purely for ones own
advantage: how that would be to treat a person as a means to an end (your
own end that is) and it would not be treating them as an end in themselves
– as someone with their own purposes which may be as important as our
own. On the other hand, to tell the lie that ‘that dress doesn’t make
you look fat’ when the intention is to make your own life pleasant and
also and quite independently of that consequence to make the person to
whom you are speaking happy, is to treat the person as both an means and
an end. And thus that lie might be permissible. The point is that
humanity, whether in your own person or in that of others can’t be used
just as a tool or a resource. Nozick thinks that a consequence of this is that
the citizen cannot be used as a tool by the state to achieve some sort of
end that the state desires. Particularly if the citizen is unwilling to be
so used and if the end that the state envisages is antithetical to the end
that the citizen sets for himself. Amongst the ends that a state might set
are a degree of equality of wealth in the society. Suppose that there are
two citizens in a state, A, with lots of wealth, and B, with little. The
state has set itself the end of an equality of wealth in the society,
therefore it takes wealth from A and gives it to B. But A had not set this
end for himself, and, indeed the ends that A had set (or B for that
matter) were quite irrelevant to the state when it did what it did.
Therefore the state is treating A as a means only. Therefore the state is
acting as no one should act according to Kant’s principle. Any form of
taxation which is justified in those terms is therefore unethical
according to Nozick. And given that that is almost all taxation – just
look at the size of the social welfare budget in any modern society –
this is a very significant attack on the practices of the modern Westeern
state. Distributive
Justice vs. Entitlements But apart from this direct argument to the
injustice of taxation for the purpose of redistribution, Nozick has much
to say about the inadmissibility of redistribution as a form of justice at
all. The idea that there is some ‘just’ distribution of wealth seems
to suppose that wealth is just a large resource that nobody has a special
claim on, but this isn’t a very good description of how wealth actually
arises. Nozick’s view is that a more plausible story of justice in the
possession of wealth would have three parts: 1.
justice
in original acquisition – so that someone would have an entitlement to wealth if they had created
it under the right circumstances. You may recall that in Locke’s story
about property he had a bit to say about the conditions of acquisition.
Nozick has much the same story but without the appeal to God’s purposes
as the fundamental point of origin of such rights. 2.
Justice
in transaction
– so that someone who obtains wealth, property, goods etc. from another
person in the right way and in the right circumstances has an entitlement
to that wealth. We didn’t talk about this with Locke but he does have a
story about how wealth is to be transferred too. 3.
There can be no entitlement to any wealth that does not
arise from a repeated application of these principles. Given what welath
actually is, there is no other way for an entittlement to arise than by
just creation or just transfer. This is a recursive
definition of justice in entitlements, and you can see that a
redistributivist government is going to have a hard time justifying wealth
confiscation if it has no entitlement (or the citizens that it wishes to
benefit have no entitlement) to someone else’s wealth. Again that’s
going to make it very difficult for the welfare state to operate. There is, of course, a problem with this view; and
that is that not all acquisitions and transactions have been just in the
past and so there may be many people with wealth to which they are not
entitled according to this scheme. My great great to the nth degree
grandfather may have stolen something that allowed him to possess
something else that allowed his son to have certain advantages that
allowed his son to own … etc. What are we to do about the consequences
of past injustices? How are we to rectify
errors? Well, Nozick has plenty to say about that, which you can read
about in his very easy to read book, but the only point I wish to make
here is that you can’t go straight from this problem to a redistributive
answer because the fact of injustices in the past is not a necessary
fact, and the argument to an entitlement theory of justice is not
affected. The distributivist has to believe that the entitlement theory is
wrong in principle. And bad
entitlement claims don’t affect that any more than the state making bad
distributions would affect the distributivist case.
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MacIntyre on the Rediscovery of Virtue |
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Both Rawls and Nozick present visions of society
that they claim operate from universal first principles – and I think
both have been presented above in such a way that the attractiveness of
those principles is clear – and the argument proceeds logically from
those principles to completely incompatible conclusions. They can’t both
be right, and yet we can’t seem to agree on which is wrong or just where
the wrongness occurs. This sort of thing seems to happen all the time in
ethical thinking. It’s frustrating for philosophers, it’s frustrating
for students, and it’s frustrating for people who want to use the best
available reasoning to find out what the right thing to do is. This
observation is at the heart of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking. He thinks
that it indicates that there is something radically wrong with all our
moral thinking. What? He thinks that when we think we are thinking about
ethics we are not really doing so. What can he possibly mean? The
Current Moral Disorder He begins his most famous book, After
Virtue (first published in 1981) with a description of an imaginary
world in which there has been some sort of catastrophe and all the records
and habits of modern science have been lost. Then people start to discover
fragments of science books and try to reconstruct science from the ruins.
They make up theories that try to connect the bits and pieces that they
have, but they don’t really know what science is all about so the
theories really have nothing to do with the original science. They don’t
really know what the words mean so they don’t mean anything when they
use them in their new theories. Perhaps there will be disputes amongst the
reconstructors about what are the correct theories – but since
everything they’re doing is basically incoherent and mistaken none of
these disputes are really about what they think they’re about and no
conclusions are ever reached. You can imagine how this might be. Well,
MacIntyre thinks that something like that is what has happened to
morality. The catastrophe was a slow motion thing – involving the
gradual change of civilization from the Greek and Roman period, through
the Middle Ages and the triumph of Christianity, and into the Modern
period – but it has resulted in a loss of the original meanings and
habits of moral thought; and attempts at reconstruction have cobbled
together parts that don’t go together and words are used as if they
meant the same thing now as they did way back when: and so everything
we’re doing is basically incoherent and mistaken and none of our ethical
disputes are really about what we think they’re about, and no
conclusions are ever reached. We can’t really use our moral notions to
change the views of others about what to do and even worse, we can’t use
them to decide what we should do ourselves because it’s all quite
meaningless. But if this is the case then it also follows that we need to
use some other system to come to our conclusions about what to do – and
MacIntyre thinks that if you look around you will see people behaving as
if the only thing that counts is satisfying our own whims, and that we
actually do treat other people simply as means to our own ends. Well, if
we have no other usable guide to action, why wouldn’t
we behave like that? And, of course, since we may have incompatible ends
politics in modern society has become a simple competition to enforce our
own ends with only the disguise
of argument, not the reality. Thus MacIntyre has said that our politics is
‘civil
war carried on by other means’ (After Virtue 253) You can see why I think this is an interesting
point of view. I’ve been describing something a bit like this disaster
process in most of the lectures in the course. Although I don’t myself
feel that despair is the only possible response – or that all moral
thought is necessarily meaningless. But what does MacIntyre think is the
solution to all this? What is to
be done? He thinks that we should return to the sort of
ethics that Aristotle wrote about. That we as humans have an ergon
or characteristic activity, and that there is a telos
or end that we are naturally aimed at, and that this end is a type of
human happiness like Aristotle’s eudaimonia.,
and that the virtues can be identified as those dispositions and
characteristics that are most likely to lead us to achieve the end set for
us. If we can agree on an end for human life then all the arguments about
what we ought to do can have a
real point. You’ll recollect that in various lectures I’ve pointed out
that there is a way of using ought
which is really unproblematic – that is when we say things like ‘if I
want to get to Pac Fair I ought to take the 752 bus.’ In a case like
that the ought is only telling you that the action in the last part of the
sentence is the appropriate means to achieve the end in the first part of
the sentence. That is what ought statements would be doing if we had a
final end that all our actions were ultimately aimed at. By contrast,
there’s a use of ought that is really hard to understand – such as when we say that
‘we ought to tell the truth.’ I’ve said many times that it’s
really hard to see where the force of the obligation comes from in
theories that think that such statements make sense. MacIntyre would
probably say that it was no wonder that we are having this problem,
because that usage is just a misapplication of vocabulary from an earlier
unmysterious way of doing ethics, and the way we’re using it really
makes no sense at all. In the Internet Encyclopedia article on this that
I’ve linked there’s a nice little phrase that Clayton uses. We can
compare morality to a map that tells us how to get to places, but ‘Absent
any conception of what human beings are supposed to become if they
realized their telos, there can be no ethical theory, because it simply
has no purpose. For people with no destination, a road map has no value.’ MacIntyre has a good deal to say about how adopting
this point of view would result in a completely different society; one not
at war with itself and not beholden to the sort of self-centred ideals
that he thinks is the curse of modern Liberal capitalist society. But I
don’t think we really need to go into all that. I just thought that
expressing a doubt about the coherence of the entire edifice of moral
thought that has been built up in the West over the last 2500 years might
be a nice encouraging way to finish up.
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