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Justice, Institutions, and Luck

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 125; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00318108-3321771

1558-1470

Michael Blake,

Political Philosophy and Ethics

Luck egalitarianism—the thought that unchosen forms of advantage are presumptively unjust—has not been the most fashionable view as of late. The rise of the “democratic equality” of Elizabeth Anderson—along with the continuing influence of John Rawls's own political view of justice—have contributed to the sense that luck egalitarianism is simply too blunt an instrument with which to analyze social and political justice. Kok-Chor Tan attempts, in this recent book, to develop a chastened and moderate luck egalitarianism, one that might demonstrate why luck egalitarianism is attractive—and how it can defend itself against its critics.The book is a model of clarity and rigor; it is a thin volume, but it manages to cover several decades of recent thinking about social justice, and do so with grace and accuracy. It would be of use, even if Tan's own arguments were rejected, as a useful supplement to any class on recent political philosophy. Tan's own arguments, though, are the real heart of the book, and these arguments amply repay close reading.Tan develops his view with reference to three questions: where does distributive justice matter? Why should we care about economic inequality? And among whom does justice hold? The first question is taken up in the first third of Tan's book; his answer is that distributive justice applies in the first instance to institutions—to those large-scale structures that transform natural facts into inequalities of wealth and income. This part of the book argues that, contrary to the arguments of G. A. Cohen, an institutional focus is not an abdication of moral concern but a recognition of the possibility of value pluralism. Were justice directly to constrain individual choice, it would select goods for individuals based upon impersonal considerations of justice. This, for Tan, would fail to respect the plural and diverse goods that might be made the subject of a human life.The second question is answered by Tan's own luck egalitarianism; we have reason to care about economic inequality precisely because we have moral reason to care when people are treated in unequal ways by the social institutions in which their lives are built. This means, though, that we have reason to regard luck egalitarianism not as a free-floating view about justice, to be applied in all contexts. Instead, we should construe it as a critical posture from which we are able to develop and apply more specific principles of justice applicable to social institutions. Tan suggests, in particular, that Rawls's own difference principle might be a plausible way of applying the luck-egalitarian method to social institutions (109–14).These principles, finally, are to be applied at the global level in two ways: they apply, first, to all persons, regardless of nationality. They apply, further, to global institutions as much as to domestic institutions, given how these global institutions turn natural facts about resources and territory into inequalities of wealth and power. The luck-egalitarian idea, in the last third of the book, is rendered a plausible and powerful basis for criticism of global inequality. We have reason to care about global economic inequality, since it is the global institutional set that creates it; we do not, however, have to focus on all imagined cases of difference, because Tan's “institutional egalitarianism” (2) is not in the business of eliminating all forms of difference—it is set up only to counter those forms of institutions that transform natural facts into economic inequality. As Tan says, mirroring Hamlet: there's nothing good or bad, but institutions make it so (87)—and this institutional focus can restore luck egalitarianism to its rightful place in the philosophical toolkit.I admire Tan's work enormously; this is the most powerful defense of luck egalitarianism I have encountered. I do, however, have one significant worry, which can be expressed in a variety of different ways. The worry comes down to this: What, exactly, do Tan's institutions do? What results can be ascribed to them? How this question gets answered, I think, will affect how able many of us will be to accept his conclusions. Look, for instance, at his rejection of a familiar anticosmopolitan hypothetical. A relatively impoverished alien planet suddenly appears; despite having no relationship of trade or political affiliation with Earth, the inhabitants of the alien planet make demands of distributive justice against the inhabitants of Earth. Those of us who are democratic egalitarians think that the aliens are mistaken in their moral claims; built examples like these are thought to show that social relationships, including most importantly shared liability to a coercive law, are prerequisites for the moral relevance of distributive justice.Tan's book says that luck egalitarianism can survive this sort of example. In the first case considered, the inhabitants of the alien planet have no relationships with Earth but simply demand monetary transfers; Tan says that we can ignore their complaints, since the difference between their wealth and ours is not produced by any shared set of institutions (168–69). Tan then argues, though, that if the aliens insist that they have the right to take our resources and are refused, or move onto our territory and are deported, that the inequality in economic chances between the alien planet and ourselves is now a matter of distributive justice, since it is produced by the institutions to which we expect them to comply. The inequality is “the result of how affective common institutions have combined with the natural fact of the universe” (169).All this, though, should be somewhat worrying. I am not sure that refusing to allow an alien society to settle on our planet creates an institution, whereas simply refusing a request for money does not. (If, on a desert island, I refuse to share my fireplace with you, have I created any institutions, or just done a particular action?) I am even less sure that the institutions described are sufficiently robust that we can think that they have “produced” the economic inequality in question. If the aliens were poor before they asked for settlement rights, and poor after, then in what sense is their poverty rightly ascribed to some shared institutional set? Tan echoes Thomas Pogge's condemnation of explanatory nationalism, on which all inequalities are ascribed to domestic institutions (156); I worry that his own view crosses over into explanatory globalism, on which all inequalities are the result of global institutions.This problem results from a broader concern; I am not entirely sure that we have an adequate theory of what sorts of inequalities are produced by social institutions, or that the institutional approach can consistently limit itself to only economic forms of advantage. Tan argues that luck egalitarianism need not be in the business of compensating people for being unattractive; attractiveness is a “natural trait” (128), and we have reason to be concerned only when that natural trait is transformed into economic advantage by social institutions. For my part, I would have thought that the “natural trait” is simply the fact of people's having different bodies and faces and that this fact is transformed into various forms of social advantage by institutions describing what is beautiful and what is ugly. Ugliness, on this account, would be an injustice, as an unchosen form of institutionally mediated disadvantage. (Certainly, different societies have had different visions of beauty, all of them reinforced by institutions such as television and mass media.) Why, then, is ugliness not a matter of justice, even on the moderated, institutional form of luck egalitarianism Tan endorses? Tan wants to avoid this result, of course, and focus only on economic goods; I worry, though, that this exclusion seems somewhat ad hoc. If this is right, though, then Tan's institutional egalitarianism may not avoid some of the difficulties that led many of us to abandon it in the first place.Tan's book, then, may not convince all of those who are hostile to luck egalitarianism; it is, however, eminently worth reading, and represents the best current defense that view has to offer.